CoderKat

@CoderKat@lemm.ee

I write bugs and sometimes features! I’m also @CoderKat.

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

CoderKat,

The video also calls out that one of the challenges in moving off of fandom is SEO. The fandom sites often are above the new sites even when the fandom site becomes a pile of unmaintained, vandalized garbage. This suggests that vandalism actually helps fandom.

The best thing we can do is not visit the sites and don’t link to them, instead using and linking to their new sites.

Well, Cities: Skylines 2 is here, and it's another broken game release. angielski

I don’t really understand how people make the review threads, but we’re sitting at a 77 on OpenCritic right now. Many were worried about game performance after the recommended specs were released, but it looks like it’s even worse than we expected. It sounds like the game is mostly a solid release except for the...

CoderKat,

I completely agree. I think the point of the commenter you’re replying to is that this is the kind of game that will fix these eventually. It’s still disappointing for a launch, but eventually it will probably become better than CS1.

CoderKat,

Baldur’s Gate 3 has also done this very well. The build up to finally reaching the city of Baldur’s Gate really is worth the in game hype. The city is massive and the entirety of act 3 is spent within it. They use the standard trick of ensuring you can only visit part of the city, with much of the city being inaccessible but visible. That’s a great way to make the city feel like it’s actually city sized while still ensuring that the part you can explore can be explored in depth (as in, almost every building can be entered and is unique).

As contrasted with the GTA approach where the visitable area is far larger, but you can’t enter most buildings and it’s more generic.

I think it’s pretty hard for an open world game like Skyrim to achieve the way games like BG3 or TW3 do cities, though. After all, Skyrim basically lets you go everywhere, which makes it difficult to fake the size of cities. Skyrim also tries to have not one city but like a dozen cities and towns. I feel like if they wanted to make a realistic city, they’d need to really focus on a small number of cities (probably just one city and a few towns). I’m not sure of the Skyrim scale can really allow for cities as detailed as BG3 or TW3.

Skyrim also has far more in depth NPC, which have routines going all the way from waking up in the morning till they go back to bed. That surely adds scalability issues.

They could do a hybrid approach. Have many unenterable buildings and generic NPCs. But I’m not sure that’s a good idea. That’d make things look bigger, but it wouldn’t really be that much more content and it’d kinda waste our time in traveling to the good stuff. Or they could scale things down. They don’t actually need to span an entire province. They could have focused entirely on one city and surrounding area. But it does come at the cost of more limited lore options and a less varied map.

Personally, I like the Skyrim cities. They’re flawed, but very fun. Not a lot of games have the level of NPC detail that Skyrim has and none of them have the kind of massive, open world that Skyrim and Fallout have (I’d love more games like those).

CoderKat,

I love BG3. It’s a very different game from Skyrim though. After all, that city is basically a third of the game. Plus BG3 has all kinds of travel and camera limitations that Skyrim doesn’t. That’s what lets them make the city truly seem like a sprawling city.

By comparison, Skyrim basically lets you go everywhere and it has a far larger map. Skyrim chose the “big as an ocean, shallow as a puddle” approach when it comes to map design. Though NPCs are actually deeper than BG3. Skyrim NPCs have lifes, while BG3 is frozen in a moment.

CoderKat,

I recall ages ago having read a theory about this concept of compression. That most game worlds that we see aren’t literal, but rather are compressions of the world that characters experience. A city that we see might have just 5 streets, but that’s just the city being compressed to a manageable size. For what characters experience, there’d be hundreds of streets. And same thing for NPCs, as you put it. We mostly only see the important NPCs and a small sample of others, but there’s many NPCs that really are there for story telling purposes, they just aren’t shown.

It’s a really good technique if pulled off well. After all, it’s really hard to have cities in game. You have to do something to limit it. Either padding it out, making most of it unvisitable, “compressing” it, or… just not having cities. Every option has downsides, but at least the compression approach optimizes for gameplay and your time.

CEO Bobby Kotick will leave Activision Blizzard on January 1, 2024 (arstechnica.com) angielski

Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision Blizzard, emailed employees after news of Microsoft's successful $69 billion acquisition to say that he was "fully committed to helping with the transition" and that he would stay on as CEO through the end of 2023.

CoderKat,

The frustrating thing is they’re both being shitty for consumers. It’s terrible that they’re acquiring these previously cross platform publishers and making them exclusives, but at the same time, this is what Sony has been doing for a while (at best, they very recently have started doing PC releases but with a multi year delay, which I don’t really count as truly cross platform).

CoderKat,

I’m doing an evil playthrough now and finding various things I missed from the first playthrough. But oof, I feel really awful about the horrible things the game lets you do. 😅

CoderKat,

Yeah, I’m hearing impaired and need captions. I’ve never seen a major game without them for many years now, and recent games have gone above and beyond with things like captioning sounds (not just dialogue) and directional indicators.

I kinda hope someday they’ll remaster the original Assassin’s Creed. It’s the only non-spin off in the series that I haven’t played. I own a copy, but gave up on it because it has no captions and I couldn’t understand what anyone was saying.

I also love how difficulty settings are much more common now. I’m never gonna buy a Dark Souls game. Fuck those. I tried the first game and learned my lesson. Thankfully, most games these days don’t take such an elitist stance with difficulty. It’s really common that games these days will let you change difficulty on the fly. Some games have split puzzle vs combat difficulty. I’ve seen some games have specific settings just for reaction timing. And also love those settings that highlight interactive objects so I don’t waste so much time looking for subtle hints that something is interactive.

CoderKat,

I’m sorry, but 99.99% is a laughable hyperbole. A huuuuge number of people have disabilities and disabilities are extremely diverse. A simple example is colour blindness. Google says 8% of men and 0.5% of women are colour blind. Video games frequently do use colour in a way that makes colour blindness a problem and colour blind modes are an accessibility option.

Google also says 15% of the world has some degree of hearing impairment. That’s admittedly biased towards seniors, but I can find numbers that say 9% of 20-39 year old Canadians have detectable hearing losses. Captions are an accessibility option.

And those are just two examples. There’s tons of disabilities out there. Even when an individual disability might only be 0.1% of the population, add them all together and there’s a substantial number of people who are left out by lack of one accessibility option or another. Aside from obvious disabilities, there’s also just general worsening of reaction times as people age.

CoderKat,

It’s definitely not merely a matter of not bothering to make a decent store though. I mean, do you think Epic is held back by not being bothered? The way they pour money into their store, I’d it were easy, they’d have it. And having a decent store isn’t enough. It’s kinda like social media in that you need the crowd effect. People want all their games in one place with integrations like friends, mods, achievements, etc. AFAIK, there’s no open standard for most of these things, so you need a big market share to convince devs to make the change.

CoderKat,

All of the following? Why would you need to be better in every way? There’s a perfectly valid use case for trade offs. Eg, let’s say some competitor had exclusives, no VR, the store interface was a little worse, and it was only roughly comparable on many other points. If it’s simply faster and more lightweight, that’s its competitive advantage. Or if it focuses on being open source and DRM free like GoG, that’s a competitive advantage.

Expecting something to be better in every way (than something with a massive head start) or else it might as well not exist? That’s just unreasonable. I don’t require a clothing store to be better than Walmart to shop there. I mean, the clothing store doesn’t even sell fruit! Why would anyone shop there when you can go to the Walmart and buy some grapes with your jeans?

CoderKat,

Monopolies aren’t based on the mere existence of competition. It’s based on power and market share. Eg, Chrome has a monopoly. Firefox, Safari, and a few niche browsers exist. But Chrome is the utter vast majority of the market and has pretty much all the power on dictating web standards as a result.

Microsoft had competitors when they got sued for their IE + Windows monopoly. But they had an utterly massive amount of the market share and used that to push their own browser.

CoderKat,

Baldur’s Gate 3 is great at story and choices, which I think is where a lot of praise comes from. But it has a lot of really questionable issues with smaller mechanics.

The one I’m hating the most is how NPCs react to many summons and wild shape. Having a wild shaped party member makes most NPCs run away screaming, which is very painful in the NPC heavy areas of act 3 and basically discouraged you from even using wild shape or summon elemental, even though those are both incredibly powerful. You can dismiss the summon/wild shape, but it uses resources, so it sucks to do so. People have reported the bug for months but it doesn’t seem on the devs radar (they purposefully made NPCs run away – it’s a “feature”).

And just the other day, I discovered weirdness with warlock spell slots. Something about having used an elixer that gives me an extra spell slot (and then having consumed the spell slot) was preventing me from casting certain warlock spells (I think those of the spell slot’s level) because it claimed it needed that spell slot, even though I had higher level warlock spell slots. So a bunch of my spells couldn’t be used! When I searched, I found many reports about similar issues when people multi classed.

CoderKat,

Yes! Can confirm it’s fixed. It’s great and revitalized my interest in using certain characters. I had almost sworn off some characters because of the bug and now they’re back on the menu.

Druids are insane. Owlbear does utter bonkers damage. Far beyond what I could do with any other character (I can’t tell if that means I built my other classes wrong). Only downside is that druids feel super limited. Usually to just melee attacks with no items and most equipment doesn’t even do anything (there’s little reason to ever purposefully revert to your original form, since you’d just eat a wild shape charge).

CoderKat,

Amazon undercut like crazy and is utterly massive today. They’re basically the online shopping company.

CoderKat,

I hate Steam’s review system, though. Binary yes or no is not useful to me. I want to know if a game is good (maybe a play eventually) vs absolutely amazing (where I might prioritize playing it right away). Such granularity is also useful because a 10/10 might be worth it even if it’s not my favourite type of game, but a 7/10 can be very worthwhile if it is the type of game I adore.

It’s a shame that user reviews on sites like Metacritic are just consistent trash. Too many users only know 0 or 10 and the user reviews are often review bombed. I wish regular users could at least give numbers like critics. No professional critic is gonna give a game a 0 because of a handful of problems, for example, but average people will totally give a game a zero for that. Only problem with critics is that they often have a perspective that makes them detached from the average person, since they spend all their time reviewing. Ideally user reviews would fill that gap, but users are incredibly fickle.

CoderKat,

At least with 0-10, I know to ignore any review that gives a zero. And usually I’d view 10s as just a binary recommend.

CoderKat,

I don’t agree at all. SR3 and 4 were peak for me. I don’t want a game that feels like it lives in the shadow of GTA. SR4 really had it’s own personality and it was a ton of fun for me.

CoderKat,

Many games I play automatically determine pretty reasonable settings. And worst case, you can always lean towards lower settings.

CoderKat,

I also love space RPGs. SWTOR was pretty great. It’s an MMO, but it has good single player. The Knights of the Fallen Empire/Eternal Throne DLCs are basically single player games and they’re really good quality. The KOTOR games are also really great, if a bit older and KOTOR2 was basically unfinished and requires mods to make it even feel 80% finished.

Outer Worlds was okay. It certainly does in some ways feel similar to Fallout in space. But not quite as good and I don’t recall being aware of any serious modding scene.

But huh, I thought there’d be more, but I’m struggling to think of space RPGs with a feel like Mass Effect or Elder Scrolls. I’m really looking forward to this, too, cause despite being a buggy mess, I love Bethesda games and I also love sci fi (especially in space).

Not an RPG, but I also love Stellaris. It’s a strategy game, but really scratched that hyper advanced sci fi and space exploration itch.

CoderKat,

Honestly, with how long it’s been in development, I can totally believe it. And sure hope so. I mean, it’s been so long and I’ve also been constantly thinking about how long it’s been since Skyrim came out (since it’s been publicly stated that TES6 was blocked behind Starfield). All that time has gotta mean something. And it’s not like Bethesda doesn’t have great talent. I’ve always got the impression it was all a matter of lack of time for the size of the game.

CoderKat,

Story is really what I care about the most from RPGs, though I’m also a sucker for old school RPG battle systems. I’ve never heard of this or the studio, but reviews liken it to Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy, which is a very good look in my book.

It seems like an especially great year for gaming. I can’t remember the last time there was so many highly rated games coming out (and there’s still more to come – I’m most excited for Starfield).

CoderKat,

You know, I realize I dunno who uploads their details to these kinda sites, but I’m glad people do. I consult HLTB a lot and it’s always been really useful for judging the time investment a game will take, how worthwhile DLCs will be, and for understanding what kind of game something is (longer is often better in my book, but not always, since games like AC Valhalla have actually gone too long, since I can’t help myself but to play mostly completionist).

CoderKat,

Personally, I sometimes like when a game feels like just a new storyline (and map) for the same game. Sometimes I just want more of a good thing and don’t want to have to learn new mechanics or risk the game making things worse.

And since dev time is limited, I think in theory, this could mean more time could be spent on making the story missions perfect. But in practice, I don’t think that usually happens. Publishers would rather cheap out.

How Spec Ops the Line Condemns the Player: A Timestamped Excerpt from Games as Literature's Analysis (youtu.be) angielski

The whole video is worth watching, but this section in particular makes a better case than I’ve seen in other analyses: that the game condemns player involvement not by simply chastising the player for choosing to continue playing itself (as I’ve seen other analyses argue), but rather for carelessly and uncritically engaging...

CoderKat,

Going in blind is the best. Unfortunately, it’s probably pretty difficult to do, since spoilers are extremely rampant. I don’t even know how I managed to do it. But it really is magical if you go in blind.

CoderKat,

I really dislike being set back far when I die or mess up. I can handle a fair bit of repetition, but replaying the exact same thing over and over because I died is frustrating and boring.

Which means that I particularly dislike when games have lousy checkpointing or save systems. I also dislike when games are too difficult and I can’t turn the difficulty down to at least get past whatever is giving me a hard time. And of course, unskippable cut scenes right after a checkpoint are a classic pain in the ass.

Examples:

  1. I just finished Outer Wilds and found that game’s checkpointing to be pretty frustrating. So many boring trips to Brittle Hollow because I lost my footing. I almost gave up because it was so bad.
  2. I never finished GTA 4. I got stuck in some mission where there was like a 5 minute drive and then some difficult combat. I kept dying and having to redo the very boring drive over and over killed my motivation. I don’t even know why it was so hard. I played GTA 5 twice with no issues.
  3. I tried Dark Souls once. Lol, lasted maybe an hour before giving up. Now I’m very wary of any game that doesn’t have configurable difficulty levels. Thankfully, most games these days are actually progressing to more granular or meaningful difficulty levels.
CoderKat,

I usually dislike weapon durability (eg, in Fallout), but Zelda is the one game where I actually liked it. Perhaps because in Zelda, it was a central mechanic that the game was designed and balanced around.

For most games, durability is something that the game isn’t really designed around and feels more forced in. When you can repair your gear (as you usually can), durability just means every now and then you gotta deal with the annoyance of repairing.

CoderKat,

I agree with you on those special weapons. I dunno why the heck they made those so rare or expensive while also not being that durable. I don’t find it an issue for most normal weapons, though, especially with the fuse mechanic in TotK. I like how it forces me to vary things up and allows for regular treasure chests or drops to actually give you something you can use (even if it’s basically like a short lasting consumable).

CoderKat,

I enjoy the scale of large games, but Odyssey and Valhalla was too much even for me. I’d like maybe half that (which would still be at least 50 hours I suspect).

Phil Spencer announces Call of Duty deal with PlayStation

“We are pleased to announce that Microsoft and @PlayStation have signed a binding agreement to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation following the acquisition of Activision Blizzard. We look forward to a future where players globally have more choice to play their favorite games.”...

CoderKat,

I wonder what they got from Sony. Ideally it’d be some promises about Sony reducing exclusives themselves. Exclusives suck for everyone but the company that owns the exclusive console. I don’t personally own an Xbox, but I still want Sony to cut it out with their exclusives.

Where are all the good stealth games?

I’ve been trying to find one throughout the Steam summer sale and come up dry, and now I’m out of money until the 15th. Hopefully y’all can help me find a good one before the winter sale. Here’s a rundown of what I’ve tried so far and what I’ve liked and dislike about them:...

CoderKat,

Dishonored was the first thing that came to mind when I read the title, too. OP, if you haven’t played it, check it out!

As for others…

  1. Skyrim and Fallout aren’t exactly deep stealth games, but stealth is hands down the most popular and arguably most fun way to play. Sneaky archer is a freaking meme.
  2. Far Cry games all favour stealth as well. While you’re totally allowed to go in guns a blazing and it’s frankly more effective sometimes, the game does reward stealth and is clearly designed with it in mind. Silencers are magic, you can distract enemies, can lure wildlife to attack, smoke bombs, knife combos, “death from above”, etc.
  3. The Metro series isn’t entirely stealth, but a lot of human enemy sections are meant to be done with stealth and I recall it being actually very difficult if you’re not stealthy (you die fast). I also recall the stealth feeling more realistic in terms of detection time. Finally, there’s something extra fun about being stealthy in a very dark post apocalyptic subway tunnel. Much better atmosphere for it!

As a final side note, the way OP described assassin’s Creed sounds like the older games. They might like some of the “middle” games like Unity more. The games that came just before Origins (Origins and later are very fun games, but the stealth is no longer the focus).

hybridhavoc, do gaming angielski
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    CoderKat,

    The only way this could go well for consumers is if they could manage to negotiate fewer exclusives from both Microsoft and Sony, and I don’t see that happening because they’d likely rather gamble on the chance that their exclusive would be the big new IP that makes them billions. So we’re really just gonna see more games become exclusives.

    It sucks. Exclusives are just bad for consumers, period. Doesn’t matter if it’s Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft. They all just reduce how many options consumers have unless they’re willing to shell out hundreds for a new console. Personally, none of my consoles are chosen because of some trait of the console; they’re all just to play exclusives. Not even the Switch – I didn’t buy that to play games on the go or have motion controls. I bought it to play Animal Crossing and Zelda. If I could have played my Switch games (legally) elsewhere, I would have.

    CoderKat,

    It does (on the website – if you’re using an app, that’s on your app creator). OP simply hasn’t replied to any comments in the thread yet. Last I saw, kbin was missing the OP indicator, but that shouldn’t affect you on beehaw.

    What games have great cinematography? angielski

    I’ve come to really appreciate when games aren’t merely graphically pretty, but that they also take great care with their use of camera angles and animation in general. I speak particularly of cutscenes and dialogue, but frankly this question applies to the entire game....

    CoderKat,

    Despite that age, I think it has aged great (at least on PC). It’s a beautiful game.

    I don’t get why it’d be remade, given how well it has aged. Just make a sequel with similar gameplay but a fresh story, missions (no eavesdropping!), and map. AC Rogue was very similar, but without being explicitly pirate themed and the story of Rogue was very short (but I did like it).

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