Baldur's Gate 3 has a lot of mechanics to it, but it does a really good job of onboarding you in most of them. On character creation, or on leveling up, or anything where the game asks you to make a decision about how you've built out your character, there are tooltips to explain the mechanics. Mouse over it if you're on mouse + keyboard, or press Select or click in the right analog stick if you're on controller (it should tell you which one). It will explain everything you need to know there. But if you'd like to breeze past the character creation screen, you can choose an origin character, which are pre-made, or you can stick to basics. Choose a Fighter with 17 Strength if you want to do melee stuff. Choose a Rogue with 17 Dexterity if you want to do ranged attacks like bows. Choose a Wizard with 17 Intelligence if you want to do magic; magic uses "spell slots" instead of mana or MP, which basically just means you can use a spell that many times. When you get the option to choose a "feat", which is approximately every 4 levels, upgrade that primary attribute until it hits 20, which is the max. Whatever that attribute is (the ones I just listed for those classes), the higher it is, the more likely you are to hit with your attacks.
The gist of it is, when you find a complicated game, you can often just engage with it on the most basic level, and then once you master that basic level, you build on it a little bit at a time. BG3 is a long game, so you've got plenty of opportunity to master what you know before building on it; rinse, repeat. I've applied this same methodology to fighting games plenty of times as well, which many people would consider to be a difficult genre to learn. We got rid of game manuals a long time ago, so complex games have had to get better and better at teaching you how to play while you're playing.
Nah, BG3 rewards you for just doing more stuff. If you keep doing the things you find as you explore, you'll level up plenty. They also let you respec more or less any time you want after the first couple of hours.
At least it can still be played offline, though character unlocks do require an internet connection. They also replaced the krypt mode, which was itself pretty grindy, with a far grindier mode that's far less fun this time around, so a significant chunk of the value is gone.
Yeah, WB is just late to the party. Sony was going to make a dozen different live service games, but they're reading the room now and cutting that forecast to less than half. With any luck, this is the tail end of the live service era.
Tons. Just not the latest crop with the biggest marketing budgets. For what it's worth though, the live service nonsense in these fighting games doesn't really get in the way if you're not tempted by cosmetics. The real problem with MK is that you can't decline wi-fi opponents, and the problem with Tekken is that the netcode appears to be unimproved from Tekken 7. These days, I mostly play Street Fighter 6, Guilty Gear Strive, and Skullgirls. Killer Instinct is getting one more balance patch soon, and rumor has it there's a sequel on the way. GranBlue Fantasy Versus: Rising is coming out very soon with Under Night In-Birth's sequel hot on its heels. There's lots to play.
I know a sizable amount of the Skullgirls community, and I wouldn't call any of them 4channers. I don't have melanin on my list of fighting game criteria, nor do I know what's acceptable for your standards, but that's probably restricting your selection far more than live service shenanigans. If Tekken does it for you, then I hope you can tolerate its netcode.
EDIT:
I def don’t believe the IG announcement Wednesday is going toward a sequel
The rumor was there was a sequel cooking long before IG became available again.
I'm not faulting you for the perspective. I just don't know what to recommend you if Leroy and Jax satisfy you but not Nagoriyuki, especially since the percentages of representation appear to me to be similar or better than DBFZ and Soul Calibur.
I beat Dungeons of Aether, both in the story mode and in the roguelike challenge dungeons mode that I didn't realize was there at first. The story mode is structured more like an XCOM or Midnight Suns, with a home base to buy upgrades at between missions, while the challenge dungeon mode is more like the Slay the Spire structure that the game's combat system sets expectations for. I wish I liked this one better. There are some decisions they made in late-game enemy design in the pursuit of adding challenge that I very much disagree with, where in lots of situations the game can just always react to what you do with the mathematically correct decision rather than allowing you to bait out attacks like the game teaches you to do. Also, one of the playable characters, Hamir, just seems way better than the other three. I beat the roguelike mode on my first try using Hamir. I got my money's worth out of this one, and it's got some really neat ideas, but it lacks the replay value you'd expect out of a roguelike. I think they need to take another go at this one and let it bake some more.
I then moved on to Backpack Hero, which I played in early access before they added its own story mode with a more macro structure, and I guess that's just what the roguelike market is doing these days, huh? So far, I don't think it's quite as good as just doing a regular run, but this game does have that replayability that you come to a roguelike for. I'll see the story mode through before moving on to the other games I'd like to finish before the year is done.
It is surprising every time a game sells this many copies, because it's so rare. By Wikipedia's count, only 5 other games have sold better, and for the length of time it's been on the sales chart, we can realistically only compare its success to GTA V and Minecraft.
Alyx is an interquel, if we're going to say that's a real word, and it released on a platform most of the audience just won't ever have. Also, it doesn't so much continue the story as it does promise to continue the story. They admit that they've got work to do.
I have trouble reconciling that with the PC market, where the same version of a game I bought 4 years ago would be able to run at better resolutions and frame rates the next time I get a new machine. From where I sit, it does just appear to be worse value in the console space.
This was something I started wondering about when I was reading a thread about Star Citizen, and about how space combat flight games were much less-common than they had been at one point, how fans of the genre were hungry for new entrants....
I'd like to see more first-person shooter campaigns in general. They've mostly disappeared. And what I don't mean are the likes of Dusk or HROT that harken back to the Quake era. I'm looking for the era just beyond that, like Halo, BioShock, Half-Life, F.E.A.R., Crysis, 007 games and so on. A Cyberpunk expansion and, to a lesser extent, a remake of System Shock are all I have to scratch that itch this year. Someday the indie scene will cycle around to getting nostalgic for that type of game, and I'll get more of it again. With Free Radical facing near-certain death on that TimeSplitters revival, so do my hopes for getting more of that type of FPS again. With LAN and split-screen co-op and deathmatch with friends while we're at it too. Trying to make a game into a live service that inevitably dies is just telling me not to buy the few promising games that come around, like Friends vs. Friends.
People brought this up at the time, and the go-to problem with it is if you go too far back, like your 1812 example, you have to deal with reloading a gun being one of the most time-consuming actions you can perform. WWI was taboo for a while due to chemical and trench warfare, and for the most part, devs still shy away from it.
Chrono Trigger isn't much longer. Whatever; I'm not going to say this game in particular is worth $60, but 10 hour games are like an oasis in the modern games market.
HowLongToBeat has a median playthrough for Super Mario RPG at 17 hours and 24 hours for Chrono Trigger (rushed comes in at 12 and 16, respectively). Completionist times are coming in at about 25 to Chrono Trigger's 43. That's not 1/5th the length any way you slice it.
Replaying large swaths of the game over again in order to get each permutation of how the ending can be different isn't adding as much value as you're letting on. That's not to say that Chrono Trigger did something wrong, but it doesn't turn a 20 hour game into 40 hours of value just because replaying the previous 20 hours can have a different ending. That's exactly the way that it's easy to make games "longer" and why I don't think a ten hour game should be some kind of pejorative, and we're still a long ways off from a 1:5 ratio in game length.
The person above you in this comment chain said 1/5. 24 hours to 17 hours isn't that huge of a difference, and you responded with "lol what" as though I indicated Viewfinder was comparable in length to Baldur's Gate 3.
I think I'd say, in a world where games that used to be 10-15 hours are now 30-60 hours and much worse off for it, that dollars per hour is just not a metric I'm interested in using or setting thresholds for. So no, I don't think $6/hour is an insane amount to pay. I paid that for Resident Evil 2, and it was very good.
To each their own, but if you see an arbitrary grind to max level as offering more value, it's exactly why people like me find more value in games that don't have one, as that's the way that games can be arbitrarily made to be "longer" that I was talking about. I've played Metal Gear Solid so many times that I've easily gotten over 100 hours out of it, but that doesn't make it a 100 hour game. It's just a quality short game.
But that's no different than me just replaying Metal Gear Solid or setting an arbitrary goal for myself in any other game. That's just you enjoying that game and wanting to replay it in some different way, which is fine. You can replay Super Mario RPG as many times as you like too. The arbitrary grind is more of a modern thing that developers derived from systems like Chrono Trigger's that have been around for decades that they weren't thinking of in Chrono Trigger, but they didn't add tons of content to Chrono Trigger by having a high level cap. You just chose to power level against the same content over and over again.
Far too reductive of an assessment. We simultaneously had a massive leap in resolution (higher quality textures needed) and a massive step back in dollar per gigabyte for storage, as we could no longer get acceptable read speeds from hard drive technology. At the same time, for better or worse, open world games are what a lot of these developers are making, which compounds that texture problem. Massive file sizes are what you get when games are optimized; they're just optimizing for performance and not storage space.
Decompressing an asset so that it can be used is an operation that takes processor cycles as well. It's why Titanfall 1 came in so high on storage requirements at the time, because in order to meet CPU performance targets, they had to leave audio uncompressed. In this case, huge texture asset files are often LODs, high detail versions for when you're up close and low detail versions for when you're far away, so that the machine is always loading the right size version of the asset rather than just always using the best quality one in a worst case like you seem to be implying. This takes up a lot of storage space, but it means they aren't wastefully using high detail assets for a mountain a mile and a half away.
If you check out The Final Hours of Half-Life: Alyx, you can see a timeline of all the stuff Valve worked on since they started with hardware. Work on Proton started basically immediately after Steam Machines launched, in response to its library problem. So in a way, this is still that same commitment.
Interesting. I've got an 18 year old account with somewhere north of 1000 games. There's a bit of selection bias, since I've been on Linux for the past 5 years, but my verified or playable percentage is closer to 2/3. When you say Steam Deck ready, are you only referring to verified? Because if you've got a very old game with small text or poor controller support, it's unlikely you'll ever see it switch to verified, but it may still be a good experience on the Deck.
My heart says BG3, but my head also says BG3, because if you look at Google trends, BG3 has held the conversation longer and with higher peaks. Still, the winner is realistically only one of these two games.
Baldur's Gate 3, because it's one of the best games I've ever played, but also I haven't played more than a few minutes of the other games on the list. Alan Wake 2 is only a storefront that doesn't support my operating system; Spider-Man 2 is stuck on a console that I don't intend to buy so I won't play it for at least two years (and even then it seems way too similar to the last games); Resident Evil 4 is surely better than the last time I played it, but I'm not in a rush to play a revised version of that game; Super Mario Bros. Wonder I can say shocks me that people are rating it this highly; and even if I wasn't pissed off at Nintendo these days, Tears of the Kingdom still didn't build on Breath of the Wild the way I wanted it to.
The awards are voted on by journalists, not fans, so the games favored to win are the ones that woo the most outlets, not the ones that sell the most copies. They're correlated, but if a staff of game reviewers is holding the game that sold a third as many copies in higher esteem, it can still win in this show.
To be perfectly fair, Skyrim has a decade of sales and mods in its favor when it comes to Steam numbers, and whether or not Starfield has fallen short by any metric, the things that it does were more novel when Skyrim did a lot of the same stuff 12 years ago.
The performance category feels like they purposely limited it to one performance per game, otherwise we'd have seen multiple reps from Baldur's Gate 3. The performance for Astarion was great, but I could easily see the nod going to Karlach or the narrator as well. And no disrespect to Idris Elba, but what he had to work with in Phantom Liberty (enjoyable as it was) doesn't hold a candle to Karlach; I might even say that another actor in Phantom Liberty put on a better performance than Elba did, again just because she had better material to work with.
Also, this is the first time the fighting game category nominees didn't make me angry. Usually they omit some notable game that belongs in the category and include a game or two that clearly don't belong there.
I finished my second run of Baldur's Gate 3 with the Ghost Recon team. I made sure to finish up some major side quests I passed the first time around, and to avoid spoilers, let's just say that my team was so effective that I got the Interfectorem Draconis achievement in one turn. This was still only on balanced difficulty, but now that I've played through the entire game with this team, I'm confident it would work on tactician.
I also started and finished Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty this past weekend. BG3 really illustrates you how much more freedom that game gives you compared to most AAA RPGs. Cyberpunk definitely accounts for different builds in a variety of ways, but they're all predetermined options for you that the game explicitly allowed for, as opposed to BG3's more systemic approach that allows you to be more creative. So it reminded me how Cyberpunk is a pretty decent RPG, but in a world where we get basically no FPS campaigns anymore, it's just about all we've got on that front, and it does a better than decent job of scratching that itch. There was one mission I didn't care for, and of the two mandatory boss fights, they mostly entailed sprinting around the room in circles until the boss gives you an opportunity to return fire. Other than those complaints though, it was solid. The story was good, the missions were fun, the presentation was excellent; I'd recommend it if you want more Cyberpunk.
I picked up Dungeons of Aether as a second-screen game while podcasts are on. I expected this to be more of a roguelike, but it's not really. I can't say how much procedural generation there is, because I haven't failed a mission yet, but I'm more inclined to just call it a strategy game that uses dice. I'm totally fine with that; it's just not what I expected. The game is pretty fun so far.
SteamOS has, in my experience, avoided a lot of problems that any desktop OS has with being a gaming-only device, Windows or Linux. Stuff like applying updates or needing to alt+tab to address notifications that are major pains in the ass to do with a controller.
I don't think they did. The genre could do that all by itself regardless of Halo or CoD. It also feels like there can only be so many creative weapons. Ratchet & Clank reused the same handful of templates after only a handful of entries.
The sci-fi games that didn't just jump off the weapons rack gave us assault rifles with chainsaws on the end of them. Ratchet & Clank has no connection to the military industrial complex and gave us the same handful of templates within only about 5 years of the franchise. There's just only so much you can do with a weapon that's essentially a gun. Maybe you get one really unique-feeling weapon every game, but you can't get an entire arsenal of that every game.
Why did we single out just this award from the whole show? Not only are there plenty of others worth talking about, there's also all the ways that show hung on by a thread. Troy Baker basically apologized for each joke written for him to read, and he and Gary Whitta had to yell at a nearby table for talking loudly over award winners.
How are you all playing these insanely complex games?
Just some off the top of my head: Destiny, Deep Rock Galactic, Overwatch, and most recently Baldur’s Gate....
Get ready for shitty games from WB next year that are full of always-on and battlepass
This is from earlier this month. But it didn’t really hit until seeing more Suicide Squad details....
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of November 19th
What have you all been playing?...
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Falls Out of the U.S. Top 20 Games for the First Time in Six Years (www.ign.com)
Half-Life 25 Anniversary Update (www.half-life.com)
The Last of Us 2 PS5 Remaster Announced, Has a Brand New Survival Mode, $10 Upgrade Path (www.pushsquare.com)
What game genre would you like to see more entrants in? angielski
This was something I started wondering about when I was reading a thread about Star Citizen, and about how space combat flight games were much less-common than they had been at one point, how fans of the genre were hungry for new entrants....
YouTuber The Completionist's Open Hand Foundation Accused of Keeping Charitable Donations - IGN (www.ign.com) angielski
Karl Jobst’s video...
Super Mario RPG (2023) Review Thread
Game Information...
Bigger Than Godzilla: Why Are Games Using So Many Gigabytes? (www.techspot.com)
Valve says it is committed to the Steam Deck, has a "road map" (www.axios.com)
Game of the Year | Nominees (thegameawards.com)
Here Are The Nominees For The Game Awards 2023 - Game Informer (www.gameinformer.com)
The Game Awards 2023 nominees announced (www.gematsu.com) angielski
The Game Awards has announced its nominees for 2023, as selected by a global jury of more than 100 media publications and influencer outlets.
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of November 12th
I definitely didn’t forget to do a new thread yesterday 👀...
SteamOS will be coming to other handhelds before you can install it on your PC 'because right now, it's very, very tuned for Steam Deck' (www.pcgamer.com)
Call of Duty MW3 faces dramatic Steam drop-off from MW2 launch (www.pcgamesn.com)
Resident Evil 4 Remake wins PlayStation Game of the Year at the Golden Joystick Awards 2023 (www.msn.com) angielski
Resident Evil 4 Remake has been crowned PlayStation Game of the Year at The Golden Joysticks 2023 powered by Intel....