It’s worth noting, I think, that the definition of shovelware has slipped somewhat since it was coined like thirty years ago, and I think this is leading to you and niisyth talking past each other. Shovel Knight for Switch was maybe shovelware by the original definition, which was “shovel a bunch of old software onto a CD and resell it,” but by the Wii era people were using it to refer to software that is just bad, but exists to trick people into buying it by promising to be more full-featured than it actually is. The Wii had so many titles like this that it seemed like they were “shoveling” shit directly onto store shelves and calling it games. In this new definition, it refers to titles like My Horse and Me or Imagine Party Babyz. So if they are thinking of the newer usage, it sounds like you’re insulting Shovel Knight’s quality as a game.
The traditional answer to this is to just not let players cast spells that would be costly to implement, in the same way that we can’t currently cast Reincarnate or Magic Jar. There are still high level combat spells to look forward to, like Meteor Swarm.
I’m mostly just surprised that I’ve seen people say AC6 is more accessible than previous ACs when it’s probably the hardest AC game since Last Raven. The chapter 1 boss is as hard as the final boss of Verdict Day.
Of course, I said the same thing about Elden Ring; my friend was trying to convince our other friends that it was more approachable than Dark Souls, and I was like “The first story boss has higher moveset complexity than Nameless King phase 2!” I think in the end most people still found it more approachable, which I don’t really understand because I think it was way harder than the non-DLC parts of DS3, so maybe I’m just looking at these games wrong/weird.
It’s not the lack of a grid specifically that bothers me in BG3, it’s that there are a lot of scenarios where in tabletop an enemy would be ruled to have cover, but in BG3 the shot is simply obstructed and your character needs to move before they can take it.
Also sometimes the automatic positioning for melee attacks is bad and will tell you that you can’t reach, but if you click to move and then click to attack you actually can.
Also the fact that AoE spells target the ground specifically instead of an arbitrary point in space, which means in some areas you get weird situations where the enemies are close enough together to fireball all of them but you can’t do it from your location because the spot where you need to place the fireball is in a slight depression that you can’t see into from where you are.
Also there is some weirdness about casting AoEs through doorways, where even if you can see someone that doesn’t mean you can fireball them because it’s treating the fireball “projectile” as being wider than I would expect, so that it can only go through at certain angles.
I do think a grid system would be less likely to have these issues, but they could be fixed without it.
It doesn’t have to be “proper” if it works as a joke. It implies that a Bethesda game can’t be merely “buggy,” it must be the “buggiest,” even if it’s (paradoxically) less buggy. So, “least buggiest.”
You can revivify party members who fell into chasms by using the scroll/spell on their “soul orb,” which should appear somewhere in the area. Granted, it may be far enough away that you need to survive the fight first.
I’m excited, but I’m not done with BG3 yet, and I’m also supposed to be getting stuff in order so that I can move, so it’s going to have to wait until next month.
Well, I had already bought BG3 in Early Access before the OGL debacle, and before Hasbro (WotC’s parent company) sent the Pinkertons to intimidate some small time Youtuber into giving back some unreleased Magic: the Gathering cards that he had been erroneously sold early by a distributor. So I couldn’t very well boycott it when I had already purchased it and played like 30 hours of it.
Katamari Damacy, the game where you roll up terrified humans into your giant ball of trash and hand them over to your emotionally distant father so that he can turn them into stars, is a wholesome game? I’d dispute that!
I’m also not sold on the wholesomeness of Undertale, given what you have to do to hear the best song in the game.
I actually love PoE’s inventory management, but I play the game “wrong.” I hardly ever trade, except to grab a cheap unique here or there that enables a build. I pick up and manually ID all the items that could be useful, even knowing that there’s only like a 1/10,000 chance that they actually are. I pick up all currency, even portal scrolls. I clear maps at a pace that might be described as “puttering.” And typically I RIP early in maps and start the league over, so most of my playtime is in the story, where successive characters can pick through my stash for junk my old character was hoarding for no reason, that might now have some use for levelling a different build.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Mankind Divided can be played as stealth games, and I really liked them. Note that they aren’t “pure” stealth games, there are some encounters where you cannot avoid fighting.
Also DE:MD kind of ends in the middle, so if you are a story player you will be frustrated to know that there seem to be no plans for the next sequel.