LoamImprovement

@LoamImprovement@beehaw.org

Oh god, please don’t make me talk about myself.

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

LoamImprovement,

The only thing I don’t like about Cyberpunk’s writing is that everyone seems to be deathly allergic to pronouns, even when it would clearly make the dialogue flow better.

LoamImprovement,

Can you name a few? I’m looking for one that scratches the mage itch of hitting a bunch of mobs with chain lightning without the expectation of online participation, or item refinement.

LoamImprovement,

I’m guessing it was the goal but it didn’t work as well as they’d hoped. I’ve got a couple of the freebies but I’ve stuck mostly with Valve because most of my games are already on Steam and they haven’t seriously fucked up yet.

LoamImprovement,

Honestly they’ll have money as long as people keep playing fortnite, kids are throwing stupid money at skins and shit.

LoamImprovement,

I’m guessing here because I don’t sit on Epic’s board of directors, but I would imagine their angle for consumers was mostly to grab new markets with the appeal of free games, which would also establish a library that would be a pain point if they ever wanted to move away, coupled with some of those one-year exclusives that would peel people away from Valve if they wanted to play them day-of.

LoamImprovement,

But I’d say that’s because there’s been an oddly big jump in system requirements, recently.

Because devs don’t optimize for PC and get away with it by listing absurd minimum requirements.

LoamImprovement,

You’re kidding, right? I wish a bank would be so lenient with me as to let me pay off my interest-free loan with terms of ‘whenever you feel like it, off the money you make as a freelance forager.’

LoamImprovement,

Honestly I think that game has possibly one of the best ‘first rooms’ in horror game history, like even with the low poly graphics, that thing jumping through the window, giving you the impression that shit is happening and you need to move, and then doubles down with the zombie out of the floor, and that if you know what’s coming, you can prevent both. It’s a shame the final section is filled with janky-ass platforming.

LoamImprovement,

Goddamn did that game push some limits. I guarantee something like that remade today would get an AO rating.

LoamImprovement,

Fun fact - that ‘puzzle’ has its difficulty set by your processor’s speed. The game uses a set amount of time to determine the best move for the computer, and plays the best it’s got after that time. On slower processors of the time, it would only be able to calculate so many options before needing to come to a decision, but because it didn’t account for better hardware, the computer can make the best move every single time, causing it to be unwinnable even if the human player also plays perfectly.

LoamImprovement,

Shivers - that game absolutely nailed the atmosphere, and for the players that don’t know the ixupi hotspots and the game’s tricks, it’s genuinely terrifying. I’d say give it a look, on GoG you could do worse for six bucks.

LoamImprovement,

Honestly, if nothing else, I’m grateful for the fact that they give you a cyberware capacity - the extended gameplay trailer they showed implied that certain cyberwares would have a ‘humanity’ cost but the game had none of that on release, just treated like extra equipment slots, which was incredibly disappointing. Also it looks as though they’re not locking weapon upgrades behind the tech tree, which is great, because the fact that you could pick up uniques that would be useless in a few levels unless you dropped everything into tech (and even then) was also a major disappointment.

LoamImprovement,

Oh goddamnit, another creation engine game?!

LoamImprovement,

I know what the implication here is but I feel like I should ‘pray they don’t alter it any further?’

LoamImprovement,

There are nine reviews on metacritic from various outlets that score the game 100/100. I would love for every single one of those reviewers to look me in the eye and with a straight face, repeat the claim that Starfield is perfect and there is absolutely nothing in the game that could possibly be improved on. If you want to know who’s not conversing honestly, that’d be a good kicking-off point.

LoamImprovement, (edited )

I trust the scores that come after release over the ones that came before, because post release scores aren’t concerned with biting the hand that feeds re: getting future review copies for titles down the line. It’s telling that a lot of the earlier ones are higher but just say “great game, Bethesda’s knocked it out of the park again” with a sentence or two, and later, lower ones are a lot meatier with specific criticisms.

I think it’s worth noting that there are a lot of irrelevant low reviews from the review bombers too, as well as zeroes from the people who are upset that you can choose your pronouns. I’ve played the game. I don’t like the game - I think it’s bad on its own merits, or lack thereof. Where I think FO4 was a ‘meh’ because of the less impactful character building and stripped-down dialogue system, doubling down on the clutter looter aspects, I call Starfield bad because the same clutter looting and character building with a new coat of paint is now gated behind repetitive tasks and mostly barren procgen maps. There’s more layers of obligatory fast travel between the parts of the game that are enjoyable, and that’s in service of the parts of the game that aren’t. The game is objectively worse than FO4 for those reasons, and in the case of the leveling system, it didn’t even need to be.

And you know, while I’m airing my grievances here, I also think it’s fair to have higher standards in the eight years between the two games - Bethesda doesn’t get to hide behind their own old engine the same way Obsidian gets a pass for the issues FNV runs into - it’s their engine. They should know from the get-go whether the game they want to make can be supported with a system built over a decade ago, and if it’s not, they should be prepared to go back to square one. They had plenty of time; I don’t believe for a second they couldn’t have made this game right, but they were hell-bent on getting one more game out of the Creation engine, and by god did they, for better or (much, much) worse. So when people say “It’s Bethesda, what did you expect?” I will answer, from the top of this hill where I’m already carving my fucking epitaph, “Something more and better than what we got last decade.” And people give shit for that expectation? I’m supposed to be impressed that they plugged the random number generator that puts cartons of cigarettes in trashcans into a random planet generator? That in the eight years between FO4 and this samey, shallow, mediocre mess, two more than the development time between Daggerfall and Morrowind, that arguably set the standard for this kind of game with its masterfully crafted world, with huge setpiece cities full of bespoke characters and encounters, they’ve managed to stretch the disappointment of randomized containers full of vendor trash and blocky bases full of raiders over thousands of empty maps? Give me a break. Game bad. Emperor Todd has no clothes and I’m fucking calling it out.

LoamImprovement,

I mean, that’s still pretty much the case, it’s just emulated very well, with lots of polish. It’s a lot like Minecraft in that you have to make your own fun, but once you find it it’s a very nice flow. It’s definitely better with friends, and fights with real players especially are fun, and make you realize just how bad you are.

LoamImprovement,

Well you can already fast travel between planets. I’d be okay with the happy medium of intersystem travel if it meant I could actually land on a planet. The problem is the way Bethesda has set it up, the planets themselves aren’t real, there’s just a handful of zones around POIs.

LoamImprovement,

I mean, to be fair, Starfield doesn’t do it well either. In the 15 hours I played, especially toward the latter end, I ran into plenty of texture pop-in, bad culling, bodies without heads and arms, heads and arms without bodies, bad shading patches, t-posing, stutter, lots of other goofy shit. And granted, my rig’s not the best but I’m playing on medium with a 9600K, 3070, 32GB RAM, and the game’s installed on a Samsung 870 SATA.

What are some games that "spin" failure states? angielski

What I mean by this, is instead of when you fail and are met with a game over, the game finds some way to keep it going. Instead of being forced to reset to a previous save or an autosave checkpoint, the game’s story continues in an interesting path. Are there any games like this?...

LoamImprovement,

It looks like a shitpost with how often it uses colors and textures that seem to want to hurt the player with how godawful they look, but if you can get past that, the core gameplay is really good.

LoamImprovement,

Disco Elysium is probably the best implementation of the ‘Fail Forward’ ideology I’ve seen in a game - not ‘Game Over’ per se, because running out of Health or Morale will give you a game over, along with some nonstandard endings, but failing important story-related checks doesn’t lock you out of the story, you’re just encouraged to go explore other parts of the world - raising the skill associated with the check you failed opens it up again, and certain objects, thoughts, or interactions can also open them up again. In the same vein, failing noncritical checks can often lead to more interesting and/or advantageous outcomes than succeeding. As an example:

spoilerOne red check (noncritical, can’t be retried) you make early on is to try to remember your name via Conceptualization. Succeed, and you’ll just admit to yourself that you can’t remember. Fail, and you immediately land on ‘Raphael Ambrosious Cousteau.’ You can then spend the rest of the game referring to yourself as RAC, with humorous reactions from pretty much everyone who hears it, and if you do it enough, you unlock a thought that raises your Savoir Faire and Espirit de Corps skills.

Great game, by the way, highly recommend.

LoamImprovement,

That explains why whats-his-breakfast in space cowboy town has his locked up.

Does anyone know of any kid-friendly "horror" games out there for children ~7 years old?

My son loves the adrenaline rush of getting scared, particularly with jump scares, however, I have a lot of difficulty finding a game or show which is appropriate for him. He is prone to nightmares, and more adult-oriented “kid horror” is too much (Poppy’s Playtime, Cartoon Cat?) And others like Siren Head. His peers...

LoamImprovement,

I would give My Friendly Neighborhood a try - it’s very much in the vein of Resident Evil 4 with just-different-enough Sesame Street puppets that give you a jumpscare and damage when they make contact. Put together by John and Evan Szymanski (brothers to and collaborators with David Szymanski, of several New Blood titles fame,) it’s made explicitly to be horrifying without relying on gore and excessive violence.

LoamImprovement,

Shivers is also a very good example from this era. Excellent atmosphere in a spooky museum.

LoamImprovement,

The same as anything else in a Bethesda game, busywork.

LoamImprovement,

Weren’t they floating codename Deckard a while back? If they can make a handheld that plays modern titles reliably, a standalone headset on par with the Quest seems about the right speed as far as next steps goes.

LoamImprovement,

I have a friend who says it needs to go one of two ways - either encumbrance matters hard and is super realistic, where you can reliably carry 30-60 lbs of gear for long distances, and that’s it, or it just doesn’t exist and you can lug around as much shit as you want and abstract out the rest, because the middle ground where PCs can carry like 250 lbs of shit leads to a game where you’re constantly just sorting through your inventory about the best vendor trash you think you can packrat to sell while moving through a dungeon, and that’s slow and unfun. The low carry weight turns every interaction into “is it better than my current gear?” which is really easy to answer in the moment, and when weight doesn’t matter, you just hoover it up and sell it when you get a chance.

LoamImprovement,

Granted, I’m only like five of the twelve hours in I’m supposed to be before the game starts getting good, but my god they made some baffling design choices here. Possibly the most egregious is the fact that every skill comes with leveling requirements - for example, the worst offender I’ve seen is the oxygen (stamina) skill requiring you to completely exhaust your meter 20 times before you can put a second point in. (Worth noting, ‘completely exhaust’ in this context means deplete both the regular O2 meter and max out the CO2 meter, which depletes more slowly than the O2 refills) The only way to reliably and safely do this, considering you only really need stamina in short bursts when playing normally, is to literally just run fucking laps. Bad and boring, to the point that I will say, without a hint of sarcasm, that the person responsible for making it this way should be moved off the team. I cannot fathom how that person arrived at the conclusion that doing chores was somehow the most exciting and innovative way to spice up FO4’s perk system, because that’s all it is underneath, and it is an aggressive waste of time.

Looking for games with unique core mechanics

I’m requesting for recommendations for games that stand out from the rest in their genre, and not in the sense of being the best game in that niche but actually bringing something new and innovative to the table. I’ve not had much experience in gaming, but I have a few games to give you a hint on what I am talking about:...

LoamImprovement,

To be fair, QWOP is a walking sim, it’s just that you’re really bad at it.

LoamImprovement,

The you’re addressing here is The four-point scale, which exists primarily because rating a low score on a big developer’s game is a good way to ensure you don’t receive review copies ahead of release, something reviewers live and die on because their fans want to know ahead of time whether the game is any good. In that sense, it’s a bit of a paradox - you can’t be sure at face value whether the 4 out of 5/8 out of 10/83% was something that the reviewer genuinely levied against the game as a fair criticism of flaws and/or commendation of positive experiences, or if they give it a high number because they’re afraid of biting the hand that feeds.

LoamImprovement,

Yeah, that always came across as “I’m trying to neg you but I ran out of my best insults like an hour ago so I’m throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks.” Same with the adopted joke.

LoamImprovement,

The best case scenario is that it releases in whatever broken mess it ends up being, with good bones and the same kind of thoughtful worldbuilding B1 had, and the community picks it up similarly and makes it into a cult classic.

I’m not holding my breath though, people are still scratching their heads on the developer announcement.

LoamImprovement,

I love it for the most part, the only thing I wish they’d change is the cleanliness tols for smaller or larger objects. It’s not fun to try and pixel hunt the last bit of rust on the inside of a wheel, and it’s a little disappointing to get almost done with a big flat panel only for the game to decide you’re done before you can spray off that last little chunk.

LoamImprovement,

Yeah, like I picked up an 8TB SSD for like $300 the other day to move shit off of three old platter drives, I still have room to spare. A 1TB is like $60, that’s less than the cost of the game.

LoamImprovement,

Not OP but I can at least throw a minor pet peeve in that hat - Mage hand only works once per short rest, instead of as an at will as the cantrip should.

LoamImprovement,

Careful the devil doesn’t trip over that bar.

LoamImprovement,

Honestly, at this point every AAA title should just be treated as having a release date of 3mo to a year out from the actual launch. There’s zero reason to buy a game before day one, and any developer that tries to give you one a la cosmetic preorder bonuses probably doesn’t have a product worth your money, and is just trying to milk your FOMO for every dollar it’s worth.

LoamImprovement,

I would definitely suggest Heaven’s Vault, very good, vibrant artwork in that game, and lots of variety.

LoamImprovement,

Balenciaga is quite good.

LoamImprovement,

Ah yes, Balenciaga.

LoamImprovement,

Seconding the movement. Everyone wants at least one feather and a handful of hooves and energy drinks but if you stack up you can literally just fly around the map. It’s even more fun with movement utilities like the commando’s slide, you can launch jump like crazy.

LoamImprovement,

Here’s the thing: I don’t want games to keep improving, at least, not in that way. It doesn’t mean anything to me that the game includes ultraHD textures and looks stunning on an 8K monitor because I’m still rocking a 3070 with a 1080 120 Hz. The fact that it takes them three years to make a game look this good, which is meaningless to a majority of gamers who can’t afford that kind of hardware, is especially frustrating. And now they’re telling us for the pleasure of waiting so long for them to put the finishing touches on what is effectively marketing material, I have to reserve not just 100+ GB, but all that space on an SSD because the game loads too damn slow otherwise? That’s like an eighth of the available space on your average m.2 drive, for one game, for something most people won’t even be able to enjoy because their hardware just isn’t made for that kind of output.

I don’t want sixteen times the detail, I want an optimized game with serviceable assets and a gameplay loop that doesn’t feel like a second job. And granted, this is getting beyond the graphics argument, but I like games that aren’t afraid of not appealing to the broadest audience. I want my Fallout in Space to have more than four dialog options that all point the same direction. I want to make meaningful choices and play a character that has real opinions and can act accordingly, instead of endless modifiers on the gear of a voice-acted talking doll that exists to service a mostly linear plot. I don’t want F4, I want FNV. I’ll be pleasantly surprised if the reviews come out and it ends up being as meaningful as I want it to be, but I’m not holding my breath, and in all likelihood I’m not jumping through the hardware hoops to play a game I probably won’t like.

LoamImprovement,

I think the only thing I might have changed about the first game is removing relic slots. It felt a little needless to limit the number of keys/exploration upgrades the player can use at any one time. Other than that, solid game.

Steam Deck VS rivals

I was interested in buying a Steam Deck… Until I discovered all the (apparently) better alternatives. Asus Rog Ally, OneXPlayer, Aya Neo etc… I like the idea of an handheld console and obviously I would like to have a device that can run almost everything, so the Windows based handhelds seem better than the Steam Deck. Is it...

LoamImprovement,

Not OP but I can take a crack at it. For starters, the build quality is fantastic. As someone who’s used quite a few mainstream handhelds (Gameboy up through Switch light, PSP/Vita, and most recently the GDP XD) The deck feels sturdy, and although it is quite bulky, it fits with case and charger in a backpack that’s flown cross country several times. I’ve had to replace other devices that just couldn’t stand up to that kind of abuse.

It’s also quite powerful - enough to run Elden Ring at a very consistent 30 FPS. More lightweight titles have zero issues. The same is also true of emulated hardware up to 6th gen, including KH1/2, Metroid Prime, etc. Which is quite a feat for a portable computer like this.

The backend/desktop mode is easy to access and makes setting up those emus quite simple, and with a little command line work you can get applications running that aren’t available via Discover.

Really, the only thing lacking here is battery life, but even then, 2-3 hours is on par with most laptops.

LoamImprovement,

Then fuck it. All the people who want microtransactions, or don’t care about the quality of the medium enough to stop engaging with shitty practices, can have them. There are plenty of developers making games that care enough about the things they make that I’ll be happy to buy from. We’ve reached a point where the big studios will spend three years and a quarter of a billion dollars putting out 7/10 games that look great in trailers and don’t function on PC that exist alongside solo devs who make the games that look at home on PS1 and offer a better experience than anything Blizzard has made in the last decade. Even if my wallet’s vote doesn’t matter to the big guys, it doesn’t have to as long as it’s enough to support people whose passion isn’t exploited to make a just barely par product.

Don’t get hyped, don’t preorder, don’t buy games until they’re fixed. You can’t change the industry but you don’t have to support it.

LoamImprovement,

I would guess they’re made for people who really really like Far Cry 3, because the gameplay loops do not appear to have fundamentally changed since that game came out in 2012.

LoamImprovement,

Worse yet, what if we have to do some QA on PC and optimize our games instead of just hoping that they don’t continuously crash on launch?

LoamImprovement,

The first time I played I did it with full color and English dub, and it was good, but it kind of suffers from the “Pick the cat turds out of the sandbox” issue that almost every single one of these games do, where eventually you’re just going from POI to POI on the undiscovered portions of the map and everything gets kind of samey after a while.

I don’t know if playing in Kurosawa mode would be a fresh enough experience to hold me through a second playthrough.

  • Wszystkie
  • Subskrybowane
  • Moderowane
  • Ulubione
  • •
  • rowery
  • giereczkowo
  • lieratura
  • Blogi
  • test1
  • muzyka
  • Spoleczenstwo
  • slask
  • Psychologia
  • ERP
  • fediversum
  • motoryzacja
  • Technologia
  • esport
  • tech
  • nauka
  • krakow
  • sport
  • antywykop
  • FromSilesiaToPolesia
  • Cyfryzacja
  • Pozytywnie
  • zebynieucieklo
  • niusy
  • kino
  • LGBTQIAP
  • opowiadania
  • warnersteve
  • Wszystkie magazyny
    •