half vampire, half mortal. Always seemed kind of silly to me, since I always felt like vampire was more of a modifier then a race, but lore exists so vOv
I play one in Pathfinder, and being able to travel by day is useful, but the sun is such a debuff that it’s really more of a nice thought than anything I take seriously.
One of the best ways to drain people's energy nowadays, is via video game design.
I like to open my games with a long segment of walking while your character is injured, so they really just kind of slog along at a slow pace. Having them be injured at the start is good, because they can really get used to pressing a single button to move forward without having to worry about any other buttons. Since they're stuck going slow this is also a good time to have a narrator or other npc explain convoluted lore of the world that you won't really care about, but it'll be mildly important if you put in over 100 hours into the game, so we can include that unskippable dialogue here.
Then after 8 or 9 minutes of injured walking, we'll have a 3 minute unskippable cutscene in which our character gets healed, but then also gets thrown into their first combat. And me, I like a challenge, so the first enemy is a boss fight, but since the player probably doesn't know the buttons yet, it should probably take most players at least 3 tries. The fun part is, you can't save until after beating that first boss, so if you fail, you have to go through the 9 minute slow walking segment and 3 minute unskippable cutscene again.
At this point a lot of gamers go onto the internet to complain about stuff like this, and I just respond that all that stuff is unskippable to protect the narrative vision of our game. Even though really most of the story is just lifted from "A Good Day to Die Hard."
It's not as powerful a drain as you can get in person, but you can get little bits from a lot of angry nerds on the internet at once.
I actually enjoyed that game, was the first and only mafia game I played. I really like the cars and music of that era, the racial tensions also added a lot to the story and gameplay.
My vote for worst energy vampire game would be AC Valhalla, just barely fun enough to keep me playing for over 150 hours just to see how the story concludes. Wow what a waste of time that was, story made almost no sense on the ISU side and the conflict building with your brother ends with him just giving his clan to you.
Yeah Valhalla was the last AC I’m probably ever gonna play because of that. I mean, I guess I kind of enjoyed some of it? I liked the proto-halloween story with the Welsh girl the blacksmith falls in love with, and no one understands as fucking word she says.
There were a few things I liked, but the alliance missions got really stale. I feel like if the writing was even 10% of what the witcher had, I would have cared about these dozens of side characters, that you only see again at the end of the game. Just blew me away how lazily the cut scenes and scripted portions were made, really gave me the quantity over quality vibe early on in the game.
Or at least release the server code when you shut the game down, so anyone can spin up a server of their own. Community servers are fine, but you should always be able to host your own for friends to play on.
The problem being that execs often learn the wrong lesson from that. Instead of learning that this type of live service game isn’t wanted by the market, they’re likely to learn that this series of games or this character is no longer wanted.
This was inevitable as soon as games started getting the budgets of blockbuster movies. No one wants to invest that much money into a project without getting some oversight and control in return.
Of course, very, very few people who have access to that kind of cash have any design sense whatsoever, and even fewer understand the creative process, or what makes games “good”… so they ask for shit that they think will be “safe” money-makers, and we get what we get: endless, samey, soulless shlock.
Why did they make an expensive game like Concord which nobody wanted? Don’t they have market analysts or something like that? Everyone was able to tell them beforehand that it will flop.
Afaik they started development when overwatch was already successful. By the time development finished the hype was over and players had moved to other genres, and had very little interest in an overwatch clone.
They probably started it at a time when analysis suggested it was what people wanted more of, and then during the probably what; 4 or 5 years it took to develop, interest waned?
I don’t think it was weird that they started on this; it was pretty weird that they didn’t pivot or cancel earlier.
I can’t imagine how it sucks to being these devs. They obviuosly earned more and lived better than me, but I’d have a hard time parting with some project even if they are all mismanaged unborn messes.
I was a professional developer in a wide range of gaming areas for about 20 years… Looking back, I can honestly say that 95% of the work I did ended up as a vapor… The 5% that made it to market were so fleeting…
I derived my satisfaction not from completing projects, but solving the underlying problems. That kept me very engaged.
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