ampersandrew

ampersandrew, wczoraj

Add the fact that roguelikes are almost exclusively procedurally generate

If they’re not procedurally generated, they’re not roguelikes. It’s a defining feature. It’s also not lazy to define a set of rules that generate good, interesting levels every time you boot it up. I’m basically the only guy who didn’t enjoy Hades, and a large reason why is that their level generation is sorely lacking compared to so many others (though Hades is more lite than like) I’ve played.

ampersandrew, 2 dni temu

Having played it on PC, if they got that running acceptably on a Switch 2, I’d be shocked.

ampersandrew, 2 dni temu

Did you play it? I thought the class designs were excellent.

ampersandrew, 2 dni temu

I really enjoyed both of them. It may just not be your cup of tea, but I get the sense that the average person just plays them sort of mindlessly. For 3 and 4 especially, I found there’s a really interesting layer in there when you start min/maxing around creating a feedback loop. In case you ever found yourself curious enough to give them another try. It makes them very memorable experiences.

ampersandrew, 2 dni temu

I think the onboarding ramp is pretty standard across the series. If you stopped at 2, I thought the active abilities and corresponding upgrades were far more interesting in 3 and 4, even from the get go.

ampersandrew, wczoraj

Short? It was a similar length to the rest of the series.

ampersandrew, wczoraj

Their How Long to Beat times are all a tight spread. Having just played through them all in the past year, I can tell you that the only thing that makes 2 longer than the rest is that it has more DLC.

ampersandrew, wczoraj

If you say so. I can tell you I’ve been tracking my times pretty judiciously in the past year. For each of those Borderlands games, my times were:

• Borderlands 1: 23h17m
• Borderlands 2: 35h15m
• Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel: 22h21m
• Borderlands 3: 35h25m
• Borderlands 4: 28h26m

So I guess Borderlands 2 wasn’t longer, like I may have remembered it. In each case for the above, I basically just did enough side missions to keep pace with the recommended level of the next main story mission, which amounted to a few hours per game. All of those times include the DLC except for Borderlands 4, and the DLC is also very similarly sized and paced across games.

ampersandrew, 2 dni temu

The sane reckoning that more of the industry needs to have. And both Outer Worlds 2 and Avowed were some of my favorite games from last year, so hopefully what they’re talking about with building on the work they’ve already done can speed things along.

ampersandrew, 2 dni temu

If the world needs more good games, they should have designed it to last rather than inevitably shutting down in under two years if it doesn’t take off.

ampersandrew, 2 dni temu

Unless there’s a prolonged software drought, analysts say that if it did this well during the holiday, it will probably do just fine into the future. Switch 1 numbers are a high bar to clear long term, but it’s on pace to outdo most consoles historically. In less than one year, it’s already putting up numbers that rival what the Gamecube or Xbox did in four or five years.

ampersandrew, 2 dni temu

There was a whole price fixing thing for retro games that happened in the same time frame, so it’s not an experiment that could be run with only a single variable. Old hardware is going to become more expensive as time goes on, as it becomes harder to source; young people are finding a curiosity with old tech that has no mandatory online connectivity, for a host of reasons; and quite honestly, the Switch 1 launched with Mario Odyssey and Breath of the Wild in its first year, with Smash soon after, Mario Kart 8 being one of the best-selling games of all time even before the pandemic, and Animal Crossing would have done gangbusters regardless. I’m convinced the pandemic had little to do with its success, even if Animal Crossing has a major chapter in it.

ampersandrew, 3 dni temu

You just described why it won’t be widely adopted.

ampersandrew, 4 dni temu

Diablo III and IV don’t have a monopoly on the genre. There’s Titan Quest, Grim Dawn, and the Borderlands games, all playable offline, even in multiplayer. They’re not exactly Diablo, but you’ll hardly get closer than Grim Dawn, and there’s no reason you need to be married to the Diablo IP anyway. That kind of brand stickiness is how you get taken advantage of.

Personally, when something like that doesn’t respect my values, I’m not even finding myself tempted by them these days. Oh, it’s always online? It’s dead to me. There’s a deluge of other stuff to play, including games that are similar but respect my values.

ampersandrew, 4 dni temu

Would you mind listing some of the ones you’ve tried? Describing melee as spam clicking sounds like you’ve either only played real-time RPGs or didn’t understand the tactics that come with the trade-offs on your character sheet. Fallout itself comes in a ton of different flavors across the series.

ampersandrew, 3 dni temu

I’d argue that a game like Fallout, 1 or 3, is not 99% combat, and that’s probably where the disconnect is. They intend for you to do some detective work and even solve problems without combat plenty of times too, even when you have a combat-heavy build. Pokemon is a strange one here too, because that series is built around a rock paper scissors system such that you should be regularly be switching up which attacks you’re using. I’d love to see if your complaints hold up to Larian’s games on tactician difficulty.

ampersandrew, 3 dni temu

I’m a very recent fan of loot games, and I only briefly tried Torchlight 1 as more of an academic exercise to see how the genre evolved over time. There was some special sauce that I observed starting around Borderlands 3 or Pre-Sequel (that I suspect originated in Diablo 3) around class design that was still absent from Torchlight. Other than that, I didn’t form much of an opinion on it.

ampersandrew, 3 dni temu

Larian’s party size is only 4, so it’s not much larger. Your breakdown of your spent time in Fallout sounds a lot like you’re trying to speedrun it compared to how I play it (I’d be surprised if you stood much of a chance in late game Fallout without giving combat more thought), so the differences in how we play it is probably somewhere there, and I think Larian’s games will probably force you to engage in more of those aspects in order to get through them. Divinity: Original Sin II regularly goes on sale for quite cheap these days, but I’d be lying if I told you it was anywhere near as good as Baldur’s Gate 3 despite having a lot of the same DNA. For one, the D:OS games just about encourage the genocide of every monster on the map in a way that BG3 doesn’t, but at least I’d strongly doubt your ability to play through the combat thoughtlessly.

ampersandrew, 4 dni temu

To be honest, Epic is doing a good job of tearing down walled gardens in places like mobile, and we’ll probably be better off for it. But yeah, they’ve done a terrible job of competing with Steam.

ampersandrew, 4 dni temu

Of course, but…broken clock, you know? A large percentage of personal computers will be freed from Windows in large part because of Valve, even though they profit off of legalized child gambling addiction. And walled gardens in mobile will be broken down in large part because of Epic, which uses dark patterns to trick people out of their money in pursuit of a cultural hodge podge of nonsense that won’t even exist in a few decades.

ampersandrew, 4 dni temu

You’ll have to convince those other developers to release on GOG. It’s not Valve preventing them from doing so.

ampersandrew, 5 dni temu

Plenty of great games are not immune to failing even when they’re on Steam. The market is tough. But at the same time, it makes perfect sense that Steam has a rule preventing you from taking advantage of their infrastructure for marketing and communicating with customers while you make it available on Epic first for less money.

ampersandrew, 5 dni temu

A software company can run its own store, and make its own launcher. Just look at so many of the big titles over the last two decades: Minecraft, League, Tarkov, War Thunder, Roblox, and more recently Hytale.

This is also survivorship and selection bias though. Not only would you not have heard of the ones that failed, but these are the games confident enough to not launch on Steam in the first place. Several of them are so old that Steam was in its infancy and not the de facto storefront when they came out.

ampersandrew, 5 dni temu

I’d love to see this as an official tag on the store page.

ampersandrew, 4 dni temu

In 2005 when Roblox came out? No. League of Legends came out in 2009, and I had barely started shopping on Steam for non-Valve games back then. Most of us were still buying games on disc at Walmart. Minecraft was doing early access before Steam had the feature.

ampersandrew, 4 dni temu

Steam was a launcher for games most people still bought on discs back then. I remember 2007 was the first time I bought a game on Steam, and it wasn’t a regular habit for years after that. It wasn’t about which other digital store you used; it was that, as a digital store, it held no power in the market compared to brick and mortar. Plus, back then, PC gaming was definitively second fiddle to consoles.

ampersandrew, 4 dni temu

If consumers’ regular buying habits at the time were not to buy on Steam by default (which they weren’t), then it’s unimpressive, and not a feasible poster child, for one’s game’s ability to survive in the modern market without Steam. That’s the point I was making. Brick and mortar was the de facto storefront for PC games at the time that most of those games came out, so it was not strange for an always-online game to sell itself online-only on their own web sites. These days, skipping Steam is not a path most will take, and for good reason.

ampersandrew, 4 dni temu

I think you just internalized this to be only about online shopping, but that was never what I meant.

ampersandrew, 5 dni temu

The only people I’ve friended online that I didn’t know in person were other people who play Skullgirls, because it was the only way to pick their brain on how I can improve, or even just to send a “ggs”. These days, we’re basically all in the same Discord server, so I can usually start typing @ and a few letters of the name they used in quick match and find them pretty easily, so it’s been a while. Still, those people are mostly strangers to me, and sometimes their accounts get hacked. The scam I’ve seen multiple times at this point is that they need people to go to an external site and vote for them to get approved for a Counter-Strike ranked league or something. I don’t know how it works, but I’m not clicking that link. If that’s how that CS ranked league works, find another one with a better method of letting you in.

ampersandrew, 5 dni temu

Neither of these are redemption arcs where a company was let off the hook. They’re using early access the way it’s intended. The biggest thing stopping me from playing early access games is the deluge of finished games coming out all the time.

ampersandrew, 6 dni temu

Iridium Studios? Man, I thought this studio closed down or something. Their last game was a long time ago.

ampersandrew, 6 dni temu

I’d like to see these justices demonstrate the skill involved in opening these loot boxes. What are the hot strats?

ampersandrew, 6 dni temu

The argument they gave, cited in the article, is that there’s a skill component to them. By which I’m guessing they mean playing Ultimate Team with the contents of the loot boxes, but it doesn’t get specific. And I still don’t think that would add a skill component to the loot boxes themselves.

ampersandrew, 6 dni temu

With any luck, it’s because this issue is such a slam dunk that it’s got broader support than more divisive initiatives. In reality though, it’s most likely just because YouTuber drama got more eyeballs on it; and if that’s the difference here, the EU really ought to re-examine how they do these initiatives. 1M signatures out of a population of 440M is a tough bar to clear.

ampersandrew, 7 dni temu

Would you have taken a moral stance against automated telephone switchboards or online shopping?

ampersandrew, 7 dni temu

Both of those things put a lot of people out of work, but our economy adapted, and there was nothing to be gained by shaming the people embracing the technology that was clearly going to take over. I’m not convinced AI tools are that, but if they are, then nothing can stop it, and you’re shaming a bunch of people who have literally no choice.

ampersandrew, 7 dni temu

I used an example of two technologies that were destructive and inevitable, now both definitely parts of your daily life, to show how silly it is take a stance against a technology like that. I don’t need to work at GOG for that to be the case. And to reiterate, AI might not be inevitable. If it’s not, this problem takes care of itself economically, and you don’t need to shame anyone.

ampersandrew, 7 dni temu

I believe I did answer your question, though I’d disagree with the idea that I’m “defending” anything. There exists nuance between “pro AI” and “anti AI”.

ampersandrew, 7 dni temu

It is the role of government to regulate those problems, but you can’t uninvent a technology. As for me in my work, the most I can say is that I almost used AI once; a coworker did it for me before I could get to our company approved AI page. That, plus other companies mandating its usage (if it was really so great, it wouldn’t be difficult to convince anyone to use it) is why I’m not confident that it is one of those inevitable technologies. But if it is, being a dick to people about it is stupid.

ampersandrew, 7 dni temu

There’s also a very generous 30 day refund policy, so if you’re at all unsure, make sure it’s working in that first month. I was pretty close to refunding The Alters, because that game just barely works via Proton, even with the right workarounds. Hell of a game though.

ampersandrew, 7 dni temu

Sure, but you take the good with the bad. Most games work, and you get to actually own a copy via GOG. Hopefully they do proper integration with Proton in the future, and this position they’re hiring for may very well lead to that. There’s the option to buy games through Heroic, which gives Heroic a cut of GOG sales, so I’m sure to always do that so that I send the signal to GOG what’s important to me and how they can earn my whole dollar.

ampersandrew, 8 dni temu

I think the article makes it pretty clear how this game is different than those.

ampersandrew, 8 dni temu

Out of Action’s big hook is its wild movement set: you can dodge, dive, dive roll, slide, wallrun, and double jump. The only thing you can’t do is, surprisingly, sprint. Getting around efficiently isn’t just about speed—it’s about chaining together maneuvers so you don’t faceplant into a wall and discovering shortcuts across the map.

ampersandrew, 8 dni temu

I never recalled seeing a wall run in Quake, and now that I’ve looked it up, I think it’s the same words to describe two different things. Less “taking advantage of weird math for optimal speed” and more “kung fu action movie with guns”. They’ve got similar DNA, but this isn’t just Quake. For wall running in particular, think of The Matrix, which inspired GunZ: The Duel; the author seems to think that’s the closest touchpoint. I played the demo a while back as well, and I felt some influence from F.E.A.R., if that helps you.

ampersandrew, 8 dni temu

Hitman was quickly pulled from GOG for being too big of a compromise on their values. Their only exception to DRM-free is multiplayer that uses GOG Galaxy services.

ampersandrew, 8 dni temu

They might be the biggest dogs in the industry, but there are so, so many games out there that aren’t like that every year.