I’ve been playing the things since Diablo I; I love the concept and the gameplay loop, but the game-design issues they run up against, and the mechanics that get implemented to address them… irritate the crap out of me over time, and I want to talk about that....
I’m all for the cultivation part, but not when games make it so planning it wrong means starting over and grinding a hundred hours more. To keep the analogy, if your farm is not going too well you can just change things after the next harvest. Experimentation is something that helps these games stay fresh.
If you simply start at the base and just get going, the branching paths quickly add up to an enormous amount of options. If you don’t get any decision paralysis from a tree with literally over a thousand nodes, you might just be a superhuman being.
Right? Steam provides better service and functionality than any other PC storefront. It’s ridiculous that there’s so much whining about them charging for it. So what if it’s a higher percentage? It’s also a better service and a large audience. Whoever doesn’t like it is free to go elsewhere, unlike console games that can only be sold though the manufacturer’s store.
Well, when companies are cutting off people’s purchases and wiping works from our cultural history, a little bit of disregard for the law that is complicit with it is pretty much necessary.
Say, it’s through copyright violation that we can still play games from Mario Maker 1 even though the servers were shut down. People figured out how to copy it even though they weren’t allowed to.
If this is wrong, maybe the law should be fixed to provide a proper path.
They would never have such expectation if they simply allowed players to host it to begin with. This used to be the norm, until companies figured out that it’s easier to control, monetize and force obsolescence to push players into a newer product if they are the only ones hosting servers.
It’s work to do anything, but we routinely see small indie studios managing to release player-hosted games just fine, while large studios don’t bother. Even though it also costs them more to run all the servers on their own. So I’m not so sure it’s just a matter of saving costs.
Ignoring the lack of updates if the game is buggy, games back then were also more focused on quality and make gamers replay the game with unlockable features based on skills, not money. I can’t count the number of times I played Metal Gear Solid games over and over to unlock new features playing the hardest difficulty and with...
Tunic is great! The dev said he wanted to replicate the experience of playing a game in a different language that you don’t quite understand at first, and he made it perfectly. English is my second language, and it reminded me of the times trying to play games before I understood it, struggling with manuals and dictionaries.
The special edition comes with a physical manual, but ironically the player shouldn’t open it until they 100% the game. It’s like a spoiler.
There were some pretty bad bargain bin releases, and a lot of games had glitches but I can’t remember any game from a big company that released with a critical bug. I do think today companies are much more blasé about releasing games with serious issues and patching it later.
Couch multiplayer and LAN parties had a sort of friendly atmosphere that is sorely lacking from most online multiplayer today. Folks are all business, no fun. Even in casual modes people get mad if you fool around.
Mobile gaming truly embraced the worst side of arcades. I remember way back when there were gamers protested so that the media and governments wouldn’t lump video games with gambling, and now the studios themselves put slot machines inside them.
They saw Pokémon dancing around those two and animal brutality, and decided to settle down right in the middle of it. The whole game is like a big April Fools joke.
The whole situation just made me believe Sean Murray really wanted to make a cool game but he got overwhelmed by the media attention and started running his mouth. Maybe he felt like he had to overpromise and say yes to everything he was asked? Hello Games was still an indie studio before it got all that attention.
If he had done it in bad faith it would have been much easier to cut his losses and run away with the money. Nearly 10 years of expansions wouldn’t come out of it if not for legitimate passion.
It also made their next game announcement pretty funny.
The planets with big money kinda suck to make bases. They are usually the most hazardous ones. I basically only leave a landing pad and a portal besides the mining stuff to collect and take it to my main base from time to time.
The thing is whatever beef they might rightfully have with 1,000,000 people pirating TotK, it’s not the emulator who’s to blame. The ones who distributed pirated copies are. They are trying to pin it entirely on the wrong group, out of convenience/intimidation.
This is like suing a motorcycle company because a thief used one as a getaway vehicle.
I’ve heard people saying just the opposite. It couldn’t run TotK before official release, and whoever made it run had to modify it independently (because it’s an open source project)
Arguing that people wouldn’t have downloaded it if not for the emulator, not only once again assigns blame to the wrong party (“if they didn’t have motorcycles to get away they might not have stolen it”), but it overlooks that there are modded Switches that can run pirated copies too.
Pirating stuff before it’s even out for sale is pretty sketchy, but Yuzu is not the one doing it. It simply lets people play copies they already have, including those they may have dumped themselves. Nintendo is encroaching on customer ownership rights by trying to argue even doing that is infringing.
edit: Maybe my analogy is lacking because one might argue that they rely on the tool to make use of the illicitly acquired thing, which is not necessarily true for a motorcycle. But if we say instead “the bluray player is to blame that people shoplifted” or “the media player is to blame that people downloaded pirated movies”, then I believe it should be even more clear that they are accusing the wrong party.
The only way for Nintendo’s reasoning to work is if they try to argue that not even someone who dumps their own roms and extracts their own keys from their own console ought to have the right to do it. Which would be disastrous for customer rights and preservation. Nintendo cannot be allowed to get away with that.
There’s merit to that, but keep in mind that sometimes the game is bound to a service for the sake of enabling microtransactions to begin with, and if not for that they would have let players to host their own servers. This has happened to most multiplayer games from larger publishers.
To be fair, to me this does not seem that bad an idea. Live service games share a lot of DNA with arcades. That’s easiest to see in mobile, where people play many short matches rather than long campaigns.
…frankly that also includes predatory monetization. People forget that games used to be so hard way back when so that they would gobble up kids’ quarters.
For better or worse, live service Crazy Taxi seems to me like a faithful conversion of the original idea to the current day gaming landscape.
It was possible to get everything but lets not overlook the inherently manipulative framing of either paying or making the game a second job, which cultivates a sunk cost mindset, which might once again make the player pay out of FOMO.
There are reasonable amounts of grind that can make games fun for some people, but the length of grind and the limited timeframes for obtaining items are all geared to feed into the same monetization cycle. All of that artificially, because it’s not like any digital game has to clear their storeroom and shelves to make space for new collectibles.
Game companies have been very sly about how they use physical real world metaphors to create justifications for their manipulative systems. Lootboxes too, because you can’t guess what’s in a closed pack… except the game keeps perfect track of what is available, what you have and what you don’t have. The only reason why anyone would get repeated lootbox items, is to lead them on and get them to waste money.
If we trusted the Market to make it good for us, we’d still have children working 16 hour shifts until they get their arms chewed off by machinery and get thrown on the streets to starve.
“Vote with your wallet” is just something business say to try to convince us that regulation isn’t needed, conveniently forgetting to mention that the fattest wallet in the room is the CEO’s.
Have you been spending hours trying to pass a level? Or maybe you are completely addicted to a newly bought game. Do you have a question about a game or would like to share something else? In the Weekly Discussion Thread, you can do it all!...
No Man’s Sky can be pretty fun if you get into the progression loop. Got myself a good 100+ hours with it. I really like getting to slowly learn the alien languages.
I just got into Yakuza: Like a Dragon after getting interested on Infinite Wealth. Ichiban is so funny, he definitely has a very different attitude than Kiryu.
These Steam Next Fest Games sound interesting, I’ll take a look on them. Happy! the Hippo saying it’s “a previously lost game” definitely sounds like they will lean to the creepy side, but hopefully it will be better than Shipwrecked 64, which I felt like overused keypad puzzles.
When the series creator is vocally advocating to marginalize transgender people and financially supporting other members of the hate movement, it takes more than a token NPC to make up for it.
Most likely that character is an insincere PR move from Warner Bros, but some trans people also pointed out that naming her Miss Ryan was probably done in bad faith. If anything, sounds exactly like the kind of tasteless thoughtless naming that JKR is infamous for.
The masses are largely disengaged with LGBT rights in general, but the declining rights of transgender people in the UK (and the US) shows this is not just a “terminally-online” kind of issue. She is not the only one responsible, of course, but her outspoken antagonism towards transgender people is influencing people.
It concerns me when people can’t differentiate “this issue does not affect me” from “this issue does not exist”. Even calling matters “terminally-online” in general is a bit questionable when whole ass presidents get elected by meme campaigns these days.
Nah. Both of you just haven’t kept up with her history of equating trans women with sexual predators and trans men with poor brainwashed little girls, some of which was hinted, if disguised in polite words, in the article where she talked about the situation and defended how she totally didn’t mean any harm to anybody.
Did you see when she said she’d march with trans people if they truly were persecuted? Their rights have been challenged and undermined many times since, and she didn’t show any sign of that.
Because, you know, sometimes people aren’t completely honest and taking them at their word is not the ultimate measure of their characters.
So don’t confuse disagreeing with people here and getting downvoted with being the one clear-minded contrarian. However much internet bandwagons are a thing, you won’t get the clear picture unless you go look into it. Sometimes you might get that reaction because you are wrong and that’s it.
HP Lovecraft was horribly racist, but his works are in the Public Domain. Neither him, his estate or any causes he supported get any money by engaging with his works. His opinions are still part of his works, but that can be criticized and modified in adaptations and derivative works.
The same can’t be said of living creators who still own and profit from those works. Even if some team deliberately tries to gloss over or alter concerning aspects, the money the author gets might still be directed towards concerning movements.
In all fairness there are concerning aspects in many industries and a lot that we consume, and each person has a lot of other issues to worry about, so while disappointing, it’s inevitable that people won’t care about everything. But I definitely don’t feel confortable giving money to someone who’s spreading hate about people I care for. I used to be a big HP fan but this situation completely spoiled any interest I had in that world… and also helped me realize it was never that good anyway.
The whole situation with house elves, goblins and other intelligent magical creatures treated as inferior doesn’t make the story feel to good. It might even be understandable if the heroes realized the deeper problems that couldn’t be solved simply by fighting, but the protagonist ultimately just inherits a slave and becomes an enforcer for the status quo.
In retrospect it makes a lot of words about good and love and doing what’s right feel like going through the motions rather than any real values.
There’s a steep learning curve as far as the basics go, but once you level up a frame, a couple decent weapons and some basic Mods (stat-up accessories), it might get you for good. I played if for years and it was pretty fun.
One of the big stumbling blocks is that level up by itself doesn’t do anything but open up slots for Mods, it doesn’t increase your stats. You need good mods and to rank them up to actually get stronger.
It’s a serious issue how many games now are deliberately designed with compulsion conditioning tactics to get people playing and spending not out of legitimate interest but out of a manufactured “need”.
I heard stories of people who had to drop their favorite franchises, like sports ones, because they started to resort to that, and they knew they’d be too susceptible to keep playing without giving in.
Bold to assume. After making a human girl kiss Sonic, and having him freed from years of torture only to become an OC’s best friend, they aren’t upticking anything.
I doubt a no name company would be pulling all this attention out of marketing alone. If it was this easy everyone would do it.
In all fairness, this is not a great game. It’s a very derivative game whose only appeal is that it combines things in a way that hasn’t been done much. Like many other hype trains of questionable quality, it just happened to scratch the right itch for the right people at the right time.
Pokémon can’t even shake up enough to figure out what to do with an open world. They took away puzzles and mazes and replaced them with… nothing. Never seen a more boring open world than Scarlet/Violet. No events or minigames, nothing to discover along the way, only bland scenery and low draw distance creatures.
Which indies did you discover and would love more people to know about? I’ll start: The Pale Beyond. Not sure if it’s a hidden gem tbh, but it’s such a good story rich game. I laughed, I cried and felt the characters struggles. If you like story rich games/ choices matter, check it out.
I was going to say Iji. Such an amazing game, it’s like the 2D version of an immersive sim. I wish there was a remake only so the dev could make the money they rightfully deserve.
I love diablo-likes, but they're also really annoying. angielski
I’ve been playing the things since Diablo I; I love the concept and the gameplay loop, but the game-design issues they run up against, and the mechanics that get implemented to address them… irritate the crap out of me over time, and I want to talk about that....
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Welp, this didn’t take long....
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RIP. I hope the levels were backed up.
Gameplay mechanics were also a lot better with more replayability. (lemmy.world) angielski
Ignoring the lack of updates if the game is buggy, games back then were also more focused on quality and make gamers replay the game with unlockable features based on skills, not money. I can’t count the number of times I played Metal Gear Solid games over and over to unlock new features playing the hardest difficulty and with...
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💀💀💀💀
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I want to try and play some more games. That feels more fulfilling if you play games that you can finish and be done with....
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Nintendo’s full case filing...
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To nobody’s surprise, Sega has enshittified its beloved Crazy Taxi IP.
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I guess this is probably going to be the new shitty norm with bait and switch for reviews then nickel and dime afterwards.
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And have we come full circle to god damn horse armor.
The Weekly 'What are you playing?' Discussion (lemmy.world) angielski
Have you been spending hours trying to pass a level? Or maybe you are completely addicted to a newly bought game. Do you have a question about a game or would like to share something else? In the Weekly Discussion Thread, you can do it all!...
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Personally I would not call Immortals of Aveum an AAA game. 😅...
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What are some hidden indie gems nobody knows about? angielski
Which indies did you discover and would love more people to know about? I’ll start: The Pale Beyond. Not sure if it’s a hidden gem tbh, but it’s such a good story rich game. I laughed, I cried and felt the characters struggles. If you like story rich games/ choices matter, check it out.
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