legend

2 hours ago, Jason said:

 

Going to leave it just for you. 

:: Put's pitchfork back in shed ::

That’s not my experience at my place of work, nor of the young people I hire, but we can drop it and get back to D4  

57 minutes ago, Dexterryu said:

 

I guess my writing wasn't as clear as it could have been. My point was that any type of consumer product has to at some level consider their audience. Depending on the situation short attention span can be an advantage or disadvantage. As a leader where I work (AWS) it is somewhat of an advantage and we keep our internal messages very succinct and concise. No 1000 word emails - desired outcome first, additional details after. On the flip side, longer attention spans are better for various types of analytics or fine craftsman ship.

In the case of a game, the majority of players are likely Milenial/Gen-Z so it's probably tuned to their taste. 

I don't think the value of keeping messages concise is limited to people with short attention spans.

Let's set aside whether "short attention span" is good, bad, or neutral. You're still blaming an outcome on some supposed cognitive property of an entire generation which is a dubious claim to make that is regularly a mistake of the older generation (or the yelling at cloud subset specifically!) and it's not going to be received well either.

58 minutes ago, Dexterryu said:

Where did I imply that it was a deficiency? It's just a difference.

That's weird that you don't, but it doesn't really make it better? Just like telling someone you think they're ugly but that you don't personally consider that a deficiency won't really change the impact of what you said. Maybe to you having a short attention span isn't a negative quality, but to most people it is, and blaming an outcome on some supposed blanket quality of the younger generation remains a path to cloud yelling  

13 minutes ago, Biggie said:

After 60 plus hours I finally ran into something that takes the game from a 10 to a 9.8 for me. The Water Temple boss. Fuck that piece of water shit and the shitty mechanic you have to use to defeat him. 3 down and only lightening to go. 

My guess is you were frustrated by him running away? If so, what I found useful was to just hit him with a homing eyeball-fused arrow. That grounds him and then you can just dash over and wallop him.

5 hours ago, Dexterryu said:

 

I'm going to guess that you're a fellow GEN-X... in which case I can say I agree with you. However, I wonder how much the short attention span of GenZ factors into the loot frequency. I'm of the opinion that the pixel color choice used by the item name is over emphasized. Most games, unless you're leveling you don't even look at anything that isn't at least Rare (yellow) quality because it can't be an upgrade (in which case, I'd rather it have just been a gold drop instead of taking up an inventory spot.

I think we should avoid assuming it's the fault of the younger generation having some deficiency. That path leads to cloud yelling  

On 5/31/2023 at 2:24 AM, Air_Delivery said:

There are aspects of the game that look good like the animations and art direction. But that frame rate, aliasing and ground textures are horrid. In fact because some of the game looks really good it really clashes with how bad other aspects look.
 

 

Thats some N64 level textures

TOTK is a a technical marvel of the highest order. But that's relative to its ancient hardware that was mediocre when it released  

Not a SF fan, but this sounds pretty cool. Will probably get it later.

1 hour ago, Xbob42 said:

I wonder if I'll ever understand the appeal of ARPGs. I've played a bit of each Diablo and PoE, including the beta for this, and it just never seems appealing to me in the slightest. They're obviously not for me, but I just can never see what the appeal actually is. They seem so monotonous and repetitive and do people still get a rush from getting loot drops? And then the concept of seasons where you just play another throwaway character, I just can never seem to figure out what part actually draws people in. Or why it being super dark and gritty is appealing as your dude does a ballerina twirl with a giant sword like a D-tier anime.

In high school, my friend and I played D2 to an absurd degree. Even then we joked about how the game was dumb because were "just clicking on things to death" but still couldn't get enough of it. So I do understand your confusion over the appeal!

That said, to not be overly reductive, the appeal back then was in thinking through creative new builds. The fact that you couldn't respec in D2 and that getting good items was difficult was kind of a critical feature to this though. It meant you really had to plan out and dedicate yourself to a build. It made what you did unique, even if it sucked, because people wouldn't just be throwing everything at the wall like you can when respec and acquiring the right items is easy.

A large fraction of my game time was spent not in the game fighting, but with a calculator on diabloii.net crunching numbers and planning out new ideas. And when those ideas finally paid off and you had a great new unique build, it was wildly rewarding.

D3 missed that and screwed it up. It was mediocre, IMO, as a result. I'm not sure D4 will have it other. They seem to have made the core gameplay more smooth and fun, but it's possible they'll still fail to capture and motivate the dedication required creativity. But that, at least, was the seed of why this game was appealing.

17 minutes ago, XxEvil AshxX said:

 

I'll be getting Diablo day one, but my friend is going to wait. When I asked him why, he said he was going to wait for "a patch or two" for them to get the launch window behind them and balance the classes. I tried to explain to him that Diablo IV is going to be constantly evolving, and if he's waiting for it to be "finished" he's going to be waiting a long time. Even Diablo III was getting balance patches like, ten years later.

You're right that it will effectively never be finished, but I'm betting the launch is going to a shit show of problems all the same. Has Battle.net ever worked smoothly in the first week of a game's release?  

This game is combat comedy gold.

On 5/26/2023 at 2:19 PM, Spawn_of_Apathy said:

Yeah I’m not sure where this trilogy will end for Cal, but it does feel like Fallen Order was him growing from a Padawan to a Jedi Knight. Survivor he grew from a Jedi Knight to a Jedi Master, and in the next game he’s a Jedi Master going to … I don’t know. 

I haven't played the game yet, but it seems like the natural progression is force ghost  

Tangentially: I feel like the summary information from OpenCritic should list the percentile of the rating. "89" doesn't sound that great, but when you switch to the chart view, you find that places it in 99th percentile of all games. (We'll, it's up to 90 now, but still, 88-90 is the range for the 99th percentile bucket)

Overall, I'm very excited for this one, and it will be coming off the heels of the amazing TOTK.

7 hours ago, stepee said:

There are moments where I really like the game. I was quite into it at the start, but I’m at probably (hopefully) a low point of the journey. That point where the challenge has moved up considerably and I need to learn how to scale myself up to it.

 

I think where I’m at with TOTK might be like the uncanny valley of open game design for me. It’s like I find the combat difficult and/or not fun because every encounter is stacked so the enemy’s have very few disadvantages. Everything is fast and can hit you from far away and will sneak up on you and won’t react much to such and such options. In the end, trying to actually heavy hand you into choosing the one option it actually wants you to use.

 

I think that may be the thing it’s best at so far, tricking you into thinking you chose this creative option thinking the game is so open when it’s just shutting off enough options to lead you towards that one. Which is probably why I keep reading people gushing about some unique solution to a puzzle and then all the responses are saying they did the same thing.

 

Not that you can’t get super creative with its tools but it requires a lot of trial and error and the swiftness of death makes me want to engage with it less.

 

Like just now I’m trying to clear out this camp and I’m running all around trying to stay away from the one hitters using the environment and powers and tools and whatever. Things are going haywire, it’s responding well with explosions and the enemy’s dying. But also it’s taking awhile and I kinda want to just kill shit. As soon as make that choice to engage and actually just fight one of the enemy’s and hit them with a weapon he hits me from half a screen a way with his staff and that’s it start all over again. That sorta thing keeps happening and right I’m just waiting for the scale to tip more in my favor so it’s fun again.

 

Im only being extra critical because I think it could still be so good and I’m giving it an honest shot after not being impressed with BOTW, but I’m gonna bitch until I get some more power on my side.

I guarantee you there is not one way to do any fight. The more you learn the systems the more you'll learn how many options are there and have been there from the start. And I'm not talking about machines, that's a whole other layer. You may want to start browsing some youtube videos on crazy things you can do in the game. Some of the shit I've watched people do is extremely impressive most definitely will not occur to anyone when they first start. It's a slow burn not only for Link getting his power back, but for you as a player to learn how things work. But the more you learn and the more random things you start doing that succeed, the more fun it gets.

Hope it starts clicking for you soon!

11 hours ago, stepee said:

 

This was a naked combat one where I couldn’t do some normal strategies. I could fuse some weapons with spikes and stuff but even those didn’t seem to do much. Arrows worked ok but they only gave me a few for a bunch of enemy’s. 

 

But it’s also the game doesn’t really want the average player to go wherever they want, there’s an order of getting more powerful and hitting the right areas for your level. It’s generally just harder than I want a Zelda game to be. 

 

I know I could look some things up and make it easier on myself doing some things in order and paying attention to some things I’m probably not. But I guess I feel I’m promised a game where I should be able to do things my own way a bit more. Also the difficulty with all the one hitting makes me want to experiment and have fun with the combat less. 

 

I feel like I wish either the game were more clear about where it wanted you to go to proceed or it were designed with less difficulty gating that didn’t have you constantly in areas where you get one shotted. I find that that the place where it lands now with this doesn’t respect time as well. Part of it might be that when you end up in the wrong place in Elden Ring at least you are leveling up. 

 

I also just don’t want to even have a Fromsoft comparison when it comes to difficulty with Zelda. Should just throw in an easy mode. I’m tempted to create my own!

 

You can get one-shotted pretty easily early on, but you should be able to handle most places with care. I didn't really let the fragileness of the early game stop where I went, with the exception that I've avoided gleeocks and the lynels. While you will get better weapons as you go, most of the weapons I use even 75+ hours in are just standard basic weapons fused with something, or arrows fused with something and those somethings are usually easy to come by. Make sure you take a look at what weapon fusions actually do. If you are just fusing rocks to your weapons, those won't really be good damage dealers. But items that get dropped by enemies often are. Or fusing weapons with weapons can be a big boost. If you find yourself low, just take a trip to the main lookout point. In their underground area they have some basic weapons there that you can just take.

5 hours ago, stepee said:

Back to this today and at Zoras Domain and moving forward a bit. I’m looking forward to not being so freakin underpowered. I’ve already turned back direction once from the rock people place. I just now did my second tower. I guess I’ll go do some more and some more shrines before moving forward because one hits suck.

I will second that you should upgrade your armor. It makes a huge difference.

11 minutes ago, stepee said:

Finally beat that shrine. Fucking hell. Took me about 3 hours. I watched that entire Jared Foggle mini series and a bad cg scooby doo movie while trying to beat it. All of it was a waste of time really. I was obviously supposed to go back to it later as the enemy’s all took like a minute to beat and the weapon I got is like 5 times the level of my other weapons.

 

But like, why does it have to be so hard that I have to go back? I don’t see how the game is any better by not being just a more reasonable task. It’s a pretty easy to find shrine near waypoints it’s providing. Why make it so if you go there and see it and bother heading that way, only to find out the game wants you there later? I got the same reward as a 30 second puzzle shrine besides a weapon that will be gone after I kill two enemy’s with it. I like a lot here but definitely some things from BOTW that put me off not addressed. Seems actually worth dealing with in this one so far though.

I don't think any regular shrine enemy should take a minute to beat. Are you just whacking them with a stick?  You should at least fuse something to any sticks!

I think the hardest shrines I've done so far were naked combat shrines, but even those usually have means to very quickly upgrade your gear. There was one that seemed incredibly hard until it become apparent you could just ultra hand the things they were standing on 

And if you do want better weapons, a quick stroll through the castle is a good place to grab some. Just run from the enemies if you feel unable to deal with them during the raid.

The other thing you have to give to TOTK is just how fucking creative and awesome the combat can be. Obviously there is the crazy machines you can make, but even in the more "traditional" combat space good players can do some amazingly epic shit by playing on all the systems. My twitter feed is like 30% TOTK content at this point and some of the shared videos are really fucking cool. 

Ultimately, you'd be hard pressed to find a game with systems as expressive as the ones in TOTK, even ones that are built to be simulators of some sort. It's a staggering design and programming feat.

11 hours ago, best3444 said:

 

You really didn't like Elden Rings controls I remember that. But in all honesty it controls really well imo with the best horse controls in a game. You are definitely in the minority with your opinion. 

There are are objective observations I can make about the controls that are sub par and were largely "resolved" after the first wave of 3d games. Not everyone has to feel like they're deal breakers (even though I won't understand that!) but they remain true all the same!

For example, the targeting is wildly inconsistent. The game practically makes the lock a requirement to use because if your character is even a slight amount off of looking directly at the enemy you're attacking, they will not adapt and will clean miss to the side of them. This lack of any adaptation is compounded by the fact that attacks in Elden Ring are pretty slow, so even if you were "on" before, you might not be when it's done.

The "fix" to that is to use the target lock. Which I would have been okay with doing, except it sucks too! You can be fighting a giant enemy and click the target lock only to find the target locks on to a very distant non-hostile enemy instead because the game decided they were more "centered" even though you may not have even noticed they existed because there is a giant enemy in your face.

I might have even put up with that if you could just lock on once reliably and stay locked on until you turn it off. Sorry! Enemy attacks (and I think other movements) will automatically break your target lock so you have to do it again! There are other similar things about the controls that bugged me, but that one I remember best. It's mind blowing how bad it is to me.

And to be fair, TOTK has some menu clumsiness and I dislike that there is no action queuing in certain situations, but that's sooooo much more tolerable than failing the basics like Elden Ring. 

Elden Ring has early 2000s levels action controls. I cannot fathom how anyone puts up with it. So yeah, TOTK, but it wasn't even a fight.

3 hours ago, Xbob42 said:

With chat AI maybe you can now!

(To be honest with the rapidly accelerating quality of chat AI, image and video AI, AI voices, rapidly improving ability to provide and optimize code and all that good stuff, I'm pretty excited for the bizarre future of video games, it's going to empower both the brightest and the bumblingest of people to make some truly unique bullshit that will probably be 90% trash, but I still can't wait!)

Could be done! Unfortunately if it’s like chat gpt it will ultimately just agree and say it made a mistake if you insist forcefully enough even if you’re full of shit, so that might not be much better!

In general though, AI is coming to games in lots of different ways, which is great!

1 hour ago, Keyser_Soze said:

The lack of @legend ITT is very disturbing.

I am a big fan of the first (though I wish I could have entered my own responses in the philosophical arguments  ), so I am looking forward for this one!

The original Marathon trilogy was my favorite game series as a kid. I put absolutely absurd hours into it and a billion mods.

I'm pretty psyched for it to return.

On 5/23/2023 at 8:51 AM, Xbob42 said:

so I think I need to like... go stare at the sky for several hours and breathe outside air before moving back over to FFXIV.

You need a "breath of the wild."

Donated! Good luck!