There are different forms of aphantasia. I have to try really hard to visualize something in my mind and often have to go into excruciating details to have a clear visualization. Something like TTRPG is unplayable for me because either I drag the entire party into mostly useless details (and we spend at least half an hour in one room) or I play like I have literally no senses. I could just be a talking head in someone’s bag.
Actually it has had balance changes. Chess clock for instance is a balance update between the players, but there’s also been balancing between pieces. En passant and castling but also changing how the pieces work (for example bishop).
Despite the obvious symmetry of the game there’s still a lot to balance.
There’s going to be a third one? I thought the second one added nothing of value, what are they going to with the third one? Discover another ultra rare resource that is going to become the focal point of human exploitation, but this time in a creature that lives underground? And poor Jake needs to relocate his family with the mole men?
The one with a better deck wins. If a homebrew deck goes against a meta deck then it’s likely the meta deck wins, but if you homebrew a deck with meta cards vs homebrewing without meta cards it comes down to how well the deck is built. A homebrew with all the meta cards but without any game plan or poor mana source distribution is going to do worse than a homebrew without meta cards, but with a clear plan and cards that support that plan.
People not building their own decks and instead just copying meta decks is another discussion.
That’s a really superficial take. For instance in MTG every format has “must have” cards, like fetchlands or shock lands (or dual lands), but beyond that there’s no “best” cards. There are “meta” cards that go into a specific meta deck and when you have one meta deck playing against another that’s when skill and strategy come into play. And it’s not like you must build a meta deck to play, you can build anti-meta decks or lab out a completely new meta deck. The problem is that such a level of deck building skills go way beyond what 99% of players are capable of doing. Even some of the best players in the world suck at deck building, because is an entirely different skillset to playing the game.
But it doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. The modern meta looks very different to when I got into MTG 10+ years ago. Some are still around in some form, like regular Tron turned into mono-g tron and burn turned into boros burn. But the bans on Twin and Pod have killed those decks while Jund and Affinity have dropped out of the meta. In those place we have brand new decks like amulet titan or 5c Omnath. Somewhere in that timeframe we also got Eggs that was literally jank cards thrown into a pile of meta-defining solitaire playing, and then it got banned for being too boring.
You can get meta cards to build a meta deck but you can’t explicitly buy “best” cards because a new combination of “bad” cards can create a meta deck and then those become the new “best” cards.
The Finals. It’s a weird one for me considering I loathe free to play games. Overall it’s been a good year in gaming. I thought Totk is going to be best game of the year, then BG3 came out and I was certain that would end up being the best game of the year (and I’m certain for many it is), but then I decided to give The Finals a try. For me it felt like a fundamental shift in online shooters, like a new baseline to compare shooters to.
On paper it doesn’t seem anything exceptional. You have 4 maps with some variations on each map, 3 game modes and 3 classes each with a handful of weapons and gadgets. There’s really not much content when you lay it all out, but the replayability is insane. The destructible environment and the tools to manipulate the environment has emergent gameplay going through the roof.
You can get really creative with how you want to attack or defend and it makes each match feel fresh. Sometimes you blow up the side of the wall and defend from the building across the street, sometimes you blow the roof to attack from above, sometimes you bring the entire building down to use the chaos to your benefit. You can use jump pads for an unexpected attack angle, you can put up barricades and defenses to block attackers. There’s so much you can do within a match.
It has some flaws, but it’s the most fun I’ve had in a shooter since some of the earlier battlefield games.
I’ll believe it when I see it. I’m pretty sure during the Anthem fiasco it leaked that EA doesn’t prevent studios from using other engines, but strongly incentivizes teams to use Frostbite. For instance by taking the licensing fee out of the development budget meaning you either cut down the scope or use an engine that might not be suited for the project.
It’s very EA to say “you can use whatever you want” and then leave out the “but we’re not going to help you if you don’t do as we want”.
The balance in the Finals is a weird one. I can absolutely understand feeling like it needs some balance changes, but honestly the more I play against things I consider BS the more I feel like it’s actually pretty balanced and every class has tools that make them feel powerful. I would absolutely give it another month of no balance changes to see if something is actually too powerful. I wouldn’t want a reactionary balance because IMO each class should have something that makes them feel powerful, it makes the game more fun.
The only thing I don’t like is the countdown not stopping when someone is stealing the cashout. At a certain point you just give up trying to steal it because you just know you don’t have time to make the steal. For instance I’ve wiped at a bad time and respawned just far enough to know I won’t make it to the cashout with enough time to steal, so I just sit there for half a minute waiting for the match to end because I already know I can’t win.
The movement thing is as close to a fake outrage as you can get. The developers have not slowed the game down. The thing that’s having the biggest impact on the game feeling slow is the default FOV that has been set to 70. If you played on 90 FOV (or higher) and then play on 70 FOV the game is going to feel extremely slow, but it’s a visual difference not a gameplay difference. The game feels exactly the same as it did in open beta.
I haven’t noticed any clipping through the floor bugs but I know on PC there’s a weird mouse bug where your mouse input freezes and you can’t use the mouse, but it passes after a few seconds so it’s not to the extent of having to DC to fix it. There’s also no extra confirmation input needed on PC which means using weapons or tools is definitely smoother on PC.
As for the bullet sponge characters. I personally prefer more bullet sponge characters and think most other shooters require way too few hits to kill which more often than not boils the fights down to who shot first. More shots to kill lets players utilize movement or other gadgets to their advantage, which IMO makes for much more interesting gameplay. It’s also much easier to track targets on PC (though, I don’t know how strong the aim assist is on consoles) and the ability to turn faster might make the combat more enjoyable on PC compared to consoles. I don’t think the theoretical time to kill (TTK) is that much higher than other games (Except COD because COD has stupid-low TTK), if you get the drop on someone they get deleted pretty fast.
I think the game has a pretty good balance on how much effort it takes to kill others because it suits with the rest of the gameplay loop. For instance lower TTK would also have to mean lower cashout steal times and lower respawn times and the fact that one player can wipe an entire team with one mag (which is what you can’t do right now unless you use the flamethrower) and then you also have to make throwables faster to use because what’s the point of a throwable if guns can just delete people? There are so many other aspects of the gameplay that depend on the characters being a bit bullet spongy.
It’s gone largely unnoticed on Lemmy (at least it hasn’t come up on my feed) but I’ve been playing The Finals since it launched during TGA. I don’t normally play F2P games but The Finals is made by ex-DICE employees so I had to try it out. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say it’s the most fun I’ve had in an online shooter in almost a decade. It has pretty much killed my Satisfactory factory (because no longer remember what I was doing there) my Remnant 2 playthrough and my plans to return to Destiny before The final shape. And I don’t care about any of those other games because there’s something so addictively fun about the core gameplay of The Finals that I just can’t put it down. I’m probably going to spend the next week(s) also playing this game.
Overall, despite it being F2P game and having the obvious negatives of a F2P game I still strongly recommend The Finals. If this was a full priced title I’d buy it full price.