I’m in like the opposite camp… But I’ve never been able to get past the initial learning curve of the game. Something has never clicked with this one for me
People blame the sunsetting decision, but most people stuck around. Honestly I don’t think the stuff they sunset was all that good. The original planet designs were feeling tired. They have brought missions back as well… But it’s been too long since I played to remember exactly how they brought them back.
The actual issue in my mind is they’ve decided making things hard means giving it a lot of health and make it take almost all of yours in one hit. So the only things that are viable are people’s cracked builds.
Basically without a full team of good shooter players, even easy mode dungeons are out of reach. Things just do so much damage and have so much health, it’s just not fun. Everything feels like a slog unless you go look up a cracked build someone made.
Actually, not everything feels like a slog. The content that doesn’t, everything just dies without any challenge.
So the options to play are roughly:
comically easy
this will take forever
this will take forever + 1 and hit like a truck
this will take forever + 2 and you instantly die
With some content having only the last 3 options.
They added some new enemy types recently, but it just hasn’t been enough to really make the game feel refreshed. Like, Remnant II showed how to do this well, different enemies, different ways that they attack you, different ways to ideally kill the enemy (i.e. lots of weak spot variety), lots of different attacks for the bosses (and death is a matter of avoiding the attacks not being in a 12 hour fight), every bullet takes a significant chunk of their health bar, etc
The locations have also felt a bit underwhelming, but that would be okay if the fights felt challenging and rewarding … not just like various reskins of the same enemies with either no or way too much health.
Brighter Shores! It’s a new game by Andrew Gower on his new game engine (just came out last month).
It’s a point and click game similar to RuneScape that’s mostly a second screen game. It’s in early access and a lot will probably change in the coming months based on feedback (they’ve already confirmed they’re rethinking some of their combat design and adding action queuing).
Unlike RuneScape it’s been designed out of the gate to provide people with a way to engage without sinking a ton of time. You can do fully offline training in this game, so you can be gaining XP while you sleep.
The game runs like a dream, has a very well done sound track, tastefully simplistic graphics, and just generally is a cozy/feel good MMO with light humor and puns.
No micro transactions, generous amount of free to play content, and a $6/mo subscription for all content.
I mean, fishing is more comparable to mining in RS2, there are other skills (typically refinement oriented skills) that have more down time between clicks.
Combat I definitely feel needs refinement. Though, I actually do like the fact that combat is not “I have a bow and I’m shooting something 1 tile in front of me and/or safe spotting.”
The skills are only trained in one area, but they have interactions across areas. You use resources gathered in the forest in town and in the mines. The weapons you make in the mines can be tuned to any other location (etc…)
A lot of this is to solve the long time MMO issue of “new content is released but it’s only for high level players and long time layers in general have a ton of advantages in the new area.”
The original RuneScape developers and owners (i.e. Andrew Gower and his brothers) are back with a new game, at a new company, with an industry shattering $5.99/mo subscription price for all content.
No micro transactions, no pay to win, no outrageous DLC pricing, no bull shit … just a fun game with many similarities to OSRS but also modernizations, formula improvements, and lessons learned.
The problem is a hash algorithm is exactly the sort of thing that copyright would be horrible at protecting. The source code is hardly relevant at all, it’s the operations that matter.
A big part of patents is to allow private sector research to occur. RCA failed and maybe patents should just fail too.
like the umbrella wedge/spring to make it open automatically.
That to me is a very specific algorithm. It’s a simple mechanism but putting it together might be a bit tricky.
That’s very similar to SHA, it’s a fairly simple set of mechanisms but the actual composure of those ideas into something that works as well as SHA does takes very specific research experience. It’s not at all an abstract idea, it’s a very concrete and specific set of operations that you invented first.
Imagine if the patent was “an umbrella can open itself with the push of button” no further details. That’s close to the level of detail some software patents are argued at and effectively what the “put a game in your loading screen” patent was awarded on.
You can’t patent the idea that “an umbrella should be able to open [somehow]” so I likewise think it’s ridiculous that someone was able to parent “your game [somehow] runs another simpler game before it runs.”
Patents should be to protect very specific research so that the private sector can do said research and profit from it. Patents should not block out broad concepts. The patent in the video game situation was and should’ve been ruled as bogus. It’s not the type of thing anyone needed to research or think about, you just literally go “what if I added a game to my loading screen” and you’re in violation.
I think software patents should really only apply to extremely tricky algorithmic “discoveries” (which I would consider inventions, as someone that’s written a SHA256 implementation from reference material, nobody is “just coming up with that”).
“Ingenuity patents” like that loading screen game are everything that’s wrong with software patents. It’s not all that crazy of an idea to add a game while waiting to play the main game. There’s no radical research required there, just an idea.
I don’t think vague ideas like “a game in a loading screen” are sufficiently creative to warrant a patent.
Nintendo is in a very envious spot in general. Hell, I think Nintendo makes some great games, I just wish they wouldn’t force me to buy yet another computer solely for the purpose of playing their games. I haven’t owned a Mario Kart or Zelda game in years but I’d love to play if I could do so on PC/Linux.
Yeah, maybe I’m just wrong in general … The above doesn’t look that different from say black ops 6 footage.
I definitely wish for a return to the linear format (or simi linear where there are a few concurrent linear quests going on). I think straight up open world just lends itself to making a lot of walking simulators.
Halo Infinity was one of the most boring games I ever played between the weapons sounding like toys and the spread out objectives with no clear central mission.