To be frank I hate survival horror. Zombies don’t do it for me. I got recommended this game as “well made” and “tests your decision making skills”, and my backlog was running thin so I said sure, what the hell, let’s out-decision-make some zombies....
I likely would have enjoyed it far more without the automated adjusted difficulty, which mostly just ended up being that the game recognized I had too much ammo on me, so zombies took more shots to go down. It was quite noticeable. Unlike Resident Evil 3 that followed it, the adjusted difficulty would only subtract things from you rather than give you things when you needed them, which made me dislike it more. I searched for mods that would remove this part of the game, scrolling past a handful of mods to enhance the wet t-shirt effect on Claire, but I couldn't find any mods that would solve this problem for me at the time. I did enjoy it plenty despite this though.
I just played through Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, and the game is incredibly straight forward until you come across some weird thing that nullifies all of your damage; or AoE stuns your entire party; or requires a +3 weapon in order to land a hit; or de-levels your characters; etc. I don't think it's the Infinity Engine to blame so much as the encounter design. It's been about ten years, but I remember having a much better time with Planescape: Torment.
It's incredible so far. I just made it out of Act 1. For the most part, you can come up with plans and ideas on your own, and they'll usually work, which makes you feel like a genius, but I have to call out two times that this specifically did not work the way I thought they would.
some light spoilers ahead
Early on, there's a target that you have to either eliminate or side with, and I choose to side with them, with the express purpose of getting them to let their guard down so that I can separate them from the group and eliminate them. The dialogue options even allude to the fact that this is a strategy they want you to use. This target wants you to sneak into another (good) faction and open a gate for a bloodbath of an assault on that faction, but the target also leaves their battle plans out in the open. So I figure I'd steal the battle plans, give them to the other faction, and just not open the gate, and then that target dies. Well, it doesn't work that way, and progressing that far along with the target invalidates the other quest entirely. Bummer.
The second is a fight right near the end of Act 1 where you've got to eliminate or side with a target again, in a room with a lot of lava, some slaves you can try to rescue, and a lot of enemies. Depending on how the dialogue goes right before the encounter, you either side with the target against the room full of enemies (but the slaves die), or you fight everyone. There are about 15 enemies in the room, which means they get a lot more turns than you, and since they're all grouped in that room, there's no real way to isolate them and take them out stealthily ahead of the encounter. I tried using a bard Performance to get them to all clump up so that I could push large groups of them into the lava, which was fairly effective, but then the slaves would join that group too, and it was very easy to aggro them. Worse still is that the slaves will happily fight you if you aggro them, but they won't join you to fight the other enemies in the room that enslaved them, let alone the target you're trying to eliminate. The only way I found through it was to reload an earlier save and to make different dialogue choices with a particular NPC so that some of those 15 enemies end up on my side in that fight when the time comes.
end of spoilers
The game usually lets me get away with whatever crazy plan I come up with, but I just wish these two points so far were a bit more flexible.
But again, my expectation is that I had other ways to go hostile against these folks, especially after the goblin camp. But that scenario is basically set up to make that combat encounter next to impossible, but I didn't know that ahead of time, because after you clear the obstruction, the state of the map changes.
Most of the video games I’ve played were pretty good. The only one I can think of that I didn’t like was MySims Kingdom for the Nintendo DS. Dropped that pretty quickly. It was a long while ago, but I’ll guess it was because there were too many fetch quests and annoying controls.
My go-to for this is Resistance: Fall of Man. Invisible walls everywhere, a cover system and a health system that were absolutely at odds with a gun that shoots enemies through walls, and an uninteresting story told in boring slideshows. The only reason I played through it is that my college roommate and I were broke and needed another co-op game after we finished all of the good ones.
That downtime in a battle royale creates a really fun tension. Unfortunately, it does feel like dominant strategies emerge in that genre a little too easily, and then they become repetitive, so you don't get that early feeling with the game for more than a few weeks.
MOBAs can take many forms, and a lot of them don't look anything like an RTS, but they do usually give you the good parts of leveling up and becoming more powerful in an RPG over the course of about a half hour.
This game came out pre-Twitter, so I've been surprised to see how many people hated this game. I've revisited it several times since childhood and still enjoy it quite a bit. The different Kong stuff made it feel somewhat like a metroidvania.
I think they asked for that in the last strike, but I haven't seen it mentioned in this one. And some speculated it was only included for something they could drop in the eventual resolution as a form of compromise.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but since this strike is against certain companies and not some entity that represents the entire industry like it does for movies and television, that means that other individual companies who come to an agreement can still hire these people, right? If so...imagine if we had that in movies and television.
Mass Effect games are often praised for their cinematic storytelling and exceptional companions, but the series' unique approach to enemies is often overlooked.
There are a lot of reasons to love the Mass Effect games, but even after reading the article, my answer to the question it poses is, "Yeah, tons." The things this article cites as novel are pretty much universal to video game enemy design, and I can't think of anything that any Mass Effect game invented here.
More concerning than Bethesda’s decision to withhold early review codes from certain outlets is how heavily some sites are relying on the game to drive their business.
More likely that they know he's probably not going to give it a glowing review, especially after Fallout 4, so he didn't get one. This is something many publishers have historically done. It keeps reviews higher at launch so that people looking at reviews or metacritic scores see more positive information than after the dust settles.
If someone docks the game for not letting you fly manually between solar systems like you do in Elite Dangerous then I just have to write-off the negativity because… of-course fucking not, did anyone expect that?
I think a lot of people expected that. This is the see-that-mountain-you-can-go-there studio.
I wasn't expecting it to be revolutionary. I expect Bioware RPGs to be on dozens of finite maps, and I expect BGS games, other than interiors, to be seamless maps. I was expecting procedural generation to cover the difference, and I expected that if No Man's Sky could do it with maybe two dozen employees, BGS probably could too, especially given when the game went into full production. I was not, and still am not, expecting the vast majority of their planets to have something interesting on them just due to how many there are.
They showed so much of the game that I was bored before I could sift through anywhere near all of it (not to say I wouldn't enjoy the game, but I know what I'm getting with a Bethesda RPG). I'm not knocking it for having a load screen between space and landing on the planet, but because we've seen that done a handful of times in recent years, as well as expectations set up from their previous games' maps, it makes perfect sense to me to expect that to be in the game.
For what it's worth, I'd say Bloodborne is like Dark Souls but with less variety. There are a bunch of play styles you can utilize in Dark Souls and Elden Ring, but Bloodborne really only lets you use one.
Overwatch was basically the only way I could socialize with my friends for a while, even though nothing about it really spoke to me. I thought for sure the allure would wear off with my friends quickly, but they stuck with it for a long, long time, until after it became Overwatch 2, though the sentiment had turned on it before that.
I’ve also been stuck in the mentality of if I want to play a game in a series I need to play the prior games.
I do this too. I just played through Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 before starting 3, and I already know there's at least one recurring character who will show up in this new one; it's that kind of thing that makes me want to see what came before. However, if I was playing Armored Core 6 right now (which I'm not, but if I find the time, maybe I will), I won't be compelled to play the earlier games in the series. I tried Armored Core 4 back in the day, and the story is as much as "you're a mercenary; shoot stuff". Not a whole lot lost there, and that means that the sequel is more of an upgrade to the software than it is a totally different chapter in a continuing story.
The percentage of the industry that can afford to push modern graphics to their limit has only shrunk over time as the development time required to make games that taxing has increased. That's why most of what you play isn't particularly high-spec.
We're not really headed to a subscription-based future. People like Game Pass, but it has no exclusive content. Nintendo's the only one trying to make a catalog of games exclusive to their service, but they're all retro games, and Nintendo can get bent, because we can all pirate and emulate those games better than Nintendo can rent them to us. They could get be getting some revenue from actually selling those old games to customers in the places they want to play those games, but Nintendo isn't interested in that. If this particular situation gets worse, then I might be worried. There's just too much diversity in the game industry for this to be a threat. There's no central cartel or representative group for games the way there is in movies and music to dictate those markets away from what the customer actually wants. In video games, you can switch to Xbox or, more likely, PC when Sony raises prices. PCs have gotten easier, and they've always been more open, and I think the gaming market has demonstrated that they value the openness.
Nah, you can find people complaining about games being too big in cycles going all the way back to the beginning of retail PC gaming. I remember Screen Savers built their "Ultimate Gaming PC" in like 1998 with a few gigabytes of storage, and they said something like, "I know that seems like a lot, but games these days can be hundreds of megabytes, so we want to be able to just fit them all". Baldur's Gate 3 and Starfield are both large games. Not every game is that big, nor are these games necessarily doing something wrong by being that big.
SSD prices finally started dropping rapidly, and HDDs are even cheaper, for games like Sea of Stars or 30XX that don't need read speed performance, both of which have options to extend laptop storage space like the author's use case.
You can get a USB 3 SD card reader and a fast SD card yourself. Even if it was bundled with the game, you're paying for the cost of the physical materials.
Economies of scale aren't magic. Games are somewhat resistant to price increases in the face of inflation because we've shifted to digital distribution that you're looking to erode with the suggestion of shipping with physical media again, and you'd still have to pay well more than half of the price it would take you to buy that same media on Amazon. The storage size has grown because they've been optimizing for other factors, and I'm sure they came to the conclusion that it's more likely you'll free up space or buy storage expansions in the future after a price drop than it is that you would buy a game that ran worse or looked worse forever because they optimized more for storage space.
For those that didn’t catch the last Direct, Super Mario Wonder has announced that it will feature two different kinds of online multiplayer, both very different to local multiplayer - one where you can see “ghosts” of other players currently online on a given level, which can’t interact with you directly but can give...
There is a fundamental difference in resource allocation when each client is running the simulation rather than a server, which is the difference between Quake and a fighting game.
It used to be charging you to send packets through servers that they (in this case, Sony) own, but now that may or may not be the predominant use case in this era of games as a service where the developer needs to run the game through their own servers anyway. The reason Valve, Epic, and CD Projekt don't charge you for it is because you're paying for it every time you buy a game through their stores, which also used to be a less prominent situation on consoles, but now well more than half of games are bought digitally on consoles as well. So PC has taken more and more market share while consoles continue upping the price of their mandatory subscription fees for online play, and one day they'll sit there scratching their heads, wondering where all of their customers went.
If you want SteamOS, your best bet is still Steam Deck. If you don't mind using Windows on a device that's not built for it (which does come with the benefit of compatibility and Game Pass), that's where most of these other options are going. I hear good things about the ROG Ally; seems like that's the go-to if Steam Deck doesn't get the job done for you. If you want some thorough reviews to help you out, check out The Phawx on YouTube. That guy has been doing thorough reviews of handheld gaming PCs for a long time now, and you'll be able to figure out which one is the one for you.
Me too, but some of my favorites were console exclusive. There's really no reason for those games to be PC or console exclusive these days. The financial math tends to not work out either.
If it literally can't be done on a controller, then sure, but I've now seen people happy with the controls for Age of Empires II on an Xbox pad, so Arma can probably be done too. I've never played Tarkov, so I can't speak to it.
having a cursor controlled by a joystick would make looting very slow
Perhaps, but aim down sights allowed for controllers to toggle two different sets of aiming speeds on demand, and Destiny-style cursors allowed for fast inventory management on character equipment screens that typically only worked on a mouse. There's probably a way to do it that's a little bit different than just mapping a mouse cursor to an analog stick that requires devs to be a bit more clever about it. The wildest one to me is that Baldur's Gate 3 looks entirely different when using a mouse and keyboard as opposed to using a controller. The likes of Elder Scrolls come up with one UI that can be controlled with either device, but even if I think that UI works great in both realms, people who've been playing those games for 20 years have a certain expectation for how it should look and work.
I know we've had cases like older GTA or NFS titles removing songs from the game in updates because the licenses ran out. I wonder if the same thing is going to happen to Hi-Fi RUSH eventually?...
The ways those two businesses function are dramatically different. Microsoft has a near monopoly of the operating system that powers gaming PCs, and they couldn't turn their store into the Amazon of PC gaming, not for lack of trying, because Steam already offers customers what they want in a far better way and any attempt to close off their operating system is met with market resistance. There's also the fact that the games market is so broad and diverse that Game Pass and Microsoft's stores are nowhere close to being the one-stop shop that an Amazon or a Walmart have historically been, and it's why they're nowhere close to capturing "the bulk of potential customers". They've got about 25-30M subscribers last I checked, which is substantial, but it doesn't even come close to the 100M+ monthly active users on Steam, let alone the wider games market. (Steam is easy to cite, because they make more of their data public, but obviously there are substantial pieces of the market on PlayStation and elsewhere.)
What developers and publishers get from Game Pass and PS+ is a lump sum that devs/pubs project will make up for the potential of lost sales, and if it doesn't, that the word of mouth from offering the game with those services will make up for it in sales outside of those subscription services. If the offer is too low, they don't take the deal. So the subscription service is either a subsidy or marketing or both, but that's only if the figure they're offered is high enough. Saying that Devolver or TinyBuild benefited from that boon in ramping up subscription offerings is one thing; in fact, it may have ripple effects that help them out long-term, as people are more familiar with their brands through subscription services now than they would have been otherwise. But if they're truly "suffering" from those deals being less generous, that's just going back to the old investing adage of "When the tide goes out, you can always tell who was skinny dipping", or to put it another way, they weren't adequately gauging their risk alongside a good deal that was never going to last forever. Judging by the article, Devolver will likely be just fine and TinyBuild is more of a question mark. I honestly had no idea TinyBuild was publicly traded. Both are making sensible long-term bets, at least for the most part...in TinyBuild's case, I hope they didn't invest too much into the likes of RawMen. Both companies were contrasted against Team17, who kept more consistently conservative projections.
The 8 hours escaping the Police Station in RE2 Remake are maybe the best 8 hours of gaming I've ever experienced angielski
To be frank I hate survival horror. Zombies don’t do it for me. I got recommended this game as “well made” and “tests your decision making skills”, and my backlog was running thin so I said sure, what the hell, let’s out-decision-make some zombies....
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of September 3rd
New thread! Whatcha all playing! I’ve been playing more blasphemous 2. Really really into it 🙏
Not counting games that were unfun because of bugs, what’s the most unfun video game that you’ve played and what made it unfun? (kbin.cafe) angielski
Most of the video games I’ve played were pretty good. The only one I can think of that I didn’t like was MySims Kingdom for the Nintendo DS. Dropped that pretty quickly. It was a long while ago, but I’ll guess it was because there were too many fetch quests and annoying controls.
Bloodlines 2 - Official Announcement Trailer (m.youtube.com)
I refuse to get hyped…
SAG-AFTRA votes unanimously to expand its strike to include the games industry (www.eurogamer.net)
Was There A Game That Did Enemies Better Than Mass Effect 3? (www.dualshockers.com) angielski
Mass Effect games are often praised for their cinematic storytelling and exceptional companions, but the series' unique approach to enemies is often overlooked.
Starfield review controversy traces game journalism's orbital decay (www.gamesindustry.biz) angielski
More concerning than Bethesda’s decision to withhold early review codes from certain outlets is how heavily some sites are relying on the game to drive their business.
What games have you played due to FOMO? angielski
FOMO stands for Fear Of Missing Out....
PS Plus price hike: We'll all pay for a subscription-based future | Opinion (www.gamesindustry.biz)
I Simply Do Not Have Room On My PC For Starfield (www.thegamer.com) angielski
Baldur's Gate 3 is currently taking up all the storage space I would give to Bethesda's sci-fi RPG.
Super Mario Wonder's online multiplayer may be disappointing, but we have already witnessed that the alternative would be far worse. angielski
For those that didn’t catch the last Direct, Super Mario Wonder has announced that it will feature two different kinds of online multiplayer, both very different to local multiplayer - one where you can see “ghosts” of other players currently online on a given level, which can’t interact with you directly but can give...
Volition is shutting down (www.linkedin.com) angielski
Studio behind FreeSpace, Red Faction and Saints Row series is no more.
Volition Games closes (www.gamesindustry.biz) angielski
I can't say I'm too surprised. It's been about a decade since they made a hit game, and that's just too long.
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Sony raising PS Plus pricing by 33% (www.pushsquare.com) angielski
Tier Original Pricing. New Pricing...
PlayStation Plus prices increasing (blog.playstation.com) angielski
USD "per year" prices:...
Baldur’s Gate 3 had to be scaled back for the Series S, but the console still has a right to exist (www.vg247.com) angielski
It'll be the cheapest place, by an absurd margin, to play Baldur's Gate 3.
Will Hi-Fi RUSH be unplayable with the original OST in few years due to music licensing? (kbin.social) angielski
I know we've had cases like older GTA or NFS titles removing songs from the game in updates because the licenses ran out. I wonder if the same thing is going to happen to Hi-Fi RUSH eventually?...
Weaker subscription deals have hit indie publishers, says analyst | GamesIndustry.biz (www.gamesindustry.biz) angielski
cross-posted from: lemmy.sdf.org/post/2944272...