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I should probably play sleeping dogs again. What a banger of a game.
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Oct 19, 2020 08:51
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oldpainless posted:Of course yes the “designer” kept on making her tits more and more massive And of course, he didn't "have the heart" to tell him to stop. Like Tarantino doesn't have the heart to tell the actress to put some shoes on, the floor on the set is dirty.
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Oct 19, 2020 09:24
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I just got the platinum in God of War, and I really enjoyed the game, except for one thing when you're going to change realms. There are three realms marked with something like "Not available, Odin won't let you" or something to that effect. And its just like, oh, this is a Chekov's gun or something, you'll get to those realms and do something there for the end, and Odin will show up and start poo poo and then...nothing. You just beat the game and you never go there. Odin never even loving shows up, like this entire game is a set-up for the next one. gently caress you, lemme go there now!
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Oct 19, 2020 10:03
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tight aspirations posted:I think Sleeping Dogs' DLC was one of the impetuses for steam allowing you to selectively disable DLC, since - IIRC - it just gave you a bunch of money and police/triad XP right from the get-go. Did they change that in the Definitive Edition? Yeah the DE removes the XP bonuses. It also moves all the bonus outfits into a special shop where they're fairly expensive with decent face level requirements. You also no longer get the dlc guns in your safehouse. They're now tied to specific outfits. The dlc vehicles are tied to story progression now. The supercar missions unlock gradually so you don't get the actual car until almost at the end of the main story.
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Oct 19, 2020 10:30
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Mokinokaro posted:The supercar missions unlock gradually so you don't get the actual car until almost at the end of the main story. That is actually a shame because that vehicle is just so drat good. Sure, it's overpowered, but you are the one deciding if you want to use it.
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Oct 19, 2020 11:37
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Inspector Gesicht posted:Outside of Dead Space 2 what examples are there of DLC actively wrecking the progression of the game? I guess it's not quite DLC, but I bought some super-amazing-deluxe-everything-you-want version of AC: Odyssey the other week when it was on sale for like $20, and part of the package was purple tiered (which I can assume is the best) items that unlock at level 5. So I went from using garbage tier items at level 4, to Legendary (or whatever purple tier is called) at level 5. It was almost like gaining several levels in terms of power. I went from getting my rear end handed to me by that first mercenary who is tracking you on the starting island, to killing him without even trying with that gear on.
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Oct 19, 2020 14:43
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Inspector Gesicht posted:Superhot getting up its own rear end with the story gimmicks? You don't say. Somewhere there's a good joke about a game where you can control time having terrible pacing, but I'm still working my coffee. How anyone looked at Superhot and thought "yes, several minutes of downtime between these rather short levels is good for this game" I'll never know. Maybe they ran out of ideas for levels and felt they needed to pad the length.
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Oct 19, 2020 14:55
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I'm glad I'm not alone in hating everything about Superhot that isn't the actual gameplay. They could have just stuffed the thing with samey levels and I'd have been okay with it. I don't need super unique scenarios if the base game is fun enough. Speaking of which I've played over 300 hours of Slay. It's a very simple hex-based strategy game and there's nearly endless levels that all just blend together in my mind yet I still enjoyed playing most of them because the basic concept is fun enough to do over and over. The thing dragging it down is that I play on the highest difficulty and it's usually fun, but some levels are just a little too tightly tuned and the gameplay so simple that the correct strategy actually requires you to metagame and manipulate the AIs or else you just get overrun. Things like not taking land because it will make one opponent too weak and let another run rampant over them, or taking land in one area over another to direct AI, or even sacrifice your own land to boost up a weak enemy or get enemies into a conflict. It reminds me very much of starting as a small nation in EU4 where you basically have no real agency and just have to play in the shadow of the AI and hope you don't get crushed before you're strong enough to actually play the game. Those stages aren't much fun and require a lot of restarts figuring out which AIs grow out of control powerful if you don't do weird poo poo to stop it. I'm not sure it's possible to fix that problem in so simple a game though beyond just not making levels that hard. And it's really only a handful so for the most part they were successful in balancing. They just really stick out as being bad experiences. Phigs has a new favorite as of 15:22 on Oct 19, 2020 |
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Oct 19, 2020 15:18
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I get a little annoyed with soft caps on stats in games. Please tell me that adding more X to Y doesn't do anything instead of me being vaguely disappointed with what's happening and finding out there's a soft cap on Y from some article.
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Oct 19, 2020 15:24
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Manager Hoyden posted:I get a little annoyed with soft caps on stats in games. Please tell me that adding more X to Y doesn't do anything instead of me being vaguely disappointed with what's happening and finding out there's a soft cap on Y from some article. Any time you’re making a choice like that games really should give you a preview of what it’ll do. I’m sure there’s some games where obscuring that was planned for and it works; but in the general case when games fail to tell you that you’re throwing stat/skill points/money away it’s a complete accident at best or stunningly bad design at worst.
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Oct 19, 2020 15:31
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More role-playing should have options that it straight up tells you are useless. Homeopathy: Whether you invest 1 point or 10, it does absolutely nothing. Atheist: Wearing a fedora adds +1 to saving throws against deities, but -2 reputation with NPCs of the oppositie sex. Studied the Blade (Midfield Humes only): Your white skin-color no longer hampers your performance with a katana. Astral Settler: You have more money to spend, but lose it all because you lack perspective. +1 reputation with all Bartender NPCs. Inspector Gesicht has a new favorite as of 16:54 on Oct 19, 2020 |
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Oct 19, 2020 16:03
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GoutPatrol posted:I just got the platinum in God of War, and I really enjoyed the game, except for one thing when you're going to change realms. There are three realms marked with something like "Not available, Odin won't let you" or something to that effect. I wouldn't be surprised if those realms were originally meant as some kind of DLC that got canceled.
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Oct 19, 2020 16:18
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Inspector Gesicht posted:Homeopathy: Whether you invest 1 point or 10, it does absolutely nothing. But if you hack it somehow to only gain the merest fraction of a memory of an ability point, it becomes the strongest power.
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Oct 19, 2020 16:19
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Inspector Gesicht posted:More role-playing should have options that it straight up tells you are useless. Disco Elysium does this if you internalise the proto-facist Revacholian Nationhood thought - it provides modest bonuses only when you're drunk, and any time you take a Nationalist option in dialogue you take a point of Morale damage.
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Oct 19, 2020 16:26
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Manager Hoyden posted:I get a little annoyed with soft caps on stats in games. Please tell me that adding more X to Y doesn't do anything instead of me being vaguely disappointed with what's happening and finding out there's a soft cap on Y from some article. Binding of Isaac does this fairly regularly. Firing speed has a cap, but there's like six ways to break it, but each thing breaks it only to a certain level. Health caps at 12 with no indication until you try to get more. Money, keys, bombs all cap at 99 but let you keep picking up more.
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Oct 19, 2020 16:35
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Let's play a game of Will start skip this cutscene, or let me pause it? or Will skipping this line of dialogue skip the line of dialogue, or inexplicably cut like 5 minutes of cutscene as well?
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Oct 19, 2020 16:49
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The Resistance stat in Dark Souls is essentially useless. The devs seem to have realised this because the starting level of each character is based on the sum of their non-resistance stats, but they still left it in the game.
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Oct 19, 2020 16:49
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SubNat posted:Let's play a game of Does this button pause the cutscene, or skip it entirely? I appreciate games where, when you press any button during a cutscene, a little button prompt comes up in the corner, indicating 'HOLD TO SKIP'
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Oct 19, 2020 16:51
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Inspector Gesicht posted:
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Oct 19, 2020 17:02
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Oh, I just remembered an example of DLC ruining progression Fallout New Vegas You could get unique packs of weapons and supplies for pre-ordering the game from certain retailers, usually just a decent early game weapon, some ammo, and a set of okay armor, maybe a unique utility item or healing item. The legendary edition of the game, however, gives you all four packs by default straight from the moment you wake up. If you're playing hardcore one of the items more or less negates the thirst mechanic so long as it's in your inventory, and the sum total of the weaponry, armor, and healing items means you're pretty much set for the first few levels. If you're a new player it's way too much equipment to start out with and you might not have any idea what you were actually supposed to have. Taking it all as a given wrecks the balance of the opening hours of the game.
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Oct 19, 2020 17:18
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Overpowered, sure, but that grenade gun was the tits.
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Oct 19, 2020 17:20
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Riatsala posted:Oh, I just remembered an example of DLC ruining progression Those weren’t too bad since it was all stuff that was early-game gear but more durable. And the 20 gauge shotgun didn’t work with the shotgun surgeon perk because of an oversight, so that gun was actually worse than the standard one you’d find in the first town. The only thing that really hosed with the game was the flask, though thirst was by far the easiest of the survival bars to manage anyway (use any water source for one tick and bam, it’s all gone).
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Oct 19, 2020 18:15
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It did inundate you with a pile of items you had to sort through at the start of the game though. I think it might have even overburdened low strength characters.
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Oct 19, 2020 18:21
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I feel like all of the weapon and character mods in Control’s dlc areas are bad? They’re all things that trigger in very specific situations, and the bonuses aren’t much better, if at all, than the vanilla ones. I stuck with the health, health pickup, and telekinesis cost ones I got relatively early on through most of the game, because while I could be getting higher quality versions of those more, I wasn’t because the DLC areas don’t want to drop them.
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Oct 19, 2020 18:49
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You want Health Regen on Launch and HP/Energy recharge personal mods. Weapon mods are specific to the type but now with the DLCs there is at least one super OP mod for each.
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Oct 19, 2020 19:24
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Phigs posted:It did inundate you with a pile of items you had to sort through at the start of the game though. I think it might have even overburdened low strength characters. As a new player, that was my experience. Overwhelmed with a bunch of items and quests at the start. I'd travelling to the quest marker and then they'd tell me that I'm too low of a level.
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Oct 19, 2020 19:44
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like many poorly implemented crafting/modding mechanics, virtually none of control's weapon mods are as useful as the ones that just make a thing die faster
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Oct 19, 2020 19:55
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The Dragon Ball Kakarot DLC can easily make you so powerful, it's not funny. With about an hour of work, you can get Goku and Vegeta both to Super Saiyan God. The way the DLC works is that it's in an entirely separate area you access from the menu, so as soon as you finish the first fight, you can go get diety level power, and normally the game restricts your transformations. Not with those; you can go SSJ3 on Raditz if you want. It also gives you items to boost your EXP to gain levels, so you can power level anybody you want.
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Oct 19, 2020 20:13
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Oxxidation posted:like many poorly implemented crafting/modding mechanics, virtually none of control's weapon mods are as useful as the ones that just make a thing die faster yeah seeing a chest in some weird spot and knowing I'd have to do a jumping dash hover puzzle or maybe punch a hole in a wall to get to it just didn't seem worth it the like fifth time I got a plus one to shotgun pellet grouping power up that I'd break down to get one percent of the currency necessary to pay a glittering hole in reality to produce a new level of plus one to shotgun pellet power up power ups.
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Oct 19, 2020 20:36
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A lot of those mods were just bafflingly useless. Like "increased ammo regen when taking damage" would be pretty bad already, but then they took it to the next level by making it only when taking damage from a specific enemy.
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Oct 19, 2020 23:42
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The Moon Monster posted:I guess when I think of mainstream games I think of stuff like Assassin's Creed or CoD that basically play themselves for you on the default difficulty, and to be fair AAA games seem to be getting away from that somewhat. Hell Monster Hunter became super popular recently, although I don't know how many people stick with that long enough to get to the challenging stuff. See, I think that's overly reductive. Even the biggest franchise games rarely "play themselves" outside of the easiest difficulties available. CJacobs posted:This thread annoys me sometimes because people constantly build up these fake human beings in their heads and then write a 500 word post tearing down the fake hypothetical argument that nobody in the thread made, and then sit back and fold their arms like "so THERE". How about you respond to people actually posting in this thread first before coming up with some spooky boogeyman lurking in the shadows whispering about how they beat Dark Souls without summoning or whatev, criminy. This video game difficulty setting thing is so tiring because very few people are actually arguing in favor or against it, it's just two sides ramping it up to the biggest strawman they can think of to get sick owns on people who are not posting in the thread The thing is...I have literally seen people describe summoning as "easy mode" before. Maybe not always in an explicitly dickish way, admittedly, sometimes moreso to say "I prefer the extra challenge of fighting every boss solo" but it's not exactly uncommon? Similarly I have noticed plenty of casual Dark Souls chat where folks act sheepish or guilty when they admit to doing XYZ thing the "easy way". (Hell, I've literally done it myself before though I was explicitly doing a challenge run.) A classic argument that would regularly come up in ye olde "Dark Souls should have an easy mode" discussions is that it already has an easy mode...you just <list of 100 different weapons, items, builds, tricks, tactics, """"optional"""" mechanics> and then the game is a pushover! Even the shield thing isn't some made up epic pwn. Sometimes people overcorrect from "spending the entire game hiding behind your shield is a terrible, tedious way to play the game, consider not doing that" to "using a shield at all is for dumb garbage idiots, gently caress armor too, go nude and dodge everything wheee!". And yeah, it's rarely a dead serious "if you use a shield at all, uninstall" type of thing but it does still carry a whiff of "maybe once you figure out to actually play Dark Souls for real you'll take those training wheels off  ".I did exaggerate for the sake of snark, you got me. But...not actually by much. Ugly In The Morning posted:Any time you’re making a choice like that games really should give you a preview of what it’ll do. I’m sure there’s some games where obscuring that was planned for and it works; but in the general case when games fail to tell you that you’re throwing stat/skill points/money away it’s a complete accident at best or stunningly bad design at worst. Soft caps are especially tricky though because even when information is given in a relatively clear way (Dark Souls) unless you've been paying attention to the exact amount of +numbers you've been getting from any given stat it's incredibly easy to miss that, say, Endurance used to give 2 stamina per point but now it's only giving 1. And of course for added "fun" it's not like every stat is going to adhere to an identical progression/soft cap/hard cap schema.
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Oct 20, 2020 00:08
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SubNat posted:Let's play a game of Queue me reloading by muscle memory right after landing the last hit on the final boss and skipping part of the ending.
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Oct 20, 2020 04:49
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Mass Effect Andromeda has 1-9 mapped to using powers, but ~ mapped to opening the debug console (which locks out all controls). On my keyboard, ~ is next to 1, so I used to die in fights all the time. I ended up having to download some windows app that would disable the ~ key at the OS level before I could play the game properly.
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Oct 20, 2020 06:42
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Jokymi posted:Reminds me of the first time I played Mass Effect 2. Reload & skip cutscene are bound to the same button. And also the 'go to next line in conversation' button is the same as 'select next conversation option'.
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Oct 20, 2020 13:46
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Morpheus posted:And also the 'go to next line in conversation' button is the same as 'select next conversation option'. 
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Oct 20, 2020 14:42
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John Murdoch posted:See, I think that's overly reductive. Even the biggest franchise games rarely "play themselves" outside of the easiest difficulties available. I didn't mean the literally played themselves, but there are plenty of games where you can win without ever thinking about any sort of strategy or engaging with the systems beyond the most surface level. On the default difficulty in CoD the extreme checkpointing and strong health regen means you can just move forward while clicking heads and pressing F on objective markers without thinking of, for example, how to best utilize your guns, what's going on in the environment, or what kind of enemies you're fighting. Does Assassins Creed even have difficulty levels? To be fair I haven't played Greece or Egypt which I guess are a bit different but in the older ones you pretty much just hold down the action buttons and tilt the stick in the right direction. You could put down the controller in the middle of a crowd of enemies and the auto-parrying and health regen would keep you alive indefinitely. We definitely hit "peak easy" awhile ago though, so the average mainstream game has been getting harder (or at least has gotten harder) since the whole Dark Souls git gud thing emerged.
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Oct 20, 2020 15:27
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The Moon Monster posted:I didn't mean the literally played themselves, but there are plenty of games where you can win without ever thinking about any sort of strategy or engaging with the systems beyond the most surface level. On the default difficulty in CoD the extreme checkpointing and strong health regen means you can just move forward while clicking heads and pressing F on objective markers without thinking of, for example, how to best utilize your guns, what's going on in the environment, or what kind of enemies you're fighting. Does Assassins Creed even have difficulty levels? To be fair I haven't played Greece or Egypt which I guess are a bit different but in the older ones you pretty much just hold down the action buttons and tilt the stick in the right direction. You could put down the controller in the middle of a crowd of enemies and the auto-parrying and health regen would keep you alive indefinitely. I guess maybe I'm just not up to date on the later installments of those franchises because those don't sound anything like the ones I have played. 
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Oct 20, 2020 20:30
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I think nowadays the discussion around difficulty is more nuanced than simply whether a game's going to be easy or hard. There are a lot more dials you can give to the player to adjust things to how they like, and there's a lot you can do in the game itself to modulate difficulty. There are even options like making failure fun or taking the sting out of it- Hades is a good example, when you die it's not so bad because you get to go back to the hub and have new conversations with characters and see what new stuff you can unlock, and it provides a little rest before you try again. Or in a game like Crusader Kings II (and III though I haven't played it yet) you can happily drive a dynasty into the ground, weaving a tale of misfortune and calamity. (This is also increasingly a thing in tabletop RPGs, the concept of "failing forward".) One thing that's happened is now games are actually more transparent about what their difficulty means. In classic DOOM you get your choice of difficulty but the game doesn't tell you what they mean- now games will say "Hard gives enemies more health and they appear more often, Very Hard makes them hit harder", etc.
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Oct 20, 2020 20:57
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I loved the last two Assassin's Creed games, but I am so put off by the viking setting of the next one that I think I'm going to skip it. Little thing dragging this game that hasn't even been released down.
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Oct 20, 2020 21:51
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| # ? May 9, 2024 12:36 |
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Maxwell Lord posted:I think nowadays the discussion around difficulty is more nuanced than simply whether a game's going to be easy or hard. There are a lot more dials you can give to the player to adjust things to how they like, and there's a lot you can do in the game itself to modulate difficulty. There are even options like making failure fun or taking the sting out of it- Hades is a good example, when you die it's not so bad because you get to go back to the hub and have new conversations with characters and see what new stuff you can unlock, and it provides a little rest before you try again. Or in a game like Crusader Kings II (and III though I haven't played it yet) you can happily drive a dynasty into the ground, weaving a tale of misfortune and calamity. (This is also increasingly a thing in tabletop RPGs, the concept of "failing forward".) Yep. I really liked how Fallen Order showed what its settings meant in terms of response time, enemy damage, etc.
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Oct 20, 2020 22:07
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