captain_aggravated

captain_aggravated, 1 day ago

Fragments of the Seamoth can be found around wrecks in the red grass plateaus, there’s a guaranteed one near Lifepod 17 aka “Ozzy from the cafeteria WHAT THE HELL GUYS?” The game hints that you can find Seamoth parts around there by the line “Our pod was almost crushed by the Seamoth bay on the way down.” You can also find several guaranteed Seamoth parts in the Aurora, I think enough to outright complete the blueprint.

Moonpool parts can be found just about anywhere you’ll find Cyclops hull fragments; I tend to find them either in the Mushroom Forest or around wrecks in the Sparse/Grand Reef.

The Scanner Room you can add to a seabase can detect scannable fragments, and you can display them on the HUD with a craftable upgrade.

captain_aggravated, 1 day ago

Very, very light spoilers:

This is a survival game, gathering resources from the environment to craft tools, vehicles, food and water are core mechanics, as is finding and scanning fragments of technology to unlock blueprints. You actually don’t need to craft very much, I have done a run of this game where I built no seabases, only one of the three submarines, crafted no food or water surviving only on what you can scavenge, and only made seven tools.

A common complaint I see people make with this game is that the inventory doesn’t stack, so where do I put my 900 titanium? Frankly they’re playing it like Minecraft, and it’s not Minecraft. You don’t need to hoard treasure chests worth of everything, most common materials are relatively easy to find and with the possible exception of Lithium, if you have more than five of basically any raw material on hand that you don’t have an immediate idea of how to use, you’re probably doing it wrong.

Base building is entirely optional; the idea is you’re a castaway, survivor of a shipwreck who is waiting to be rescued, you’re not moving in. To quote the game itself, “Treat this space as your home, but never forget that it is not.”

captain_aggravated, 1 day ago

Also found in great abundance around the red grass plateaus especially near wrecks.

You’ll get radio messages from Lifepod 17, 6 and 7.

Lifepod 17 will give you a HUD marker that takes you straight to it, depending on where your lifepod spawned you’ll likely pass a small wreck and a scatter, and there is a large wreck within sight of it. I would actually be surprised if you couldn’t complete the Seamoth, scanner room and bioreactor right there.

Lifepod 6 and 7 are both “coordinates corrupted” quests; it won’t give you a HUD marker but a picture and a hint as to their location (lifepod 4 is similar). 6 is similarly within sight of a large wreck and a scatter, going to Lifepod 7 will take you past a large scatter and a small wreck.

All three of these are fully explorable with a seaglide, high capacity air tank, and repair tool. I recommend a rebreather and an air bladder. You can find scanner room, bioreactor and seaglide parts in addition to scrap titanium outside the wrecks, and laser cutter, propulsion cannon, mobile vehicle bay, modification station, battery chargers, plus several useful databoxes including the vehicle upgrade console, and a strong chance of +30 bottles of water in supply crates.

It can be a bit of a bother for new players telling scannable fragments from the background scenery of the wrecks; act a bit like a bloodhound, drag your nose around looking for the scanner icon to pop up in the corner of the screen.

I’ll give an oblique hint for further in the game: there may come a point where you say to yourself, “Well now what?” And the game doesn’t seem to give you somewhere to go like it has been. go deeper.

captain_aggravated, 17 hours ago

Yeah, it sounds like you didn’t explore the wrecks or their surroundings, because all the blueprints you say you need can be found above 250m fairly easily. There are Seamoth parts and a free depth upgrade for the Seamoth available right at sea level in the Aurora. I’ve finished the game several times without building a seabase at all.

captain_aggravated, 4 days ago

writing headlines like that should earn a nice lengthy face tazing.

captain_aggravated, 4 days ago

pretty okay, just had a shower and I’m chilling on the couch with my cat. She is steadily purring. comfort level is around a 7.8, maybe 7.9.

I bought HL1’s GOTY edition when it came out.

captain_aggravated, 3 days ago

I would end up with a farm that took all day to water, and never enough time to go down in any mine far enough to find iridium enough to make sprinklers out of, and then stop playing.

captain_aggravated, 2 days ago

I can also say I’ve had my fun with the game and move on.

captain_aggravated, 6 days ago

Corporate fuckery is not a good smell to gamers. Smells like month old genital pus.

Just starting an article by explaining “Unknown Worlds Entertainment has been acquired by Somebody Interactive, the parent company of Hunka Chunka Studios and Rumpy Pumpy Inc” and we’re already suspicious, because corporate acquisition means the game now has more parasites to fund - layers of upper management, investors, etc.

Then we hear about major names that are the people that had the vision for the original game being replaced “immediately” in a press release full of bullshit corpowank marketing boilerplate…it means this game is almost certainly going to be cancelled, the studio shut down and the staff laid off, probably after a lot of players have purchased the game in early access.

There’s quite a bit of overlap in Subnautica and KSP’s player bases, and we’ve already had our asses burned by Take Two Interactive.

So, I’m not going to be joining any early access campaign. I’m not paying for the game before it is finished, I’m not playtesting it for free, I’m not pre-ordering anything and I’m not buying any merch, and there’s a reasonable chance I’m not buying the game at all, because it has already been smeared with the aforementioned month old genital pus.

I don’t think I want to buy games from companies that have parent companies. Parent companies make everything fucking suck.

captain_aggravated, 7 days ago

So…here’s the thing, folks: What you’re REALLY going to have to do is stop buying live service video games.

If I understand this, it is a petition to get the EU government to look into maybe thinking about making some laws to…do something about live service games becoming unplayable when the servers shut down. Okay, here’s how that’s going to go: “We looked into it and decided not to do anything.”

Has anyone tried…not buying the damn games in the first place? If you pay for these games knowing that the soulless reptilian cloacal slits that run the AAA industry can just shut down servers whenever they want, YOU are the problem.

captain_aggravated, 7 days ago

Sure. I remember when Id Software released Doom as open source. They had just released Quake II earlier that month, Doom was old news and not really a money maker for the company, so they opened the source code to let the community play with it. That was a cool thing to do, it should be done more often.

I would say yeah, you should build a game in such a way that it can be played once its abandoned. The greed vampires who are actually in charge won’t let a law like that be passed. Or if it is, they’ll ignore it.

captain_aggravated, 7 days ago

If the population at large is too stupid to make healthy video game purchasing decisions, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for protections to come from the representatives they elected.

I can see a stack of ways that this isn’t going to work:

• The government looks at the petition and says "No we’re not going to consider that."
• The government says "We’ve considered that and decided to do nothing."
• The government pulls an EU and the solution they come up with is to make every video game published everywhere in the world force the user to agree to the EULA every time the game launches, prompting a slew of “EULA auto-accept” mods to work around the annoying thing you now have to constantly click.
• The government puts in a law that’s written decently. The industry, particularly those parts based outside the EU such as Japan and North America, ignore it, and shut down servers when they damn well please.

But let’s indulge in the fantasy that democracy works for a minute and Stop Killing Games becomes a law that works perfectly as intended. The publishers will find some other way to be shifty greedy fuckpukes. Case in point: Live service games just shutting down their servers whenever they want is 100% legal right now. The government currently is not protecting consumers. It never truly will. The shadiness of business will always outrun government protection, 100% of the time.

I still maintain, if you continue to pay for live service games, you’re the problem.

captain_aggravated, 7 days ago

I strongly dislike the end-around that these “live service” games are trying to do around copyright law. I’m a strong proponent of the idea that intellectual property law is a compromise. You get some time to make your money on your idea, then it becomes the heritage of all mankind. Treating games as a service is an attempt to weasel out of their end of the bargain.

So I don’t fucking buy them.

captain_aggravated, 11 days ago

Time has been repealed. Everything took place 16 years ago earlier this afternoon.

captain_aggravated, 11 days ago

I mean, Thalassophobia wouldn’t be a terrible name for a video game.

captain_aggravated, 11 days ago

Welp. That’s that for that.

captain_aggravated, 12 days ago

How does that guy still have a job?

captain_aggravated, 14 days ago

Working isn’t worth doing.

captain_aggravated, 15 days ago

Subnautica comes to mind. It’s a survival game with a heavy focus on exploring and a very structured story. Fluff text and the obligatory random documents and audio logs are mostly optional, though the game does have a mystery to solve so some of those you want to pay attention to. No real spikes in difficulty, it’s honestly an easy game.

captain_aggravated, 15 days ago

spoilerI’ve done entire runs of this game only salvaging water. No bladderfish, no coral + salt, no stillsuit, no water reclaimer. You can easily make it through to the endgame on the water you spawn with plus what you find in wrecks.

captain_aggravated, 16 days ago

This is about maintaining the compromise that is intellectual property law.

IP law has been so perverted that I see a lot of the takietarians around here wanting to abolish it completely. That’s not a good idea. The US constitution empowers Congress to make laws that for a limited time give creators exclusive rights to their creations. FOR A LIMITED TIME. That’s the key feature. I know this is an EU petition, I imagine they have a similar concept of IP. That it belongs to the creator for awhile, and then enters the public domain as the heritage of all mankind.

Do away with copyright protection entirely, and you kill a lot of people’s jobs. The rate at which things will be created will drastically decrease. Throughout the 1980s, how many decade defining or genre defining video games came out of the United States? The nation known for a video game industry crash that decade? How many came out of the UK? How many out of Japan? How many out of the Soviet Union?

Okay so let’s make copyright permanent! Well no, because then you get Disney, a collection of stuffed suits who have MBAs instead of souls holding as much western culture hostage as they can in perpetuity.

So, we compromise. You create something, you get an amount of time of exclusive right of way, then it becomes public domain.

That length of time has gotten longer and longer to the point now that it’s more than 2 human lifetimes long. To an individual human, that’s as good as forever, so it has the problems of permanent copyright.

Especially in the realm of computer software and video games, where the life of a platform averages 10 years. There’s a whole body of software and games written for OLD systems that are still protected under copyright, but finding the copyright holder is damn near impossible. I’ll make up a game: Turtle Adventure for the Commodore 64, copyright 1985 by Bedsoft Inc. Bedsoft Inc was a sole proprietorship operated by Bartholomew Teethwick in Bristol, England. Mr. Teethwick published Turtle Adventure, a typing tutor game that didn’t really work right, and an advertisement for a Pacman clone to release in 1987 was circulated but that game was never made. The “company” was shut down in 1988 and Mr. Teethwick died of AIDS in 1991, unmarried, no children. Who’s going to sue me for posting Turtle Adventure on Github? Whose rights is copyright law protecting here?

Then you get into this model where video games don’t work at all without a central server somewhere. That’s just an end around of the deal. This software is supposed to end up in the public domain eventually. By copyrighting it, that’s the deal you made.

To patent something, you’re required to submit a technical description of your invention in sufficient detail for it to be replicated, because patent law is a similar compromise. You invent something, it’s yours for awhile then it belongs to humanity. You cannot have a patented trade secret. Why do we allow closed source software to be copyrighted?

The rules for software weren’t created for software, they were created for human readable works of literature, and they’ve been misused in ways that benefit large greed-based organizations like Microsoft.

Requiring game developers to publish their server side code when the game goes defunct is holding them to the deal they made when they installed that copyright notice. It is what they owe humanity.

captain_aggravated, 19 days ago

Breath of the wild is the worst. Crouch, as a toggle control, on L3.

captain_aggravated, 19 days ago

…And Johnson & Johnson.

captain_aggravated, 21 days ago

And girls cosplaying as Lara Croft by putting a box in their shirts will never stop being funny.

captain_aggravated, 23 days ago

Yeah at first during onboarding when you’re running like one smelter into one constructor on the ground with a wavy belt and spamming power poles everywhere it’s kinda goofy but when you start designing factories you can make some cool looking stuff.

captain_aggravated, 1 month ago

My mother got into it. I’m not going to.

A puzzle game that puts RNG in between the player and the ability to attempt a solution is something I’m not willing to tolerate.

how is it different from playing Riven with one of your sticks of RAM poorly seated so the computer crashes on a semi-regular basis resetting your progress?

No. Not for me. I’d be more interested in wearing the corner fire hydrant in my ass than playing that.

captain_aggravated, 1 month ago

That question is the thesis statement of a 2 hour long video essay if ever I heard one.

Most games involve random chance somehow to make the game feel more alive and less deterministic, like in an early Zelda game, should the Octorok run 3, 4, 5, or 6 tiles forward? Should it turn left or right? Should it drop a rupee or a heard when killed? These I’m fine with.

In an RPG, things like monster encounter rates might use the RNG to simulate the behavior of a dungeon master, both “roll for initiative” and “I’ll have them encounter 4 groups of low level monsters on their way through the creepy forest.” Using an RNG and lookup table for that is a reasonable low overhead way to add some unpredictability and adventure to the game. Note: I don’t really play RPGs that much.

The term roguelike has started to be overused to mean any game that features procedural generation and permadeath. By that definition I think Tetris qualifies as a roguelike. The original Rogue kind of worked like a virtual dungeonmaster, it would create an RPG campaign for you to play in, and then it played like any RPG where you have to explore a dungeon, learn the mechanics etc. with permadeath and the consequence of having to relearn everything you’ve learned thusfar generating stakes and pressuring the player to survive, no “whatever, I’ll just die and respawn.” So that’s an innovative use of a computer random number generator. Most things that call themselves “roguelikes” are more “We designed a cool primary gameplay loop but can’t really be bothered with level design so here’s some procedural generation to beat your head against over and over again, maybe hoping to find a scenario you can possibly win.” Quite often, it’s not that the game randomly re-engineers itself, it throws the same pre-scripted things at you in a somewhat different order, so they end up playing more like old arcade games than an actual adventure.

A “roguelike” I’ve spent the most time with is FTL: Faster Than Light, and its roguelike structure is by far my least favorite feature. I don’t really like beating my head against the RNG hoping a permutation of combats, 50/50 “do you help with the giant spiders” encounters goes my way so that I have enough scrap, and that it gives me a shop with a useful array of weapons so that I have a chance at the end encounter.

Blue Prince takes the randomization to a whole other level. It might be compelling if it procedurally randomized the house for each playthrough such that you do have to learn YOUR way through it, and you have limited stamina so that each day you can only explore so far, but you can get upgrades to your stamina so that you can stay in the house longer and explore deeper, but…I can’t see the way they implemented the game’s RNG as anything other than flagrant disrespect of the player’s time.

The “AHA!” moment in a puzzle game is what you’re after. That hapens in the player’s mind. If the player thinks up the solution, but the mechanics of the game make it take a long time to implement, all you’re doing is grinding the player’s teeth together. And Blue Prince seems designed to maximize teeth grinding, because the player may know the solution to a puzzle, but contriving the circumstance necessary to implement that solution requires several unlikely rolls back to back to back to back to back.

Sorry, I’m just convinced it’s bad game design pretending to be novel.

captain_aggravated, 1 month ago

From what I saw of Blue Prince, it would be like playing Return of the Obra Dinn, except after you get one of the death scenes and the soundtrack blarps at you for awhile, there’s the door unlock sound, and there’s a random chance it’s going to make you arbitrarily replay the game.

I’m just not on board with all the shit they piled in front of the mystery to solve.

captain_aggravated, 29 days ago

Could it present the player withbsmallband large puzzles/mysteries without egregiously misusing RNG?

I’m not interested in the RNG telling me I can’t work on the thing that’s on my mind.

captain_aggravated, 28 days ago

Putting a jigsaw puzzle together is a challenge. You could increase that challenge by requiring yourself to roll a die and getting 6 five times in a row before you’re allowed to try to fit a piece. Does that sound like good game design to you?

captain_aggravated, 28 days ago

Adding bullshit RNG to a puzzle game to make it take longer might make it more “challenging” but doesn’t make it better, is my point.

captain_aggravated, 28 days ago

Is RNG always bullshit? No; only a sith speaks in absolutes. There are appropriate uses of randomness in video games. Is RNG very often a source of bullshit? Absolutely. Do I feel like that’s the case in Blue Prince? ABSOLUTELY

“I got the pump room but not the boiler room again so I still can’t try doing the thing I’ve been trying to do.” Said players of a game designed to disrespect their time.

If, at the start of each in-game day, you were given all of the rooms you’d unlocked so far, and were allowed to arrange them however you like right then and there, and were then free to move around in it however much you please, would the game be worsened? I’m convinced it would only be improved, because pretty much all you would do is remove “Welp, for the fifteenth time, I know what I want to try, but random chance prevented me from doing so.”

The presentation is charming and the puzzles are intriguing but I think the community is putting up with the deeply terrible mechanics out of sheer novelty, and another game made like it isn’t going to be well received.

captain_aggravated, 1 month ago

Also the intro cut scene is a curtain being lifted.

captain_aggravated, 2 months ago

That’s what a lot of the upgrades boil down to, yeah. Air tanks increase endurance, fins and seaglide increase movement speed, rebreather eliminates an endurance draining effect at depth, seabases and submarines allow you to start your dive from greater than zero depth. Pretty much all of that boils down to “dives to this depth are now practicable.”

Other than that, the knife allows you to harvest plate coral for making computer chips, kelp for making fabric, and seeds for plants. The scanner is required to obtain the blueprints for several other required buildables. The mobile vehicle bay is required to build the Cyclops. The Cyclops is required to make the shield module. A radiation suit…I think speedrunners don’t use it and just tank the damage with medkits, but I consider it a requirement.

There is one straight-up key you have to craft; there are several others for required or optional doors but you only have to craft one to complete the game and two to unlock all doors.

There’s a tool that is like Half-Life 2’s gravity gun, which can be used to move heavy obstacles out of paths, but it’s never outright required for anything. I usually don’t bother with it.

The laser cutter is required, You have to cut through one of two doors in the Aurora to gain access to the Captain’s Cabin.

captain_aggravated, 2 months ago

Do you mean Stardew Valley or Haunted Chocolatier?

Stardew Valley is a combination of a creativity toy, a dating simulator, a soap opera and a security blanket. You’re actually able to return to a humble artisanal life, make absolute bank doing it, and beat the giant megacorp should you choose do to so. A decreasing number of places offer that kind of hopeful feeling in reality.

Haunted Chocolatier? I don’t know, didn’t really see the appeal when it was explained to me.

captain_aggravated, 3 months ago

Give Kingdom of Loathing a try.

captain_aggravated, 3 months ago

I’ve enjoyed the hell out of Buckshot Roulette. It’s about playing Russian Roulette. With a pump action shotgun. There’s power-ups!

captain_aggravated, 3 months ago

Tell you what customers absolutely can do: decide to stop doing business with you.

captain_aggravated, 3 months ago

This is Lemmy, you can say kill here. In fact, please do. It’s weird that we’re doing that Orwellian shit to the kids.

captain_aggravated, 3 months ago

Not only on Switch 2. There was at least one Tony Hawk Pro Skater game that did this.

If I remember the episode of Guru Larry, the developer noticed their rights to the IP were set to expire, so they went to shit out one last game as fast as possible. They had to get the game published by a certain date, as in discs on store shelves by this date. The game was not going to be ready in time, so they put the tutorial level on the disc to print and distribute it while they finished the game, which would then be a multi-gigabyte download. Meaning that a physical copy of the game is worthless once the servers shut down.

captain_aggravated, 4 months ago

What a fucking waste of time this must have been.

captain_aggravated, 4 months ago

At some point you’re going to struggle to put a capable x86 machine in a device that small.

captain_aggravated, 4 months ago

Valve has made an emasculatingly large amount of money this way. Following in the footsteps of Id Software, Valve has been very open with their development tools. I don’t know about the very earliest copies but the ZOMG GOTY edition of the original Half Life included its SDK on the disc. Counter Strike and Team Fortress started out as mods that Valve just…hired.

Releasing the tools to their customer base and then hiring the cream that rises to the top is a strategy I struggle to get mad at.

captain_aggravated, 4 months ago

“We’d prefer you didn’t use the word “Source” in the game title. You wanna sell Black Mesa on Steam?”

captain_aggravated, 5 months ago

Subnautica 2 will be optional co-op.

captain_aggravated, 5 months ago

It is a video game console that I have ever seen.

captain_aggravated, 6 months ago

That would be very on brand for an Aperture Science-like setting.

captain_aggravated, 6 months ago

I think the bowtie goes a bit better with the duck’s inherent ridiculousness.