- 0 Posts
- 76 Comments
Yeah I pretty much almost never buy AAA games anymore outside of some very specific creators/franchises. Price is definitely a part of that, but the bigger things are creativity and business practices. Indie games are where all the new ideas are and where you get honest expressions of the artist’s intent. And you generally don’t need to put up with bullshit micro transactions, DRM, etc.
I’m not gonna pay $60+ for Call of Duty 500 when I can find full, fun, inspired indie games for less than $30. I will still buy the handful of more creative AAAs that do come out sometimes.
Personally I think they’re still playing catchup from their launch commitments, but what’s been added so far has been pretty good. Season 2 expanded out the endgame content and crafting loop by a lot. This season looks a bit tamer in the grand scheme of things. A relatively smaller endgame content system with some new loot. Some class reworks. A new chapter in a still unfinished campaign.
Tech-wise I haven’t really had problems with it after the first few days of s2’s launch, but new patches always come with new bugs, so I’d expect some instability at s3 launch.
Also like others said, they got bought out so………………. Yeah… we’ll see what happens with that.
I tried it out when the testing started. It’s… fine. I’m not much of a shooter/action game player, so the higher skill elements of it are a bit of a barrier on top of re-learning a lot of DoTA-type stuff. I can imagine getting into it more if it came out years ago. But now it’s hard to find the time and motivation I’d need to dedicate to even get back to the level of incompetence I had with DoTA.
It’s really hard for me to separate my nostalgia for older games with what I’d think about them now. There are some games I’ve played a LOT but haven’t touched in years for one reason or another.
Some pre-Steam games would be things like Halo 3, World of Warcraft, Runescape, and few Pokemon games.
On Steam my most played game BY FAR is DoTA 2 at ~2100 hours. I loved that game and I still think it’s really well designed… I just haven’t played it in years because it makes me too mad to play with randos and it’s impossible to get 5 friends who play DoTA online at the same time anymore.
If I was going to pick a top 3 outside of those nostalgic outliers, maybe:
- Slay The Spire
- Dark Souls
- Deep Rock Galactic
A few angles on this:
You’re right that nothing is unimportant and I certainly enjoy it when I discover that attention to detail, but part of what makes that special is knowing that they put in extra effort into that. Acknowledging it as something that takes effort, we have to recognize the trade offs associated with that effort. Devs, especially indie ones, don’t have unlimited time and resources. So they have to prioritize. Choose your battles. What are the MOST important things that need to be in the game? What is required? Then after that if you have resources left and can control yourself from doing too much scope creep, then you can spend time on the lower priority things. If you can’t do this you might never release the game.
Of course, what is more or less important is subjective and context dependent. Subtle, intentional details might be more important in a game with a lot of environmental storytelling like Dark Souls, or a puzzle game where you want to be careful about how you direct the player’s attention, but is probably much less important in say, an action rpg where you’re just running through hoards of random enemies slamming particle effects.
Another thought I had related to the point about inspiration happening through the process: I don’t really do art anymore, (no real reason I stopped, might be fun again if I ever have the motivation/focus for it) but in high school I took 3 years of graphics design classes for art class. I’d finish whatever my assigned project was and then I just spent a bunch of time messing around in photoshop with random gradients, filters, and other effects. I wouldn’t call it super deliberate at least in the early stages, but at some point I’d end up with some abstract art that I liked and maybe tweaked a bit from there based on the things I saw from randomly trying stuff. I still use some of those for desktop backgrounds. I don’t think I could have ended up with any of that without some of the random stuff photoshop did. I could imagine someone using an ai image generation for similar kinds of inspiration. Although I can see how it’s also a lot easier for them to just stop there and not think about it again.
The way I look at it, it would be better if we had a nice, consistent language with rules that make sense but… we don’t have that. English is a nonsense language with more exceptions than rules. So if I’m going to have to deal with something that doesn’t make sense in the first place, I’d rather just go with the flow. If Shakespeare can make up words, so can I.
Agreed on it being a bad replacement for controller games. I got one around the time one of the FROMSOFT games came out (I think it was Sekiro?) and I tried using for that and it was just not usable for something like that. I haven’t really tried it for anything else since then because I don’t really play games away from my PC, so I don’t have a need for a worse but acceptable way to play M+KB games.
A while ago I tried it out and I can concur on it feeling clunky. To each their own, but I just have a fairly low tolerance for games not feeling smooth to play. There are a lot of games I’ve dropped in less than an hour because it just didn’t feel good to play even if I might have liked some of the ideas or systems.
Not a complete list, but I made a spreadsheet to help me keep track of the games I bought but then never or barely played to try to get me to revisit them in some organized way. Outside of that, there’s just the steam library. Anything further back from my time playing on consoles is kind of just lost to time and memory unless it was a particularly memorable game.
Yeah the souls games are something I like in spite of all of the things wrong with them. There is just so much jank and bizarre design decisions.
I kinda hate that all of the games that have tried to copy them have done so to a point of not critically evaluating everything in them. And then they have all the same flaws, but none of the unique charm that makes me look past them for FROM’s games.
Yeah I’m sort of interested in the game but I wanted to wait for full release. I get that a lot of indie games are helped tremendously by the money and player feedback they get out of early access, but if if the whole bottom falls out because not enough people bought the game you’ve very openly told people “this isn’t finished, don’t buy into this if you aren’t willing to be a part of the testing process,” then something is very wrong. Early access income should help bridge the gap, but you shouldn’t be entirely reliant on it.
I’ve probably played a bunch, but the one that most comes to mind is Antechamber. Super weird FPS puzzle game ala portal but with a lot of mindbending illusions, non-Euclidean geometry, etc.
It’s got a metroidvania structure but without much guidance and a lot of stuff will just loop you back to where you’ve been if you’re not getting things right. At some point I was just completely lost. I couldn’t possibly think of where I haven’t tried to go or do. Worst part if I tried to look up a guide I don’t even know where I’d begin to look.
I’m pretty curious about this. I tried Oblivion a few years ago having never played it before and it just felt too clunky for me to want to play much past the tutorial. Which is a shame because I’ve heard there’s a lot of cool stuff in the game I didn’t get to see.
If this makes things feel better to play and is a good all around remaster, maybe I’ll pick it up and give it another go.
I suppose part of the conversation is about a concept I call “difficulty pressure.” (Maybe there’s another term for it?) Essentially, how does the game’s difficulty affect players’ approach to optimizing builds in a game with them.
When a game is on the really difficult end of things, (and this goes for competitive multiplayer as well where the “difficulty” is that all other players are optimizing and you need to be better than them to win) the game pressures you to optimize your playstyle in order to just survive and overcome otherwise insurmountable odds. In this extreme environment, there sub-optimal builds get pushed out even if they seem fun because you will very likely fail with them. Thus limiting build diversity.
At the lower end of difficulty, the game might be so trivial that ANYTHING works, but it won’t feel satisfying because nothing you do really matters. You probably don’t even need a real build at that point, so that feeling of making something crazy that trivializes otherwise challenging content isn’t there. There’s just no reference point to appreciate how good your build is. If every enemy had 1 HP, without damage numbers, how would you even know how much damage you were doing? A build that did one damage would be the same as a build that did a trillion damage.
Like you said, ideally there’s some good balance state where things are challenging enough to serve as a yard stick, but there are still a lot of builds that can reach that point. There’s a boring way to achieve this easily: No builds. Or at least no difference between builds. Everything does the same thing but maybe the colors are swapped around. Obviously that’s not really what we want out of an ARPG, otherwise we’d just play a pure action game. So builds have to be different enough to allow for very different experiences, but not so much so that some are essentially invalid. But that’s a much more complicated problem. With so many pieces and combinations, it’s virtually impossible to balance faster than the internet hive mind can optimize.
There’s another boring way to achieve this: Not on the player side, but on the encounter side. Because a very wide variety of playstyles need to be able to complete the content in a roughly equivalent way, the challenges need to be relatively interchangeable because you don’t know exactly what tools the player will have access to. So you flatten the content so there aren’t sharp edges that will make some builds unable to beat it. Alternatively you can require the players to have a specific set of tools no matter the build so that they can deal with all these scenarios. For example, in Noita, you pretty much always need:
- A primary damage dealing wand that can reliably kill things safely and which won’t run out of limited charge spells.
- A digging wand to access various pickups and other areas.
- A mobility wand to be able to get around the more sprawling and dangerous levels as well as get up to places you otherwise couldn’t.
- Late game, a healing wand.
- There are some enemies that are straight up just immune to some damage types.
You have 4 wand slots and you will usually need at least one empty wand slot to be able pick up new wands in a level unless you can meet some other specific conditions. So all the slots you can use to make your build are spoken for. This limits what you can build a lot. Late game you can combine some of these effects into a single wand, but until then you have that restriction.
If the game didn’t have this variety of challenges, you’d be more free to choose what you want out of your build, but then the actual content would be way less interesting.
This is the core tension. Content asks things of you and your build is the answer to that. The more difficult or specific the challenge, the less freedom you have to make different builds. The more generic or easy the challenge, the less your build matters, meaning you have more freedom but it’s less satisfying to act on that freedom.
EDIT: I forgot to discuss the action/skill axis: Some games, despite having builds and being mechanically difficulty, can be entirely overcome with skill. People do challenge runs of Dark Souls at SL1 with a broken straight sword and no armor because fundamentally, nothing in the game requires you to take damage or kill things at a certain speed. So you technically don’t need a build. Skill is essentially all that matters. If you just avoid things forever it doesn’t matter how little health you have or how long it takes you to kill something. Any build stuff you do on top of that is just for the fantasy and to make things go faster. (Although fantasy wise I think the souls games kind of do a terrible job. All the flashiest weapon skills and spells are way too slow and impractical to be useful. They’re not just suboptimal, some of them will actively make the game harder than if you were using nothing at all.
I guess my point isn’t that it’s impossible to make a game that has elements of both. It’s that they are inherently antagonistic, not synergistic concepts. The more builds matter, the less content does and visa versa.
I think the secret sauce there is that they’re roguelikes. They have meaningful combat and they have the potential for wild builds that completely trivialize that combat. So why does this work for them? Because you can’t guarentee a specific broken build every run. They’re short and random, so the likelihood that you will put together all the pieces needed for a specific build before the end of a run is fairly low. By contrast, while ARPGs are “random”, they’re played over such a long term that it’s expected that you will be able to acquire exactly the things you need for your build eventually. (Outside of chase items, but those usually aren’t build defining for that exact reason.) PLus a lot of your build is defined by entirely deterministic mechanics. You get to choose your skills and passives. And with trading you can take nearly all the uncertainty out of whether or not you’ll be able to put together the remaining pieces.
So because it’s expected that you’ll for sure be able to build what you want given enough effort, if you optimize your build to trivialize the game, you’ll always be able to do that. When you get a a broken build in a roguelike, it’s because you high rolled that run and you get to have fun experiencing the high point relative to the baseline. You know how tough the combat usually is, so the fact that you can now breeze through it without thinking about it is fun in and of itself. But if it was always like that, it would just be a boring game. Incidentally, this is why I tend to not like roguelites that allow you to define a lot about your build before you enter the run itself. They make it a lot more likely that you break the experience in a very predictable way.
In ARPGs the high point is the baseline. Either the game is able to be trivialized with a good build, in which case it always will unless you go out of your way to nerf yourself, or you can never really make the game easier no matter how good your build is, in which case the build making isn’t super relevant. There’s a reason people joke about Fashion Souls. The gear you can equip is often so pointless that you might as well just pick armor for how it looks.
An interesting case study for a sort of in the middle experience that kind of illustrates some of this is Noita. For those unfamiliar it’s a roguelike where you play as a mage/alchemist descending into the depths of the world in search of mysteries. Your builds consist of wands that you can put an assembly of spells and modifiers in to craft very different spell setups. You also get some perks occasionally that do the usual kinds of things you’d expect from a roguelike passive item system. The game is brutally difficult to a degree that’s deliberately unfair to the player. Enemies are chaotic. The environment is volatile and filled with things that can kill you in an instant if you’re not careful, or even if you are careful because some enemy triggers some flying thing on another screen that flies into you out of nowhere. Many spells in the game can hurt you too and even the ones that can’t directly can sometimes have a firing pattern that will make it hard to avoid hitting explosives and stuff that will kill you. Healing is extremely limited. Early on the game is certainly very skill based in the sense that you aren’t going to immediately break the game in the first level or so, so you need to be able to avoid things while you slowly kill them. If you really enjoy build crafting, the early game is fairly boring in that respect. But ultimately as you progress it’s more knowledge based. Your will be hard pressed to outskill later enemies if you’re still running a dinky no damage wand. So you kind of have to find ways to break the game if you want to succeed.
SPOILERS beyond this point:
That’s the initial experience. Two things become true once you learn more about the game:
-
There are a handful of very powerful combos that are way better than most of what you can do in the game. Once you know about them, either through discovery or from reading about it online, you will kind of ruin the build potential of future runs. You can somewhat reliably find at least one of these most runs so long as you make it past a certain point. There’s not nothing cool to discover after that, but they’re all way less practical and only something you will be able to do once you’ve already reached a point where there’s no challenge they’re needed to overcome.
-
Upon freeing yourself from the initial core run to go see the rest of the world(s), you gain access to essentially unlimited perks. You can gain absurd amounts of health, damage reduction and healing, immunity to a lot of hazards, enough movespeed to avoid most things, and the ability to basically get anywhere you want on the map, etc. You basically become a god of death and destruction, untethered from mere mortal concerns… until you randomly get turned into a sheep and die instantly. So similar to a broken ARPG character, you reach a point in the game where the only things that the game can possibly do to threaten you is to strip you of everything that makes your build and just instantly kill you. And similar to an ARPG, this only really happens because you can play a run for many hours after the initial, more roguelike length run.
There’s probably something to learn from all of that if you want to try to thread that needle, but I think it at least shows the challenges of reconciling the tension between mechanical skill and cool build making.
I’ve been thinking this from the start. The genres really just don’t seem compatible.
Souls-likes are at their core about the fights themselves. Sure you can make builds, but unless you’re going out of your way to cheese things, you’re probably still fighting the enemies and dealing with the mechanics like anyone else. Outside of boss fights, you fight at most a handful of enemies, all of whom have been very deliberately placed in a level to create interesting encounters that are the right balance of difficulty. Also, your healing is very limited so that the game can punish you for mistakes without outright killing you because you will run out of resources at some point.
Diablo-likes are about the builds. The enemies are merely fodder for testing out whatever nonsense you’ve made. The norm is to optimize the shit out of your builds. The whole point is to eventually trivialize things. Enemies are randomly generated and placed. You don’t get well crafted encounters outside of bosses so when you’re presented with a mob of random enemies, your solution is to just kill them before they kill you. Also, a component of build crafting is often sustain and if you can build infinite sustain into your character, then the only things which can kill you will just be one shots.
There’s no obvious way to resolve these contradictions. You kind of just need to pick a lane. If they really want a game that’s fundamentally different from PoE 1… they need to make THAT game. But that’s really far away from the game they’ve actually made and I don’t think any reasonable amount of early access tweaking can get them there from here.
I got a new PC recently so unfortunately I am now on Windows 11. I’ve been wanting to make the swap to Linux but I can’t really make a clean break because at least some of the games I play a lot won’t work on Linux. I do think I’m gonna try to set up another hard drive with Linux on it to try to slowly start learning it and ideally move over anything that I can over there eventually and just keep the windows drive for those few games.
Does anyone have any recommendations related to that? Distro for gaming/ease of use? What’s the best option for setting up the dual boot? Anything I wouldn’t have thought of that’s relevant?
Do I think it’ll happen? Yes, even if it’s not good, because AAA companies are cheap and have no taste. They thrive on just spewing out more content than a smaller studio could make, quality be damned.
That said, whether or not it COULD be useful in the future I think depends on the context and how well you could tune the models.
I think it has absolutely no place in a narrative game where intentional authorship is what people come for. Even if it’s passable, I want to know that what I’m hearing or reading was something SOMEONE wanted to say.
But I think it could be interesting in more open ended, replayable sim games where you want to be able to try a wide variety of approaches and have different experiences each time, but it would be impractical for a dev to implement all those possibilities to the point where players would feel like the game adequately responds to their actions. However, I don’t think you could just drop a copy of chat gpt in there and call it a day. You want different NPCs to be different and you want some consistent reality that they all exist in and respond to. So you’d probably need to put in some constraints based on some hidden file describing a particular world gen’s state. A basic example would be the NPC knowing that the town you asked about is to their north or perhaps an existing relationship between 2 characters.
Idk how technically feasible this would be, but it’d be a cool tool in the right context if done right. I think the key here is it can be good when it enhances what you want to do and you put in the effort to make it work vs just using it as a lazy shortcut.
I don’t have a smart watch both because I don’t really see the point in them and because adding extra things to be on me bothers me, so I wouldn’t even be wearing a regular watch.
As for tablets: It’s just a convenient compromise between a phone and a laptop for basic browsing and video watching. I can comfortably lay in bed with a tablet rested against the wall or propped up on my nightstand. It’s harder to do that with a phone or laptop and obviously the phone screen is also just smaller. I don’t really take the tablet with me unless I’m going on a long trip, but when I am it’s nice to both have the bigger screen and actually have my media device be on a separate battery from the device I need for communication and navigation.
Aside from doing the work to maintain and update your own engine, there is also the problem of onboarding new hires. If you use a standard you can go out and hire people already experienced with working on the engine. If you use your own, you have to teach a new hire to use it before they can be any help.
I read that this caused a lot of development woes on Halo Infinite for example.
People are asses sometimes, but whenever these conversations come up, I wonder: What do you even want from us? How are random people on the internet supposed to hold random anonymous trolls on the internet “accountable?” You can call them asses, but so? What if they don’t care? They’re anonymous. You could get mods to ban them, but if it’s a free service they can always make another anonymous account. It’s even more confusing in the context of something like an online game as opposed to a forum. What are you supposed to do about someone being an ass when you’ve probably never seen them before and probably won’t see them again?
Elden Ring. Although that’s only because I didn’t want to start a whole new character for the DLC. Does Nier Automata count? All the extra playthroughs are kind of just part of the complete experience of the story. Then there’s harder difficulties of roguelikes like StS.
Beyond that, I tend to not end up being that interested in a NG+ unless there’s something substantially different about it like new story beats or I can play a cool build.
Ah. I didn’t know they said that. It’s definitely shitty to go back on that promise. Although in a vacuum, I think this is the kind of non-cosmetic content that’s somewhat acceptable to me as paid DLC. It’s not a competitive game and assuming the class is balanced, it’s just adding content that gives more variety. I’ve been fine with paid DLC in other big games as long as it’s a worthwhile amount of content for the price and it’s sold in a straightforward way without any funny business. Given that this game has online co-op, I think it makes sense that they’re gonna keep the content expansion free so it doesn’t divide people who would want to play together (also I guess there is trading, but I’m a CoF player so…) and then this is something that mostly just affects someone’s individual experience. Like if you were going to be happy enough to keep playing the game with existing classes, then this doesn’t really affect you.
So in principle I’m ok with this… but like I said, the bigger issue is them going back on their word.