It is a mechanically very dense game. There is a lot of depth and complexity to its gameplay. I get why a lot of people enjoy that. But I just kind of bounce off that, I need something to motivate me to engage with game mechanics. I need a story, or like, some kind of theming that I can project a goal on to. Poker but weird just doesn’t do it for me.
Like I adore paradox games, but I can project a broad world buildy-esq self built narrative and goals on to that, even when the mechanics are as broad as an ocean but as deep as a puddle.
Steam changed it so that popularity metrics are mostly ignored during the first couple days of Next Fest. This started with the October 2024 run, and it's a big part of why you no longer have the good demos popping up quickly at the start. To my knowledge, they never published details on it, but there was a short blurb in the developer Q&A. Things should get better starting sometime tomorrow (tends to be day 3 or day 4).
The idea is that it gives games that don't have pre-existing marketing a way better chance of success, instead of the really massive snowball effect that used to exist where devs lost out for the entire thing if they weren't popular within the first couple of hours, but it has made it a hell of a job to look for new games.
It’s the same old Rockstar formula of having you travel back and forth over the map just to do a normal mission and falls short of giving the cowboy fantasy everyone touts it as being. They added enough detail that your horse’s balls shrink in the cold but made it so easy to get money that whilst your merry band of outlaws are complaining about how little they have, I struggled to find more things to buy with immense hoards of cash. And the bounty system doesn’t work. And the multiplayer was total ass. And part way through the fantastical cowboy simulator, it adds goofy sidequests of time travel and robots. Rockstar couldn’t decide what to make the game so they tried to make it everything, leaving it lacklustre.
Collossal Cave Adventure is a text-only adventure game. It uses the most primitive technologies in the most primitive ways (as it’s old, but it’s free and even has a web version as it’s old).
Complete disapointment as a Zelda game, it felt just like generic ubi-slop with a coat of nintendo paint, complete with a pointless crafting system and the ridiculous "swords can ony hit a dozen times before breaking".
Yeah I failed to understand the hype around this one. Played it to completion and it was… Ok. Very well polished but there was nothing original about it. Maybe original for a Nintendo game but it didn’t do anything that I haven’t seen dozens of times on other consoles and PC.
Hmm I think most rogue likes. But that’s probably a me issue. I just don’t enjoy having to restart and play the same gameplay loop again. Hades was the closest one that I seemed to enjoy more as I liked the story bits between each run. I recently started cult of the lamb and I enjoy the base building so that might help too.
It’s interesting that you mention DS3. I quite enjoyed my time with it(once I got my bearings. I had to restart a number of times) but I’m super curious if I would enjoy it as much if I went back and played DS1 again to compare.
I can completely understand the environment complaint. I really liked sekiro for all the varied environments and themes.
Did you ever give Slay the Spire a go? I was also quite sceptical about roguelikes, but now it is by far my most played game ever at a whopping 600 hours.
The beauty of it is that it is quite easy to understand, but with an incredible amount of depth to it. You’ll start out having trouble winning your first ever run, but that’s when the fun begins. There are 4 characters, each with their play style and cards, and there are 20 ascensions to unlock, each being a more difficult version of a standard run. In the end, you’ll gain such a deep understanding of the balancing and tradeoffs at play that you can’t not be amazed at this achievement in game design. Baalorlord is a great YouTuber and Twitch streamer who is also one of the best players in the world. He was able to do a consecutive winstreak of 20 wins on the highest ascension, showing that this game is RNG based but has a tremendous amount of skill involved too.
Is there a certain tactic to winning Slay the Spire? I’ve played a decent number of hours across multiple characters but I’ve never managed to beat the final boss on the standard difficulty. I remember reading once that binning your default cards is key?
Most certainly! I’ve been playing this game for ages so I 'm unsure what advice is beginner friendly and what not, but let’s see…
Indeed, use any opportunity to throw away one of your starting Strikes (and to a lesser extent, the Defends). Strikes are by far the worst non-curse cards, dealing only 6 damage for 1 cost and taking up a slot in your five card draw each turn. You’ll obtain way better cards and want to increase the chance of drawing those, which is why you really want to remove bad cards as frequently as possible. (At shops and events).
Do not avoid elites! These are the special looking enemies on the map and they are the only fights who drop Relics. Having good Relics and building your deck around them is essential to winning this game!
Don’t pick a card at the end of every fight, only pick the cards that you really want. A small but predictable deck is way better than a massive deck full of OK cards. Seriously, this is one of the most important things I learned, the skip button is there to be used.
Pick cards and relics that increase card draw. A big issue in Slay the Spire is drawing a bad hand and not having the necessary cards for that turn in hand. Lots of cards, relics and potions will allow you to draw extra cards during your turn, which can often make the difference between life and death in this game. Especially towards the end when you have more energy, it becomes extremely important to be able to spend it on good cards, and increasing the cards you draw per turn gives you more options to play good cards.
Finally, keep trying. Different enemy types attack in their own pattern every time. Even when you lose, you start to learn their mechanics and how to best counteract those. There are three elite types per act, and three end boss types per act. For the end bosses, you can actually see on the map which one you will have at the end of the current act! So in total, there are “only” 9 different bosses* and 9 different elites. Once you get to know them, you’ll realize their strengths and weaknesses!
There is a tenth secret boss at the true ending, but let’s not dwell on that for now :). Suffice it to say that the pro players have win streaks of 20+ on the highest ascension difficulty (ascension 20) while always taking on this extra final boss. So this game is insanely tactical and almost any run can be salvaged to win even on the highest difficulty!
Enjoy your journey :). Oh, and start with Ironclad, he’s the most straightforward character!
One of the things that helped me improve a lot was watching streamers play. Baalorlord as previously mentioned is great. I’ve also watched a lot of videos from Jorbs and Frost Prime.
They all have some videos specifically targeted toward newer players where they explain their thought process but I’ve also gotten a lot of value out of just watching them do normal runs. I like to figure out what I would do in each situation and if they do something different I try to analyze why they made that decision instead. There are many cards that I didn’t think were very good until I saw an expert using them.
Probably GTA V. I did enjoy it, but the story was all over the place and the multiplayer was never that fun (it wasn’t long before it became filled with cheaters and ridiculous DLC cars/weapons). Something about traversing the map just bored me in a way that GTA IV and San Andreas never did.
I have tried it multiple times but I just don’t understand how so many people can put so many hours into a game when an element you are going to be engaging in for a lot of your play through is one of the worst in the genre, the combat. It is floaty, imprecise and has zero feeling of impact. It is just horrible. I felt the same about Oblivion but Skyrim seems to be held in even higher regard.
Well it doesn’t play like a complete potato anymore at least in the character creator on low settings 😮💨 but I will say their low settings like like high setting on most games. Turn off ray tracing for some ungodly reason it’s in by default
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I played one zoi through most of the idol career track. The career gameplay is very similar to Sims 4, in that you go to your work lot and try to perform all your work tasks before the end of the day. Similarly to Sims 4, I didn’t feel like there was a meaningful sense of progression in my skills and career. I went from having 0 in the career relevant skills like singing and dancing to having them maxed out in, IIRC, a little over an in-game week, in which time I didn’t perform in any idol shows because that didn’t seem to be implemented: work was always training, never performing. (It’s possible this has been updated since I played, which was in April, or that performing is hidden behind the very last level of the career track, which I don’t think I reached.) Like Sims, you never struggle to advance a skill or have any kind of challenge to overcome, you can improve at anything indefinitely by practicing alone. I started a romance with a coworker, but it wasn’t very interesting: it didn’t cause drama at work, it didn’t affect how my other coworkers thought of me (which was mostly “not at all”), and it wasn’t clear to me if the other zoi had any skills, interests or hobbies outside of work. Similarly to the Sims, I think we were at the point where I could have proposed after only one date, which mostly consisted of hanging out at the park. It seems like, similarly to Sims, the actual game mechanics are fairly basic and you need to invent a good deal of your own fun.
I liked being able to customize items by importing textures. The AI texture generator isn’t any good, but the option to noodle around in GIMP and then put my texture on something in the game is neat. I also imported images to make custom posters for my zoi’s room. There is also an option to turn a photo of an object into a 3D model of a decoration to place in your house or wear as an accessory, which I had mixed results with but was at least novel.
So far, the critical component that the Sims clones lack is character. Sims understands that Sims are a bit different than real people and they go out of their way to make them quirky and a bit hyperbolic. The clones seem to try and be real life simulators which I would argue is difficult to actually make enjoyable. Real life is boring.
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