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Kimmalah
Nov 14, 2005

Basically just a baby in a trenchcoat.


FactsAreUseless posted:

Doesn't matter because canonically, the whole island is blown up by a meteor.

It is a stupid series.

Volcano and it's still there, just even more lovely than before.

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hirvox
Sep 8, 2009

melon cat posted:

And on the topic of things dragging videogames down- I just re-fired up Red Alert 2. I used to love this game growing up, but I don't know how I had the patience for the horrible UI. Maybe I'm becoming a blind old gamer, but I gave up after I started losing my 5 pixel-wide units on the large map. I lasted ~20 minutes in my last replay of RA2 before rage-quitting after I couldn't find the tanks that I scattered across the map.

I have a similar reaction when I try to move large amounts of units in any RTS that isn't Total Annihilation or inspired by it. Waypoints, patrol routes, ferrying waypoints, formations and Select All of This Type hotkeys remove so much micromanagement.

Elite: Dangerous is the remake of the classic space exploration games. Like the previous games, it has a procedurally generated galaxy with realistic distances. And because it has multiplayer, they couldn't just slap in time acceleration. Instead, you get SuperCruise, which lets you accelerate near-infinitely and then slow down when you're getting closer to your destination. But unlike in Frontier or First Encounters, you don't get an autopilot. In small solar systems it's fine; You need to dodge stars other gravity wells and intercept other ships. But in some systems you might have to travel for fifteen minutes or so with absolutely nothing happening. But if you don't do small cource corrections or don't finetune your throttle during deceleration, you will go off course or overshoot your target. It's Desert Bus in Space.

Ms Adequate
Oct 30, 2011

Baby even when I'm dead and gone
You will always be my only one, my only one
When the night is calling
No matter who I become
You will always be my only one, my only one, my only one
When the night is calling



FactsAreUseless posted:

Doesn't matter because canonically, the whole island is blown up by a meteor.

It is a stupid series.

No you are stupid.

EmmyOk
Aug 11, 2013

There's no point in developers trying to make good looking or artistically interesting games because Ókami has already been made. They should just focus on pixels and frames.

For content, MGS2 is amazing but playing as Raiden instead of Snake is definitely a shame. I don't even dislike Raiden, I'm one of the few people who quite liked him even before revengeance. He just looks bad when the game opens with you playing as Snake and in constant codec contact with Snake for the rest of the game. He never measures up when he's constantly juxtaposed with Snake.

Speaking of the tanker opening mission versus the rest of the game; the main game insists on spamming you with codec calls and tutorials on how to do all the stuff you spent the past two hours doing on the tanker.

Who What Now
Sep 10, 2006

by Azathoth

EmmyOk posted:

There's no point in developers trying to make good looking or artistically interesting games because Ókami has already been made. They should just focus on pixels and frames.

For content, MGS2 is amazing but playing as Raiden instead of Snake is definitely a shame. I don't even dislike Raiden, I'm one of the few people who quite liked him even before revengeance. He just looks bad when the game opens with you playing as Snake and in constant codec contact with Snake for the rest of the game. He never measures up when he's constantly juxtaposed with Snake.

Speaking of the tanker opening mission versus the rest of the game; the main game insists on spamming you with codec calls and tutorials on how to do all the stuff you spent the past two hours doing on the tanker.

I've always thought that one of the key themes of MGS2 is that no, Raiden doesn't measure up to Snake but he also doesn't need to anyway. He'll never be Snake and he needs to instead be his own person. I'm pretty sure Snake even says exactly that in the end.

Then in MGS4 he's sorta achieved that but still feels like he's in Snakes shadow or owes him something. Finally in MGR:R he's his own man and fully embraces being a cyborg murder man.

EmmyOk
Aug 11, 2013

Who What Now posted:

I've always thought that one of the key themes of MGS2 is that no, Raiden doesn't measure up to Snake but he also doesn't need to anyway. He'll never be Snake and he needs to instead be his own person. I'm pretty sure Snake even says exactly that in the end.

Then in MGS4 he's sorta achieved that but still feels like he's in Snakes shadow or owes him something. Finally in MGR:R he's his own man and fully embraces being a cyborg murder man.

I get that. I mean as a playable character it's harder to enjoy playing as Raiden when the game is constantly reminding you of the much more interesting character you could be playing as the entire time. The character you have played as for three (realistically one) game as, and even started this game playing as.

Also that reminds me of one other annoying thing. It felt very 'my original character fanfic' when Raiden saved Snake from Vamp at the start.

Screaming Idiot
Nov 26, 2007

JUST POSTING WHILE JERKIN' MY GHERKIN SITTIN' IN A PERKINS!

BEATS SELLING MERKINS.

EmmyOk posted:

There's no point in developers trying to make good looking or artistically interesting games because Ókami has already been made. They should just focus on pixels and frames.

For content, MGS2 is amazing but playing as Raiden instead of Snake is definitely a shame. I don't even dislike Raiden, I'm one of the few people who quite liked him even before revengeance. He just looks bad when the game opens with you playing as Snake and in constant codec contact with Snake for the rest of the game. He never measures up when he's constantly juxtaposed with Snake.

Speaking of the tanker opening mission versus the rest of the game; the main game insists on spamming you with codec calls and tutorials on how to do all the stuff you spent the past two hours doing on the tanker.

I think that was actually the point -- they were hammering in just how "inexperienced" Raiden was. That's why every other word out of his mouth was a nasal whine. And then in Revengeance he just goes "gently caress stealth, gently caress subtlety, gently caress fairness, IT'S TIME FOR JACK TO LET 'ER RIP!" :black101: and it became the best Metal Gear game ever.

Also, Metal Gear Solid 2 is a slow, clunky, ugly little game with just enough fun detail to keep me interested.

DStecks
Feb 6, 2012

melon cat posted:

The last time I remember seeing a dinosaur in a game was the first Tomb Raider, followed by Dino Crisis on the PSX. We are so overdue for a good dinosaur-themed survival horror/adventure videogame. But I think the videogame industry's more keen on producing more sequels to Assassin's Call of Creed.

Dinosaurs are just one of many entries on the Great List of Underexploited Video Game Genres (Westerns, Pirates, Contemporary Detective Fiction, Non-Military Sci-Fi, Espionage, etc.)

Ugly In The Morning
Jul 1, 2010
Pillbug

melon cat posted:


And on the topic of things dragging videogames down- I just re-fired up Red Alert 2. I used to love this game growing up, but I don't know how I had the patience for the horrible UI. Maybe I'm becoming a blind old gamer, but I gave up after I started losing my 5 pixel-wide units on the large map. I lasted ~20 minutes in my last replay of RA2 before rage-quitting after I couldn't find the tanks that I scattered across the map.

I think a lot of it was the shittier computers and monitors meaning you played at a much lower res. I actually played it at like 800x600 last time I did and it made everything much bigger and easier to find.

Now, the fact it does left-click to give orders, that hosed with me the whole time I played.

Owl Inspector
Sep 14, 2011

melon cat posted:

The last time I remember seeing a dinosaur in a game was the first Tomb Raider, followed by Dino Crisis on the PSX. We are so overdue for a good dinosaur-themed survival horror/adventure videogame. But I think the videogame industry's more keen on producing more sequels to Assassin's Call of Creed.

There were actually several dinosaur indie games in recent years but all of them ended up being terribad I think. One of them is a kickstarter game that mysteriously stopped being updated after receiving the kickstarter money and without saying anything (don't remember if it ever came back or not), one of them was a really bad WWII shooter where the german side has dinosaur classes except the game was bad, one of them was a dinosaur shooter that flagrantly ripped off assets from Natural Selection 2 while claiming they were "just placeholder," etc...

I just checked and that last one is on steam for a single US dollar. That's not its sale price, that's its normal price :laffo:

joshtothemaxx
Nov 17, 2008

I will have a whole army of zombies! A zombie Marine Corps, a zombie Navy Corps, zombie Space Cadets...
Dino DDay was an absolute ripoff. Was basically an untested, unbalanced HL mod masquerading as something as legit as L4D.

And c'mon y'all, the original Turok was fantastic (except for the jumping puzzles).

Rockman Reserve
Oct 2, 2007

"Carbons? Purge? What are you talking about?!"

Kimmalah posted:

Canonically cliff racers were also driven to extinction by the dude you first meet on the prison boat. I guess people hated them so much the devs threw that little tidbit into Skyrim.

I've always known that cliff racers were universally hated but never really understood why. They make loud, distinct noises when they're about to attack you, and are super easy to dispatch with any kind of Marksman or Destruction skill. I've also definitely killed a bunch with melee attacks, so it's possible.

E: You want an annoying enemy, look at the scrib. Little bastards that are easy to miss on the ground while you're off picking magical flowers or whatever that hit you with a paralyzing attack. THERE's an annoying enemy.

Kimmalah posted:

I found a few people who had this problem but in their cases it was the mouse button loving up instead of the game. Is there another one you could test it with? Maybe it's wearing out and reached its limit sometime while you were playing.

Doubtful since it works 100% fine in literally every other game and program on my computer. I guess if any one game was poorly programmed enough to make my actual hardware gently caress up somehow it would be FO:NV but I really don't think so. It seems to go away until I enter the Pip-Boy screen when I double-right-click anyway. It's really no big deal though, like I said it's more or less completely mitigated by VATS anyway.

Rockman Reserve has a new favorite as of 23:45 on Jan 4, 2015

FactsAreUseless
Feb 16, 2011

Ryoshi posted:

I've always known that cliff racers were universally hated but never really understood why. They make loud, distinct noises when they're about to attack you, and are super easy to dispatch with any kind of Marksman or Destruction skill. I've also definitely killed a bunch with melee attacks, so it's possible.
Sometimes I want to rest without being unable to because I'm being followed for dozens of miles by a cliff racer that refuses to attack me.

Hobo By Design
Mar 17, 2009

Hobo By Intent or Robo Hobo?
Ramrod XTreme
I'm playing through Knock Knock, a sidescrolling indie horror game by icepick lodge (makers of Pathologic and that one game with crotchless naked oldman babies.) I have a soft spot for pretentious indie things, but the game parts are a bit unbalanced. It's about exploring a slightly randomized house, waiting for morning, doing home repair, while dodging ghosts. Hiding can fail (if you are bad, like me) and ghosts cannot follow players between floors. The safest way to wait until morning is to wait at a ladder between floors and just go up/down it when you see a ghost. Which is not :spooky:.

Hobo By Design has a new favorite as of 03:57 on Jan 5, 2015

bewilderment
Nov 22, 2007
man what



Hobo By Design posted:

I'm playing through Knock Knock, a sidescrolling indie horror game by icepick lodge (makers of Pathologic and that one game with crotchless naked oldman babies.) I have a soft spot for pretentious indie things, but the game parts are a bit unbalanced. It's about exploring a slightly randomized house, waiting for morning, doing home repair, while dodging ghosts. Hiding can fail (if you are bad, like me) and ghosts cannot follow players between floors. The safest way to wait until morning is to wait at a ladder between floors and just go up/down it when you see a ghost. Which is not :spooky:.

Ghosts only appear if you sit still long enough for your man to close his eyes (which you need to do to make stuff appear in some rooms anyway). Technically as long as time's actually passing then the safest thing isn't to wait still, it's to constantly pace back and forth.

Lord Lambeth
Dec 7, 2011


Gestalt Intellect posted:

One of them is a kickstarter game that mysteriously stopped being updated after receiving the kickstarter money and without saying anything (don't remember if it ever came back or not),

Stomping Land?

Hobo By Design
Mar 17, 2009

Hobo By Intent or Robo Hobo?
Ramrod XTreme

bewilderment posted:

Ghosts only appear if you sit still long enough for your man to close his eyes (which you need to do to make stuff appear in some rooms anyway). Technically as long as time's actually passing then the safest thing isn't to wait still, it's to constantly pace back and forth.

I'll pay attention to that onward, thanks. On one stage I kept moving, fixing lights and unjamming doors, and ghosts showed while doors jammed behind me. It was annoying. On another I did the same and no ghosts. :iiam:

Inco
Apr 3, 2009

I have been working out! My modem is broken and my phone eats half the posts I try to make, including all the posts I've tried to make here. I'll try this one more time.
Sequence is an interesting kind of RPG/Stepmania hybrid, but my controller is ill-suited for the game, and it doesn't appear to have customizable keyboard controls, or even a keyboard control reference at all. All in-game prompts are given in Xinput commands.

Esroc
May 31, 2010

Goku would be ashamed of you.
Game Dev Story is dangerously addictive, but I hate that using the same employee for a certain aspect of the game twice gives you a stat reduction.

Bitch, that's what I'm paying you for. Shut up and do your job.

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


Ignore my posts!
I'm aggressively wrong about everything!
Bravely Default tries to do a murder mystery for one of its sidequests. An assassin traps your party and a group of top commanders of an army you allied with, and begins picking people off one by one. You need to find out who it is and stop them to get out... and more importantly, earn the Ninja job.

Unfortunately, it fucks it all up by having no actual gameplay, or mystery-solving, involved in the mystery; your job is to talk to everyone and let cutscenes happen until one of your party members figures it out. It's a shame, because they actually come up with a really good twist: it's the first victim, who nobody actually saw die, and whose body you never got a proper look at, because everyone thought it was a bit insensitive to treat someone who just died like that.

The entire segment of the game around the fire crystal sort of bungles its sidequests, frankly, but that one's easily the worst.

Kimmalah
Nov 14, 2005

Basically just a baby in a trenchcoat.


Ryoshi posted:

I've always known that cliff racers were universally hated but never really understood why. They make loud, distinct noises when they're about to attack you, and are super easy to dispatch with any kind of Marksman or Destruction skill. I've also definitely killed a bunch with melee attacks, so it's possible.

E: You want an annoying enemy, look at the scrib. Little bastards that are easy to miss on the ground while you're off picking magical flowers or whatever that hit you with a paralyzing attack. THERE's an annoying enemy.


I admit I haven't played a ton of Morrowind, but I do remember that nearly every single time I went more than a few yards from a city I would have at least one or more cliff racers basically trying to fly up my character's rear end. Since I was low level I couldn't really do poo poo to them and they would follow me for miles, just attacking me (which would slow me down since I was getting knocked around).

So that was pretty annoying.

PJOmega
May 5, 2009

Cleretic posted:

Bravely Default tries to do a murder mystery for one of its sidequests. An assassin traps your party and a group of top commanders of an army you allied with, and begins picking people off one by one. You need to find out who it is and stop them to get out... and more importantly, earn the Ninja job.

Unfortunately, it fucks it all up by having no actual gameplay, or mystery-solving, involved in the mystery; your job is to talk to everyone and let cutscenes happen until one of your party members figures it out. It's a shame, because they actually come up with a really good twist: it's the first victim, who nobody actually saw die, and whose body you never got a proper look at, because everyone thought it was a bit insensitive to treat someone who just died like that.

The entire segment of the game around the fire crystal sort of bungles its sidequests, frankly, but that one's easily the worst.

The payoff for the lack of interactivity in the murder mystery is several chapters later. You can even solve it early if you check things thoroughly.

Will agree with the writing around the fire crystal having some weird plot holes though.

Hel
Oct 9, 2012

Jokatgulm is tedium.
Jokatgulm is pain.
Jokatgulm is suffering.

EmmyOk posted:


Speaking of the tanker opening mission versus the rest of the game; the main game insists on spamming you with codec calls and tutorials on how to do all the stuff you spent the past two hours doing on the tanker.

That's because the Tanker chapter can actually be skipped if you pick certain choices at the start, IIRC Easy and "New to the series" both start at the Plant, though I think they removed that in the HD version. But yes they should have cut down the tutorial if you played the tanker chapter, but then they could also have removed them on replays.

Calaveron
Aug 7, 2006
:negative:

Cleretic posted:

Bravely Default tries to do a murder mystery for one of its sidequests. An assassin traps your party and a group of top commanders of an army you allied with, and begins picking people off one by one. You need to find out who it is and stop them to get out... and more importantly, earn the Ninja job.

Unfortunately, it fucks it all up by having no actual gameplay, or mystery-solving, involved in the mystery; your job is to talk to everyone and let cutscenes happen until one of your party members figures it out. It's a shame, because they actually come up with a really good twist: it's the first victim, who nobody actually saw die, and whose body you never got a proper look at, because everyone thought it was a bit insensitive to treat someone who just died like that.

The entire segment of the game around the fire crystal sort of bungles its sidequests, frankly, but that one's easily the worst.

Next time you're in a murder mystery again, try checking the body some 15-20 times

Walton Simons
May 16, 2010

ELECTRONIC OLD MEN RUNNING THE WORLD

EmmyOk posted:

Speaking of the tanker opening mission versus the rest of the game; the main game insists on spamming you with codec calls and tutorials on how to do all the stuff you spent the past two hours doing on the tanker.

At least in MGS2, they introduced being able to hold down triangle and the codec convo would fast-forward very quickly, unlike the original where you had to press X for each line of codec dialogue you wanted to skip. There was so, so much codec stuff after you input the PAL cards until the end of the game.

ChaosArgate
Oct 10, 2012

Why does everyone think I'm going to get in trouble?

Walton Simons posted:

At least in MGS2, they introduced being able to hold down triangle and the codec convo would fast-forward very quickly, unlike the original where you had to press X for each line of codec dialogue you wanted to skip. There was so, so much codec stuff after you input the PAL cards until the end of the game.

This is the big thing keeping me from playing the PS1 MGS over Twin Snakes, I don't care about codecs I've already heard and I want to skip them without having to button mash like I'm in the torture sequence again.

Leal
Oct 2, 2009
FF14: The materia meld failure animation. It takes like 3 seconds, happens every time, trying to move or do anything to cancel it doesn't work. SE, I just watched 250 grand blow up in my face, that 3 second animation is just rubbing my face in it.

And when every meld after the guaranteed slots has a 65% chance of failure, and ramps up to a 78% chance then an 86% chance of failure... I don't need to see it 80 times in a row.

EDIT: Actually I timed it. It takes almost 6 seconds. 6 loving seconds, every single time you fail a meld at 65%+ rate. 6 god drat seconds sitting here, watching my money vanish, I have to sit here and watch my character mope for 6 god drat seconds. I spend more time watching my character shake their head then I do actually doing the meld.

Leal has a new favorite as of 19:43 on Jan 5, 2015

RBA Starblade
Apr 28, 2008

Going Home.

Games Idiot Court Jester

Hobo By Design posted:

I'm playing through Knock Knock, a sidescrolling indie horror game by icepick lodge (makers of Pathologic and that one game with crotchless naked oldman babies.) I have a soft spot for pretentious indie things, but the game parts are a bit unbalanced. It's about exploring a slightly randomized house, waiting for morning, doing home repair, while dodging ghosts. Hiding can fail (if you are bad, like me) and ghosts cannot follow players between floors. The safest way to wait until morning is to wait at a ladder between floors and just go up/down it when you see a ghost. Which is not :spooky:.

I have never gotten hiding to work in Knock Knock. I beat it through doing laps around the house and strategic light activation. And also through the game being bugged at launch so time spent in a breach didn't count against sanity. It's a cool game though.

StandardVC10
Feb 6, 2007

This avatar now 50% more dark mode compliant
Europa Universalis 4: I've played older Paradox games before, I know that random events love to gently caress you over, but come on, having the national bank failure event three times within a few decades is just tedious.

a kitten
Aug 5, 2006

Leal posted:

FF14: The materia meld failure animation. It takes like 3 seconds, happens every time, trying to move or do anything to cancel it doesn't work. SE, I just watched 250 grand blow up in my face, that 3 second animation is just rubbing my face in it.

And when every meld after the guaranteed slots has a 65% chance of failure, and ramps up to a 78% chance then an 86% chance of failure... I don't need to see it 80 times in a row.

EDIT: Actually I timed it. It takes almost 6 seconds. 6 loving seconds, every single time you fail a meld at 65%+ rate. 6 god drat seconds sitting here, watching my money vanish, I have to sit here and watch my character mope for 6 god drat seconds. I spend more time watching my character shake their head then I do actually doing the meld.

Hahaha, I'm laughing because that's just terrible as hell.

Really everything about highend crafting and gathering drags the game down for me. Too much money and too punishing with failure rates; I love almost everything about the game, so it's a bummer that the crafting poo poo seems so mired in old, lovely game design.

Even fishing which I completely enjoyed leveling up to 50 went from a fun thing to do to "holy poo poo you need me to spend how much gil and do how many HQ double-leeches" to keep going. Oh well, just gonna set my sights a lot lower and very gradually and half-assedly work on it from here on out.

melon cat
Jan 21, 2010

Nap Ghost

Leal posted:

FF14: The materia meld failure animation. It takes like 3 seconds, happens every time, trying to move or do anything to cancel it doesn't work. SE, I just watched 250 grand blow up in my face, that 3 second animation is just rubbing my face in it.

And when every meld after the guaranteed slots has a 65% chance of failure, and ramps up to a 78% chance then an 86% chance of failure... I don't need to see it 80 times in a row.

EDIT: Actually I timed it. It takes almost 6 seconds. 6 loving seconds, every single time you fail a meld at 65%+ rate. 6 god drat seconds sitting here, watching my money vanish, I have to sit here and watch my character mope for 6 god drat seconds. I spend more time watching my character shake their head then I do actually doing the meld.
The Final Fantasy series seems to be quite bad with this sort of thing. I still remember the unskippable Summon spell animations in FF7 (is that what they were called? It has been a while). I don't know if it was an oversight from Square Enix, or an intentional (and self-indulgent) feature that they decided to keep. But it got really irritating really quickly. If I recall correctly, FF9's Eidolons were similarly repetitive.

Len
Jan 21, 2008

Pouches, bandages, shoulderpad, cyber-eye...

Bitchin'!


melon cat posted:

The Final Fantasy series seems to be quite bad with this sort of thing. I still remember the unskippable Summon spell animations in FF7 (is that what they were called? It has been a while). I don't know if it was an oversight from Square Enix, or an intentional (and self-indulgent) feature that they decided to keep. But it got really irritating really quickly. If I recall correctly, FF9's Eidolons were similarly repetitive.

FF9 would play the full summon once and then randomly after that. FF8 made you sit through entire animations but added in the ability to boost the GF by button mashing.

Nuebot
Feb 18, 2013

The developer of Brigador is a secret chud, don't give him money

Gestalt Intellect posted:

One of them is a kickstarter game that mysteriously stopped being updated after receiving the kickstarter money and without saying anything (don't remember if it ever came back or not

This is a pretty big one dragging games down. I donated to Chroma Squad's kickstarter ages ago, they had planned the release for december 2013 according to their kickstarter.

A year later and they're still just occasionally chucking out a beta and stopped updating their supporters about the game at all. I fondly remember back when indie games first started becoming a huge thing on steam everyone was saying they'd become the best thing about gaming, the way of the future and all that but I've yet to play one that wasn't terrible, and steam has taught me to be wary of anything that embraces the early access tag.

Lord Lambeth
Dec 7, 2011


Prison Architect is pretty swell. So is Kerbal Space Program.

really you just have to accept that video games are kind of awful for most of their development period and hope the developer actually finishes the game they set out to make.

Len
Jan 21, 2008

Pouches, bandages, shoulderpad, cyber-eye...

Bitchin'!


Nuebot posted:

This is a pretty big one dragging games down. I donated to Chroma Squad's kickstarter ages ago, they had planned the release for december 2013 according to their kickstarter.

A year later and they're still just occasionally chucking out a beta and stopped updating their supporters about the game at all. I fondly remember back when indie games first started becoming a huge thing on steam everyone was saying they'd become the best thing about gaming, the way of the future and all that but I've yet to play one that wasn't terrible, and steam has taught me to be wary of anything that embraces the early access tag.

It's almost as if trusting nerds who have no higher force making them meet deadlines is a bad thing.

The Moon Monster
Dec 30, 2005

melon cat posted:

The Final Fantasy series seems to be quite bad with this sort of thing. I still remember the unskippable Summon spell animations in FF7 (is that what they were called? It has been a while). I don't know if it was an oversight from Square Enix, or an intentional (and self-indulgent) feature that they decided to keep. But it got really irritating really quickly. If I recall correctly, FF9's Eidolons were similarly repetitive.

Speaking of Square Enix and long crafting animations, how about that Tactics Ogre remake? Amazing game but everything about the crafting was terrible. Every time you crafted something you had to watch this little animation of a 5 pixel by 10 pixel cauldron jiggling. And to craft a finished product you'd have to watch the animation A LOT.

Say you wanted to craft an Ogre Slicer+1. To craft this you'd need 3 pieces of Wootz Steel. Wootz Steel is crafted from 2 Baldur ingots and a silver ingot. A Baldur ingot is crafted from 2 steel ingots and a Baldur crystal. A steel ingot is crafted from an iron ingot, charcoal and flux. An iron ingot is crafted from iron ore. Iron ore is crafted from low quality ore which is bought from a vendor.

I just made those formulas up, but high end items usually had dozens of steps with each one forcing you to watch that stupid jiggling cauldron every time. There was no way to, say, craft 5 irons bars at once. Each step also had a failure chance. For most ingredients it was only around 10%, but for the finished products it was often more like 45%. There was nothing to keep you from savescumming, but that just added to the tedium.

Then of course there was the way you actually got these recipes. High end recipes were mainly located it optional endgame dungeons. So you'd fight to the fifth floor of some dungeon where the enchiridion (book) containing the recipes could drop. Each floor had several layouts it's enemies could spawn in, so you savescum that floor until you find one with a female zombie standing on tile E7 or whatever. Then you savescum to kill that unit over and over until the 20% chance drop triggers. You have to kill it in a different way each time too, or else the rng will give you the same result.

Another clear indication that SE makes its games with the expectation people will be playing it with gamefaqs open, as there is no in game way to know that these recipe books exist at all, much less where you can find them or what drops them.

Rick_Hunter
Jan 5, 2004

My guys are still fighting the hard fight!
(weapons, shields and drones are still online!)

Nuebot posted:

This is a pretty big one dragging games down. I donated to Chroma Squad's kickstarter ages ago, they had planned the release for december 2013 according to their kickstarter.

A year later and they're still just occasionally chucking out a beta and stopped updating their supporters about the game at all. I fondly remember back when indie games first started becoming a huge thing on steam everyone was saying they'd become the best thing about gaming, the way of the future and all that but I've yet to play one that wasn't terrible, and steam has taught me to be wary of anything that embraces the early access tag.

Steam indie games are just like any other business that needs capital and you're the venture capitalist. It sucks that it makes you wary but that's really the risk when it comes to indie studios using kickstarter to fund their project. I think the model works but what it needs is more oversight so that less people are scammed and more games are made because they are setting milestones in the development process.

DStecks
Feb 6, 2012

Nuebot posted:

A year later and they're still just occasionally chucking out a beta and stopped updating their supporters about the game at all. I fondly remember back when indie games first started becoming a huge thing on steam everyone was saying they'd become the best thing about gaming, the way of the future and all that but I've yet to play one that wasn't terrible, and steam has taught me to be wary of anything that embraces the early access tag.

If you're actually saying here that you've never played a good indie game in the past 3 years, then either you haven't played any, have horrible judgement about what looks like a good game, or have horrible taste in games.

EDIT: Seriously, 2014 was the tipping point where there were officially more great indie games than great AAA games.

The Moon Monster
Dec 30, 2005

Rick_Hunter posted:

Steam indie games are just like any other business that needs capital and you're the venture capitalist. It sucks that it makes you wary but that's really the risk when it comes to indie studios using kickstarter to fund their project. I think the model works but what it needs is more oversight so that less people are scammed and more games are made because they are setting milestones in the development process.

I think the entire appeal of kickstarter for developers is lack of oversight. There's no principal investor to look at your project and say "this will never" work or force you to make compromises to actually get your product out the door.

There are plenty of good games from kickstarter though.

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Leal
Oct 2, 2009

a kitten posted:

Hahaha, I'm laughing because that's just terrible as hell.

Really everything about highend crafting and gathering drags the game down for me. Too much money and too punishing with failure rates; I love almost everything about the game, so it's a bummer that the crafting poo poo seems so mired in old, lovely game design.

Even fishing which I completely enjoyed leveling up to 50 went from a fun thing to do to "holy poo poo you need me to spend how much gil and do how many HQ double-leeches" to keep going. Oh well, just gonna set my sights a lot lower and very gradually and half-assedly work on it from here on out.

Whats really great is that even after investing all that money and time, then you have to deal with the turbonerds who have long since had everything maxed out and watches the market boards like a loving hawk, so you have to deal with them constantly undercutting you (at no penalty too, you can put an item on the market for free. That needs to be changed cause low effort undercuts like pricing 1 gil lower then you is rampant). Even better is that items you craft will have your name on them, so if you try to undercut someone you just might start getting harassed over it.

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