SteposVenzny

SteposVenzny, 7 dni temu

My understanding of Baldur’s Gate 3 is that everybody is romantically interested in the player character.

Maybe I’m just a catch?

SteposVenzny, 27 dni temu

I can’t think of another game that I like so much and enjoy playing so little. I will spend countless hours creating families and houses and then five minutes playing the actual game before I’m like “oh, right, I hate this” and then I start making another family.

SteposVenzny, 27 dni temu

!;!;!;!;!

SteposVenzny, miesiąc temu

For anybody playing this for the first time, an important piece of advice:

Don’t be a completionist. Leave areas before you’ve done everything in them and don’t do any side quests you’re not interested in.

It’s my least favorite Dragon Age but it got a lot more hate than it deserved because other open world games trained people to play it the boringest way possible.

SteposVenzny, miesiąc temu (edited miesiąc temu)

Not in the sense where they failed to make it interesting, more in the Breath of the Wild type philosophy where any side-content you do is indirectly progress toward the main goal so there’s a mix of things of varying levels of interestingness in all directions. You have an organization that raises in “power” or whatever they call those points whenever you do a side quest and you need to bank up certain amounts of those power points to do the next story mission or unlock the next region. That progression is paced in such a way that you simply don’t need to do most things.

Many quests are genuinely interesting but other ones are just filler. And some filler between good quests is inoffensive, maybe even a refreshing little diversion. One generic filler side quest is essentially “stand next to this portal and kill all the ghosts that come out of it”. Doing that once in a while is okay, doing it as many times as there are portals to find is torture.

I still haven’t played the sequels, would you say they’re still worthwhile or is it for the best to leave the story at the end of Origins?

The short version of that answer is that the sequels do not have what you love about the original but you might also like them for the different things that they are.

Awakening feels less like a sequel (technically an optionally standalone expansion but I’m counting it) and more like a fan mod. It’s nerdier, sillier, edgier, and has that high-effort mod habit of adding concepts that should logically be new mechanics but are executed by old ones because you’re doing it on minimal skill and zero budget. I think that’s a pretty cute vibe but it’s fundamentally just Origins again but worse.

2 has high highs and low lows and, while I personally love it, it’s negative general reception is very fairly earned. The thing that it was trying to do in the first place, story-wise, is something that would already have been divisive even if the rest of the game were flawlessly executed and it was emphatically not flawlessly executed. The simplest way I can describe it is that it is not a story about an adventure, it’s a story about a place. You do not leave that place, you just stay there over the course of several years and experience the historically significant events that are happening there. So the narrative focus for you as a protagonist is on how you feel about things rather than what you’re accomplishing.

Inquisition, conversely, is the least interesting one from a conceptual standpoint but, like, it’s competent from a technical standpoint and the harsh criticisms you tend to hear usually stem from misunderstandings about its design rather than the lack of creative ambition. There’s another new evil horde and you’re another special dude who’s the only one who can stop them and now you’ve got a personal army instead of being an underdog. There’s more political conflict than the first game but the politics are less complex. Ultimately, though, I think the most important factor of any open world game is simply the degree to which you want to spend time in that world regardless of what it is you’re actually doing and it’s an interesting enough world to spend some time in. Certainly, it’s worth trying for free.

SteposVenzny, miesiąc temu

Blurry looks more realistic than blocky, especially on the low-resolution CRT monitors old games were designed for.

Now that we’ve got better screens and games with better graphics, we see early 3D as a stylized aesthetic and a lack of texture filtering fits that aesthetic better but these games’ actual goal they were made with was realism.

SteposVenzny, miesiąc temu

Too much new stuff. I think the fact that Xen existing was the difference between the free version and the paid version pushed them to pad Xen out way too far for fear that snappier pacing would feel like a ripoff.

SteposVenzny, miesiąc temu

How cheap is an adequate VR set these days? Probably still not cheap enough for this one game to justify the purchase, right?

SteposVenzny, miesiąc temu

Touch screens don’t lend themselves to Snake the way buttons did, so the only good mobile game is now functionally unplayable.

SteposVenzny, miesiąc temu

“It’s okay to fail” seems like it would have been a more valuable life lesson than “it feels good to beat a really hard video game” and it concerns me that you’re so okay with the amount of trauma this entertainment product caused him.

The fact that you’re sharing this story of years of repeated meltdowns caused by a video game and calling it an example of games being beneficial is pretty surreal.

SteposVenzny, miesiąc temu

These are your words, quoted from your post:

One of his most recent meltdowns was so traumatic for him,

SteposVenzny, miesiąc temu

My point is that I described the same distress you’re describing using the same terminology you did. I didn’t accuse you of anything, I just strongly disagreed with your takeaway that this story describes something positive.

SteposVenzny, miesiąc temu

Andromeda has the biggest difference I’ve ever seen between low graphics settings and high ones. I wonder if the lack of recognition for its beautiful environments isn’t mainly that they just weren’t beautiful on most people’s systems.

SteposVenzny, miesiąc temu

My favorite ME1 build is Infiltrator. The damage output of a properly modded sniper rifle can get truly depraved late in the game.

SteposVenzny, 2 miesiące temu

The ammo system rewarded you with ammo for the opposite color of beam you were using, so you are actually totally free to ignore the power beam most of the time without running into supply issues. Even when you wanted to only use one color, like the light beam when you’re on Dark Aether, use the one you don’t want in combat to shoot crates and plants and stuff to farm good ammo for the fights.

SteposVenzny, 2 miesiące temu

It’s less that they’re easy to get without buying them with real money and more that they’re supposed to be acquired slowly and, when relevant, used sparingly.

My frustration with the discourse is that so many who see the game’s general lack of convenience see that through the filter of these microtransactions and assume ill intent on part of the actual game design when really it’s just genuinely idiosyncratic like the original was.

The truth is, if you’re the sort to be tempted by these purchases in the first place then you’re not the sort of person who would enjoy the game even if you do buy them. I don’t know whether that makes them better or worse, honestly, but if you buy the game it at least doesn’t rub your nose in them like Assassin’s Creed.

SteposVenzny, 3 miesiące temu

It’s such a fun phrase to say, though.

SteposVenzny, 3 miesiące temu

Games that I’m confident the average person would love:

• Burnout (3 and/or Revenge)
• Tony Hawk’s Underground (definitely 1 and not 2)
• Shadow of the Colossus (I’m otherwise avoiding games with HD versions for modern platforms but I specifically think this game is weirdly better with PS2-level graphics and performance)
• Ultimate Spider-Man (Spider-Man 2 had better swinging but I think this is the stronger overall package)

Games with a more niche appeal but, dammit, I want you to play them anyways:

• Steambot Chronicles
• Shadow of Destiny

Games that felt like a big deal at the time but I haven’t actually played since I was a kid so take with a grain of salt:

• Evergrace
• Way of the Samurai (1 and/or 2)
• Stuntman
• Def Jam Vendetta & Fight for NY
• Mercenaries 1
• NBA Street (2 was my favorite but all three were great)
• NFL Street (only played 1, presumably 2 and 3 are also great)

A game I know is bad but I want you to play it so that the voice clips will be burned into your brain also:

• Kessen 2

SteposVenzny, 3 miesiące temu

West of Loathing. The RPG stuff is great and the comedy is great but really the main strength is I just enjoy reading its dialogue. The vocabulary and sentence construction have a real sincerity for the setting contrasted against the silliness of the rest of it that makes both parts hit harder.

Similarly, the first three Monkey Island games which achieve that same injection of the heartfelt into the wacky by way of their gorgeous art and music.

But as far as the joy of just doing something it’s hard to beat the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games, to just be dropped into a level and be told “do cool stuff for a while”.

SteposVenzny, 5 miesięcy temu

I really think modernizing the controls is a bad idea. Lara is probably still going to be as heavy and rigid as in the original, so if all it changes is what analog sticks do then it’s going to set up the players with expectation that it should be responsive in the way that dual analog games are responsive instead of the type of responsiveness you got from the old tank controls so people will perceive the game as being sloppy and unreasonably demanding. And if they change more than just what analog sticks do, if they change the underlying mechanics of movement to be more the way dual analog controls are responsive, it’s going to make the platforming a lot harder because the jumps were designed around the type of precision tank controls offer.

In the modern day, its weird retro tank controls are honestly one of the original series’s biggest strengths for me. In a landscape full of platforming that largely plays itself, old-school Tomb Raider makes platforming feel exciting again by making you stop and think through what you’re doing.

SteposVenzny, 5 miesięcy temu

I feel like these conversations get dominated by games with the fewest explicit flaws rather than the ones that have the most to offer but it’s my firm belief that no piece of art can be truly great which is not also kind of annoying. Not because annoyingness is inherent to greatness but because greatness and annoyingness are both the products of an underlying willingness to take creative risks.

So in that spirit, my answer is Steambot Chronicles.

SteposVenzny, 7 miesięcy temu

Plenty of new stuff is still coming out so I can see no reason to be upset about remakes and remasters.

SteposVenzny, 8 miesięcy temu

I actually totally sympathize with that critic from your clip and don’t think there’s anything dishonest or otherwise cognitively dissonant about that review. There’s nothing I can spend more time complaining about than something I really enjoy because I naturally fixate on things that stand out about a given experience and the flaws are what stands out in something that’s overall very good.

I would never in a million years rate that particular game a 9.1/10 but that’s just me and the critic valuing different aspects of design different amounts.

SteposVenzny, 8 miesięcy temu

Prior to dlc, games were released in what was considered a finished state though.

Not really. Games were updated back then, too, it just meant the physical copy someone bought later was more up-to-date than the physical copy someone got earlier. Usually it was just bugfixes but a more visible example that’s pretty well known is Ocarina of Time’s 1.2 release that censored blood by turning it green and removed an Islamic prayer sample from a piece of its background music.

And there were absolutely games came out with unforgivable major bugs back in the day, a top-of-my-head example is that Battletoads on the NES actually can’t be beaten in two player mode because after a while the controls will just stop responding. Admittedly it was less common then in major releases than it is today but that’s less because patches exist and more because new games are more complex than old games so there are more opportunities per game for something to go catastrophically wrong.

The ability to patch games that have already been released really is only a good thing.

SteposVenzny, 9 miesięcy temu

I’ve absolutely died as a result of bad dialogue choices but that’s just role playing; sometimes something you might choose to do can only logically result in your death and I, for one, am happy to be given that choice. I’ve straight up deleted a character profile with lots of progress because there was no in-character way not to do the thing that would kill me in dialogue. That game over is just that character’s canonical ending as far as I’m concerned. He couldn’t not shit-talk that god, that god couldn’t not erase him from existence out of spite. If the game had not provided me with an option to shit-talk the god, I would have been annoyed that none of the dialogue options were true to my character.

SteposVenzny, 9 miesięcy temu

That’s why the phrasing was “from the caste of people” in the clarification. It was just a cultural difference: his home treated him as honorable and other cultures don’t.

When he is briefly enslaved, it wasn’t because they mistook him for being the kind of person you get to do that to, it’s because he was that kind of person and simply hadn’t been treated that way before.

SteposVenzny, 10 miesięcy temu

I’m ready for a new era in Mario voice acting of an Italian voice actor putting on a cartoonish American accent.

SteposVenzny, 10 miesięcy temu

I don’t see why anybody would ever play a boring version of a gnome when the proper gnome is right there.

SteposVenzny, 10 miesięcy temu

The only notable thing about the game is that it’s extremely pretty. So I say start it again, see how much this prettiness matters to you on this new TV, and then decide whether to continue.

SteposVenzny, 10 miesięcy temu

I beat Tears of the Kingdom without doing any main quests at all after getting to the surface, which I didn’t realize going in would mean beating it without the paraglider. It changes everything about how you approach movement and even a lot of the combat when you don’t have that crutch to lean on.

I accidentally created a speedster pacifist in Oblivion, building the crap out of my speed and acrobatics and neglecting the archery and stealth I had planned to specialize in so I just had to rush through dungeons stealing all the treasure and weaving between an ever-growing web of enemy attacks. By far the best Oblivion character I ever made.

SteposVenzny, 10 miesięcy temu

The lack of paraglider didn’t have much of an impact on that. It’s more common to either die or be unharmed by a fall than to take survivable damage.

SteposVenzny, 10 miesięcy temu

I went more for tech-based solutions.

SteposVenzny, 11 miesięcy temu

It’s a part of my most hated trend in the video game industry: video games that are ashamed to be video games so they try to fool you into thinking they’re a more “respectable” art form like TV shows or movies. The mainstream hype we’re seeing is probably that it’s popular with Naughty Dog fans rather than Final Fantasy fans.

I wish these types of games would at least consistently ape more interesting TV shows and movies. Alan Wake seems like the only one that didn’t aspire to be something forgettable. I don’t even like Twin Peaks but at least it’s an identity.

This game is okay enough that I’m probably going to eventually finish it but I don’t think I’d ever feel tempted to start it again even if somehow every other option available to me were objectively worse because at least some of what’s left would be memorable enough to care about.

In general, the graphics are roughly the same as FFXIV.

The graphics are apparently deceptively good. Not immediately jaw-dropping for us lay people like the series is known for but more of a technical quality. I thought it was underwhelming on first glance but I admit I enjoy the things that video brings up now that I’ve started paying attention to them.

SteposVenzny, 11 miesięcy temu

I’ve got a 1080p monitor and a 4k TV in my house and have used my computer plugged into each. The TV is also better for a lot of non-resolution reasons so sometimes I’ll want to move it there for those factors but in terms of displaying the 4k visuals, I honestly don’t think it makes a difference for me at all. Rendering the image at 4k internally has all sorts of benefits for the graphics but displaying that internally 4k image on the 1080 monitor retains all those benefits so I don’t see any point in buying a higher-definition monitor.

But the thing is, I never even wanted 4k on the TV at all. I didn’t want it to be smart, either. I just wanted good-looking colors and it became impossible to find a TV that put the effort into what I cared about that didn’t come with the other features. So I suspect that when I do ever replace my monitor, it’s probably also going to strong-arm me into having a higher resolution that I don’t actually want. And I can’t help but assume this is a big portion of what’s leading to these survey results.