Buddahriffic

@Buddahriffic@lemmy.world

Profil ze zdalnego serwera może być niekompletny. Zobacz więcej na oryginalnej instancji.

My mental health has improved after deleting games that have microtransactions in them angielski

After playing World of Warcraft for 15 years, I started becoming increasingly bored and disgruntled with the game. The game being grindy and repetitive is no real surprise, I mean it’s an MMO. But the one thing that was really frustrating was paying monthly for a subscription and a huge chunk of cash for an expansion, but...

Buddahriffic,

I’m glad I’ve had a few epiphanies over my gaming time that have resulted in no desire to spend any money on P2W or content skipping.

First one was in the first Turok game on N64. I was playing normally but at some point looked up the cheat codes for things like unlock all weapons, unlimited ammo, and unlocking all levels. There was one weapon that you needed to collect hidden pieces of from each level, and then you only got 3 shots with it that would pretty much AoE clear an area. There was another gun that you’d only find 2 shots of ammo for at a time that was similar. I had fun for a bit running around and shooting those guns at will, but after that it was hard to get motivated to play the game without the cheats because I knew the big weapons were basically just temporary consumables, which meant I’d probably never use them while trying to ration them for moments they’d be most useful. Using those cheat codes ruined the game for me.

The second epiphany was after raiding for a while in WoW and thinking about the loot motivation. It was a circular motivation: you get better loot so that you can raid more to get even better loot. If the loot was the main motivation, then it was pointless because the loot didn’t serve any purpose outside of the game. So it only made sense to do raiding because I enjoyed the process, not because of the rewards. And this applied to most reward mechanisms in games. Taking that logic just a bit further made me realize that P2W is actually paying money to avoid playing a game and short circuit right to getting the rewards, which was kinda pointless when the rewards were meant to improve the experience of playing the game. Either a) you don’t want to play the game at all, or b) you don’t get as much satisfaction from using the better loot or whatever because you skipped the part where you had to do it without those rewards.

And then the last one is finding PvP less satisfying when the game mechanics give significant advantages based on either time spent grinding or paying money to avoid grinding. Did I just win because of my skills or because I’ve acquired better gear? Did I just lose because the other player outplayed me or because they got better gear? And I didn’t even want to give any satisfaction to those who just paid money to win and don’t worry about what it does or doesn’t say about their skills. It’s similar to the line of thought when you know cheating is possible… Did I get beat by someone skilled enough to aim better or someone using an aim bot?

Buddahriffic,

DMCA takedowns on any videos with one in the background unless they pay their Nintendo licensing fees.

Buddahriffic,

This is why I like seeing new tech with a high launch price. Even if I want one, I’m patient, and it would be worth seeing a bunch of scalpers get fucked from just assuming that initial demand will set the price even higher.

I hope they thought they had to wait in an uncomfortable line to grab the ones they got and that the store only offers exchanges and no refunds.

Buddahriffic,

Oh yeah, not just for others who want it but also to cause max pain to scalpers when others can get what they want to sell for cheaper than the scalpers paid for it in the first place. If the price stays the same, there’s a good chance the scalpers will be able to at least cut their losses by selling at a slight discount (or even at par if they find the right location for a “you could have this in your hands right now instead of having to go to the store” kinda deal).

Buddahriffic,

I’ve got Gran Turismo 7 and it’s great in some ways but they ruined the pacing of the game. It hands out cars like they expire in less than a week. It can be fun to try out a whole bunch of different cars, but there’s not much sense of progression like the older ones gave.

I remember building a connection to some of the cars in older games. When you bought a car, it was meaningful because it took time to win enough money to afford something, and then I’d spend a while upgrading it until eventually hitting a ceiling and needing a better car to upgrade to progress to more races. And then add some variety with a few races with rules or restrictions along the way to give a reason to buy some other cards in the same tier, but then then it would be a big decision.

In GT7, all except the top end supercars feel like an afterthought, my garage gets filled for free as I win races, and any time I want to try a different car, first thing I do is buy most or all of the upgrades because it’s all trivial. Race with limiting rules? Ok, give me 5 minutes and I’ll find, buy, and max out another car to win this one.

Granted, it has more of an emphasis on the driving than the older ones did (where you could usually take your super car into whatever races your wanted and see how many times you could lap everyone), but I think I like the progressing through cars part more than the racing part and GT7 is disappointing in that regard compared to GT4 or GT3.

Buddahriffic,

Sounds like the first was made with the mindset of, “it would be cool to make a game that does x, let’s do that and see if it will make money” while the second one was more of a, “all we gotta do is make a game that does x and we’ll make a ton of money!”

Buddahriffic,

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+.

Buddahriffic,

Could even say it goes back to the Zelda games on NES. Metroidvania games might also count. Those games all have the “you might progress in any available direction” mechanic, which IMO is the core of the open world mechanic.

There’s also some games like Star tropics where the whole world was open (as in you could return to previous locations) but progress was more linear.

Would super Mario world count as open world? Not as old as the NES ones I mentioned, but I’m curious. Or say if you could go back to previous worlds in SMB3, would that be open world?

Buddahriffic,

For first person shooters (mix of first introduced and popularised):

Doom: started and popularised the genre. Also started and popularised rasterized 3d graphics for gaming (though the game itself was still 2d). Also first fps multiplayer and modding

Quake: various game modes (Deathmatch, capture the flag), as well as being the first true 3d fps. Popularised multiplayer and modding.

Team fortress (quake mod): Different specialist characters.

Goldeneye 64: popularized multilayer console fps, taught character size can be a significant advantage/disadvantage, depending on if you got Oddjob or Jaws.

Half-life: started horror fps genre, (mostly) seemless world

CS: customizable loadouts instead of search for guns each time you spawn, more game modes

UT: AI bots

Perfect dark: secondary fire for weapons

Deus ex: rpg fps

Halo: finally figured out a decent controller control scheme (one stick looks, one moves, button for grenades rather than needing to select grenade from list of guns). First fps I remember vehicles in, too.

Battlefield: large scale multiplayer

Socom: fps game that isn’t first person, online console multiplayer

Call of duty: using gun sights to aim

Far cry: open world fps

Doom 3: used lighting (or lack thereof) to bring fps horror to a new level.

Crisis: famous for pushing hardware and people caring more about the benchmark results than the game itself (I tried the second one, it was ok but I didn’t really get into it)

Call of duty: zombies (and other alternate game modes), kill steaks, online progression (unlocking guns and attachments as you level, prestige levels)

HL2/portal: brought physics and its involvement in fps games to a new level

TF2: f2p, microtransactions (though not predatory or p2w so the game isn’t remembered for this)

Borderlands: loot-based fps rpg

Metro 2033: fps survival

Halo reach: custom maps

Destiny: MMORPG FPS

Overwatch: hero-based, and hero roles (dps, tank, healer)

Pub bg: battle Royale

Buddahriffic,

If that photo was taken right before impact, none of the continents will remain continents because it’s all about to melt and we might have another moon when everything settles down and we evolve back from scratch over the next several billion years.

Buddahriffic,

They only found it because it’s more like a binary dwarf planet system than a planet/moon system, so the telescopes were able to pick up light reflected from both Pluto and Charron, while Pluto alone might have not been bright enough.

Buddahriffic,

I was disappointed to find out that my PS5 doesn’t support Bluetooth headsets. You’ve gotta get one of the Sony ones I guess. The controller looks like it has an RCA port for analogue headphones and a built in mic, so it might fit your use case but I was pissed when it wouldn’t let me use my wireless bone conduction headset instead of the earbuds on the PSVR2. I usually just use my TV speakers because earbuds never stay in my ears properly, but it would be nice to be able to play without worrying about the volume being too loud for others, like late at night.

Buddahriffic,

I think they fucked up with the series s/x. The Balder’s Gate 3 release made me realize that their policy that games needed to have the same features enabled for both the s and x essentially meant that even if you spend the extra money on the x, it will be held back by the s merely existing.

Buddahriffic,

Even as far back as the first xbox, I remember some people installing Linux on it. It’s also why Halo later came out for the PC, because porting it wasn’t that difficult. Iirc, the first xbox didn’t run any Windows kernel but it did use direct x.

Buddahriffic,

I hate it when good concepts are ruined by dumb or greedy implementations.

Buddahriffic,

I really don’t get why studios do that. They pick some well known franchise to attract the fans of that franchise, but then either figure they can do something better or that fans won’t care if they aren’t able to stick to the original story?

And so often that “better” they go for is really just different. And there’s nothing wrong with telling a different story, just don’t try to slap the franchise name on it for the name recognition.

Funny thing is, in some cases they could still do both by just making a new story in the same universe, either one that happens before the video game or after it (and fans would love references to events in the original story in the latter or foreshadowing events to come in the former). Though it’s still gotta be a good new story that follows the rules of the universe it’s set in.

And to add insult to injury, after seeing the result of this over and over, people walk away thinking movies based on video games can only suck making things harder for those who would do them right.

Buddahriffic,

Yeah, it shows just how good of a game Metroid Prime was because it was still amazing despite very awkward controls.

Buddahriffic,

And there’s even one new cave variation!

Buddahriffic,

I hope stealth gets a major rework, at least. Or maybe not stealth itself but how the AI handles interacting with it. No NPC should ever guess that it was just the wind when there’s an arrow sticking out of them or their colleague is lying dead in plain view (or even just doesn’t respond when they call to them).

They should use strategies and tactics that work against stealth. Patrols (including their own stealth patrols sometimes), roll calls, better lighting, positioning of guards to cut off entrance points, traps (and not just the dungeon traps, but NPCs setting new traps when they suspect stealth, where the trap could be as simple as a trip wire attached to metal rings that will jingle if someone disturbs them), spells that locate nearby people, using senses other than sight and hearing, dark vision. Sometimes stealth missions should be forced to end and come back later because the residents realize someone is trying to sneak around and kill or rob them and go on high alert with effective tools to negate stealth. Just sometimes, sometimes it should work like it does in Skyrim where a guard just doesn’t want to deal with whatever is shooting arrows at him and maybe just yells threats instead of using a stealth counter (just get rid of that memory of a goldfish thing).

I mean, stealth is fun, but it’s not as fun when every single character I make ends up becoming some kind of a stealth archer because the NPCs are effective at generating opposition to everything but that.

Buddahriffic,

Having unenforceable or illegal clauses in a legal contract means the contract wasn’t written in good faith, which should void the whole thing. Regardless of any “if parts of this contract are deemed illegal, the rest still stands”.

It would be nice to see more proactive involvement of the legal system with this, like have some people whose job it is to challenge these consumer contracts and standardize them kinda like how some open source licenses are standardized. Modularize it, so instead of writing out the whole “limited liability” section, they could refer to an established one by name. Then each module can be the subject of study and challenge, like if a more limiting one should come with other compromises elsewhere.

I think at that point, most honest companies would just pick a standard license or contract, plus maybe a few modifications and shady ones will have more trouble hiding shit like this in the middle of pages and pages of the same boring shit you’ve read hundreds of times before if you actually do read these things before signing or clicking agree.

At this point, most contracts should probably be unenforceable because few people actually do understand what they are agreeing to, which is supposed to be one of the essential parts of a contract. So many parts should probably have an “initial here to show you agreed to this” at the very least. But I’m no fool, this is likely considered a feature rather than a bug for most of the people involved in making and enforcing these things.

Buddahriffic,

I have no interest in my gaming experience being at the mercy of network latency. It’s bad enough for online games, but there’s no getting around that other than physically going to the same location as everyone else you are playing with. Big no for single player games. If cloud gaming does replace locally computed gaming, it will be another case of enshitification.

Buddahriffic,

I wonder if the “it’s just trolls, not Nintendo” misinformation is actually disinformation also coming from Nintendo…

Buddahriffic,

I’d argue that the indie and AA studios are making games today that are as good as or better than the pre-enshitification AAA games of the 90s and 00s. Maybe not quite as high in production value for cinematics, but on par or better for game content and play.

Like I’ve been largely ignoring AAA options and still have a huge backlog of games and generally have fun with new ones I try out, including finding new gems to add to my favourites.

So I guess if you have a base assumption that great games need to be AAA to even be contenders, the gaming situation looks worse than it did in the past, but IMO that assumption is flawed.

Buddahriffic,

The Steam Deck is priced similarly to consoles and gives access to a lot of AA and indie games. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the divide between consoles and PC gets fuzzier and fuzzier as time goes on and consoles eventually just become specific PC configurations that games can optimize for.

Plus, on that note, if you look at overall cost, buying AAA games can add up pretty quickly to outpace the cost of building a PC. If you buy enough games, a console + AAA game collection can surpass the cost of a high end PC + AA and indie game collection, especially if you’re a patient gamer and can wait for good Steam sales. Every month or so, I’ve been buying a handful of games on sale for on average less than half the price of a single AAA new release. Building a PC just has a higher up front cost (though patience can help there, too).

Buddahriffic,

Point a laser pointer at him.

Him: What are you doing??

Terran voice assistant: Nuclear launch detected.

Buddahriffic,

Any specific enemies you have particular trouble with? I usually don’t run with tight deadline but have noticed that strategy for specific enemies can make a big difference in how easy and quick they are to take down.

And in general, I’ve noticed you tend to get better results dashing towards things rather than away from them. It’s even better with Athena’s dash boon.

Buddahriffic,

Ah, yeah the bow is one of my weaker weapons in that game.

One suggestion is to try Poseidon’s main attack boon as that knockback will allow you to stun lock armoured enemies. But personally, I prefer the weapons with faster attacks.

Buddahriffic,

Awesome, congrats!

I played a couple of runs and it reminded me of another tip that might help even more: the secondary damage boons are where you get huge damage boosts. Like the rip current one from Poseidon and extra damage to bosses from knockback boons. Comboing your boons is huge, especially when you can combo into legendaries or duos.

Buddahriffic,

Because it was made as an excuse to fully transition to a f2p business model. It wasn’t a game anyone was asking for and the only way they could get people to use it over the first one was by shutting the first one down. It was their way of pushing enshitification.

Buddahriffic,

Maybe raise a stink with your attorney general and/or representative, too. The whole idea that a company can sell licenses for something and then arbitrarily decide they don’t want to do it anymore and revoke all the licenses doesn’t sound legal. And if it is, it doesn’t sound like it should be.

Gameplay mechanics were also a lot better with more replayability. (lemmy.world) angielski

Ignoring the lack of updates if the game is buggy, games back then were also more focused on quality and make gamers replay the game with unlockable features based on skills, not money. I can’t count the number of times I played Metal Gear Solid games over and over to unlock new features playing the hardest difficulty and with...

Buddahriffic,

These days I’m driving on the way home.

Buddahriffic,

Yeah, I noticed this with mortal Kombat on snes. Every time I played the single player campaign, I’d win one fairly easily, then I’d lose to the next guy. Then I’d use a continue and beat that guy fairly easily and lose to the next one. Repeat until I run out of continues, with the occasional upset of the pattern (extra win or loss).

Buddahriffic,

From what I’ve heard, his son is cool, so we might get two generations of awesome steam.

Buddahriffic,

The tired light theory is an alternative explanation to the red shift of distant light that says it’s not because distant objects are all moving away from us but instead that the light somehow loses energy as it travels, which lowers its frequency.

There was another alternate theory that suggested everything was shrinking instead of the universe expanding (thus wavelengths seem longer by the time they get to us).

Personally, I’m more “open to the idea” than “sold” for the idea of the universe’s accelerated expansion. I like theories that eliminate the need for dark matter or energy, especially given that the current ones requiring them assume that they make up 95% of everything. It just seems more likely that we don’t understand things as well as we do than to assume we’re right about everything we think but just need to add 19 times what’s already here to balance it all out.

Buddahriffic,

I’m replaying subnautica after a few years since my first playthrough. I thought that it was more of a one-time experience than a replayable game but enough time has passed that my memory is more of a general feeling than remembering specifically where everything is, so it’s been surprisingly engaging. Without even trying, I’m pretty sure the way I’m going through everything is different from my last playthrough, too.

Buddahriffic,

Yeah, the one achievement I’m missing is hatching a certain egg so I’ve been collecting eggs this time around. Just got the alien containment, so I guess it’s time to start at that.

I’ve just built my second base. I only had one in my first playthrough, but I built more for sub zero and realized there’s nothing really stopping me from building a ton of them other than how much time I want to spend gathering the resources for it.

I’m considering trying to go to the end without a Cyclops sub since I’ve already got the max depth for the seamoth, though I need to find those deep mushrooms again for the defense shock that would be essential for that. Though now that I think of it, the Cyclops was probably why I didn’t build a second base and the lack of Cyclops was probably why I ended up building more bases in sub zero.

Buddahriffic,

Oh wow, are there any non-fish foods other than the nutrient blocks and those trees on the surface? Can you fabricate the blocks at any point? I can’t remember if the first one has the indoor grow plots for surface plants like sub zero does.

I guess the main question I’m getting at is if you can do this without having to travel to the surface to stuff your face with trees or being very strategic with the nutrient blocks you find?

Star Citizen's first-person shooting is getting backpack-reloading, dynamic crosshairs, procedural recoil, and other improvements to 'bring the FPS combat to AAA standard' (www.pcgamer.com) angielski

Well, I mean, I would have launched it first (as an AAA game), but I’m no game developer. 🤷 And neither are they, from the looks of it. Good at perpetually raking in money for himself and his family, though!

Buddahriffic,

There’s no reason for that to be a directed force, just suck in air from multiple directions and eject it in multiple directions to cancel out all net forces. Or ramp it up slowly so it isn’t so jerky. But even if it’s set up in the worst way possible, the forces will be significantly less than shooting a relatively massive bullet.

Buddahriffic,

Nah, active air cooling is a thing that computers have been using successfully for decades. It does create more heat overall, but it moves heat away from the parts you don’t want to melt.

Even liquid cooling or phase change cooling relies on air cooling eventually, those techs can just move heat quicker to a temporary heat reservoir that is then air cooled. If the cooling on the reservoir is slower than the heating, the cooling system will eventually saturate and fail to continue cooling the heat source faster than the reservoir cooling.

Even liquid nitrogen or dry ice cooling does this, it just dumps that heat earlier when the N2 or CO2 is condensed. And for those, you either have limited cooling time or need to top up the coolant as it evaporates.

Edit: not sure why you were downvoted… Your assumption was wrong but IMO worthy of discussion.

Buddahriffic,

They are just production value. How good a game looks and sounds, which isn’t necessarily related to how fun a game is.

Buddahriffic,

It was something I was aware of and against when I was on Reddit ever since I first heard of them.

And they don’t even make cheating impossible. Cheats don’t need to be running on the OS that is running the game. It could be running in a VM. I believe many VM implementations will let the guest OS know that they are running on a VM, but that isn’t mandatory. Other hardware in the system can have full access to the memory space and do reads/writes without the OS knowing (though caches complicate this). Some cheats just act as a display and mouse, processing the display as it passes through the device to the monitor, and modifying the mouse input to correct aim based on what it sees. If it spoofs a monitor and mouse, nothing in the kernel will necessarily see any difference.

Buddahriffic,

Well, there was recently a judgement on both Apple and Google anticompetitive practices having to do with app stores. Somehow apple won theirs, despite their apps being completely locked to their store while Google lost theirs despite always having supported side loading apps and other app stores already existing. The US legal system is a joke.

Buddahriffic,

Cabin in the Woods remains one of my favorite comedy horror movies to this day.

Buddahriffic,

I slept on Risk of Rain 2 for a long time but finally tried it out and damn, they did a great job converting the original from 2d to 3d.

Still picking away at Hades achievements, too. I’m at over 90% now and will trigger another one once I get back from my current run. 3 more after that: one grindy one, one gifty one, and one with a lot of heat. Might also go for 100% on the relationship bonds.

Buddahriffic,

I somehow didn’t realize there were 3 of them lol.

But yeah, these are definitely games you need to stick with and unlock stuff for progression. I didn’t make it past like stage 2 or 3 until I had unlocked a couple other characters.

And with the way the items stack, you lose versatility but gain power if you use the 3d printer to convert all of your powerups into a single one (though not every powerup is worth it, at least I think). I still haven’t beaten the game for the 2nd one, but I’m making it to the last level more consistently now.

Buddahriffic,

I like to call them deadpan instead of sarcasm. Sarcasm has a tone to let others know that it isn’t serious, while deadpan relies fully on the content itself.

I had a lot more deadpan comments crash and burn on Reddit than here. And even in this case, someone just questioned the comment while it had overall positive reception. I think Lemmy generally gets deadpan.

Buddahriffic,

I found it kinda funny when they gave fighter z and kakarot as examples of DBZ games that broke that mold when fighter z is a fighting game and kakarot was an adventure game that followed the original story. Don’t get me wrong, I loved kakarot (because it was the my first time going through the whole DBZ story), but Xenoverse would have been a better example IMO because it did break the mold more (it does still focus on the original story, but you’re a part of a time patrol whose job it is to basically provide help to the original heroes because villains are trying to change the original story).

Buddahriffic,

Disagree. The fact that I’m only hearing about it now that it’s flopped is a good thing because I might have given it attention before. Well, probably not because it’s EA.

I just hope that companies that aren’t EA don’t take what they say about single player games at face value. EA games probably need friend group hype to succeed at this point. Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking that there are many others like me who want to avoid anything from that company and thus would only play when pressured by friends.

But if EA does fail, there likely will be a period where they try to talk about it like experts and will just say, “oh, gamers must not like x genre anymore”, when gamers really just don’t like overproduced garbage games that are clearly tuned to sell MTX rather than be fun.

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