I’ve been playing it and enjoying it. It could be better. Most games could. I had kind of low expectations, honestly. I’m glad it’s a single player game with no live-service and no season-pass. I’ll probably play it a second time. Runs kind of like crap, so I might play it again in the distant future where I have better hardware.
I imagine a lot of internet duds are mad about how there’s a queer subplot, but they can go fuck themselves. Unfortunately, this creates a problem where if some random guy is bashing it I have to try to suss out if they’re really just mad about queer stuff. It’s hard to tell. And because we’re all just emotional idiots, some people might be mad about the queer stuff and not realize it, and the words that come out of their mouth will be “boring characters”.
But also a lot of their games have problems. Mass Effect 3’s ending is so bad it has its own wikipedia page.
It downscales your level if you go back to older areas, so you can play with lower level friends. (Though it’s still pretty generous, and the high level friends will be more effective). So if your friends aren’t playing much, you can still coop with them when they do play.
There’s a lot of content. Most of the maps have stuff just happening. There’s also instanced content for 5, 10, or … I think private convergences can go up to 20?
There’s not really a gear grind. When you hit max level (which is pretty easy) good-enough gear is very easy to get. A smidge better than that is a little expensive but still very feasible. The fanciest gear is numerically the same, but let’s you reskin and swap stats for free, which is nice.
Lies of P. It was pretty good. 30 hours for the first run through. I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’ve already played sekiro and some dark souls, as I think they do it better.
Some people probably know them in real life. Like, you might have a friend who’s like “Yeah this [slur] wouldn’t update her mod so i posted [hateful thing] on her insta”. You could talk to them. People listen to their in-group more than randoms online.
But then again, the worst sort of people probably mostly have the worst sort of friends, and reinforce their bad behavior.
as an almost maximally privileged person (cis straight etc), i want my whining fellows to shut the fuck up. Just stop. Stop taking up all the god damn space. Just be quiet. It’s okay not to be included in every scene all the time.
Your point about not assuming people are straight by default is valid. But I mostly just want some cis-het folks to stop embarrassing me by being fucking insufferable.
A dark souls kind of slow paced combat game, but built for co-op. Except I don’t have any friends who are on the same skill level and schedule.
More broadly, I really want more games that you can play co-op in where the players are vastly different skill levels, but it’s still fun. I don’t know how to solve this.
I can imagine like a game where one person is playing dark souls and the other is playing candy crush, and they interact somehow. Like making matches in one give estus in the other, and killing bosses gives stuff.
Basically I want to play games with my frienda that don’t play the same games, somehow.
I don’t buy a game solely because it’s the zeitgeist or whatever. A friend of mine routinely buys games that are “the new shiny” and then doesn’t finish them, or loses interest quickly. I usually wait for a sale, some patches, and/or the dlc to be bundled into a goty edition.
Some exceptions:
I bought elden ring near launch because I’m a big enjoyer of the genre, and my friend confirmed it was good. No regrets.
I bought bg3 shortly before it’s full access. I’d liked the other games larian did, and a friend told me it was good. No regrets.
Both of those were pretty light on DLC. No season pass or “goty” editions were likely.
I’m going to wait for the dragon age game to go on sale. I don’t really trust Bioware, and I don’t know if they plan to do a bunch of dlc that will get bundled up later.
I’ve been waiting for Lies of P to get cheap. The demo was just ok when I played it, but a friend tells me it’s phenomenal.
Right now I’m playing a MUD (aardwolf). It really distills some online RPG into the essence of “go kill some stuff to level up, get new skills, and kill bigger stuff”. It’s strangely satisfying.
I played a MUD once that had characters age. When you got older, it affected some of your stats. You wanted your cleric to be older because that benefitted wisdom and mana, but fighter types wanted to be young for the health bonuses.
There were equipment that modified effective age, and you could remort at max level to reset it. It was kind of cool, aside from the first time I was like “why is my HP Regen so low? Ooh my cleric is like 120 years old”
Guild wars 2 is a very good game, but very different than guild wars 1.
They both avoid the endless gear and level grind, but gw2 is generally easier and less tactical. You can solo most of it. Builds are a little more limited, but it’s also harder to make a useless character.
They addressed the most common problems with early mmos: other players are never a bad thing. there’s no kill stealing. If you’re doing some event to fight off demons that have invaded the town, and other people show up, the game silently scales up a to accommodate more players, and everyone gets credit. it’s great.
I really like it. I don’t play it every day, but I go back to it all the time.
What if leveling up didn’t make number get big, but instead gave you more options in a fight?
Horizontal progression is pretty cool .
Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t want that. They want to feel cool and competent without actually doing anything. That’s not to say like you need to “earn” your fun or whatever. But that the progress quest number go up don’t think too hard is immensely popular with a lot of people. They don’t want to be challenged.
And that’s fine. It’s a game. It’s just not a game I want to play all the time.