ryven

ryven, rok temu (edited rok temu)

It cannot really be about that, there are tons of incest porn games on Steam that pass largely unremarked upon, and this seems way less explicit than most of them. Surely if someone wanted to punish incest game creators, they’d start with one that’s way more explicitly incesty?

I think they just decided to bully these devs, in particular, and whatever they say it’s about is just a pretext for the bullying.

ryven, rok temu

I don’t think fast travel is the problem. The problem is that there is an actual “exploration” part of the game, where you wander around planets scanning things and looking for points of interest, but it is by far the most boring part and I have not had much fun when interacting with it. There is nothing exciting to find, and it primarily rewards materials that I mostly haven’t had a lot of use for, because when I need something specific for research or crafting I can buy it at the store, because materials are nearly worthless in terms of credits.

The mini-dungeons and other points of interest you can find need to be way cooler for the wandering-around-on-planets to be worthwhile, and the actual exploration gameplay needs something more than walking across plains and hills in order to be interesting.

The best parts of the game are when you pretend it’s Fallout In Space and hang out in cities doing quests for randoms.

ryven, rok temu

I’m like 90% sure that the character creator has lighting features enabled that are normally disabled for performance reasons, which is why it’s much easier to look good in the character creator than it is in the game.

If I’m right, maybe modders can “fix” it (although it will probably tank performance).

ryven, rok temu

Ohhh I knew there was something different about the clutter placement in Starfield! There’s so much of it I catch myself triple checking areas to make sure that I didn’t miss anything worth picking up.

ryven, rok temu (edited rok temu)

So you can fly in space, and fight space battles there, but you can’t really fly fast enough to fly from one planet to another in real time. To move to a different point of interest in the system, you need to fast travel to it. So the meaningfully interactable part of space is just the immediate area around each fast travel point.

I’m not far enough yet to know if the interior gets more interesting after you add more modules to the ship; the starter ship is basically an RV: bed, galley, cockpit.

ryven, rok temu

Coming fresh off BG3, the quality of the writing and the amount of character expression in dialog is like night and day. Honestly there was even one moment fairly early on when I said to myself “Fallout 4 would have let me extort this guy” and then I realized how egregious it was that I felt I had less agency in this quest than in FO4.

ryven, rok temu

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.

ryven, rok temu (edited rok temu)

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.

ryven, rok temu

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.

ryven, rok temu

Well, if I didn’t sign up when it was $1, I’m certainly not going to now…

ryven, rok temu (edited rok temu)

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.”

ryven, rok temu (edited rok temu)

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.

ryven, rok temu

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.

ryven, rok temu

Whaaaaat? I’ve played For Answer and Verdict Day and I remember them being rad as hell; why were the review scores so low?

ryven, rok temu

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.

ryven, rok temu

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.

I’m still not buying new D&D books or MtG cards.

ryven, rok temu

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.

ryven, rok temu

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.

It’s probably my favorite ARPG.

ryven, rok temu

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.

ryven, rok temu

Oh thank you, I could not remember what exactly was in each game. The bosses I’m thinking of must have been in HR then.