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explosivo
May 23, 2004

Fueled by Satan

StrixNebulosa posted:

I like to own games, instead of rent them. I have no desire to see the Blockbuster model for video games return to my household.

I wish my Blockbuster let me rent as many games (that they had stocked) as I wanted and play them for as long as I wanted to without ever having to return them as long as I paid them a flat rate every month. I had to pay my rental place that amount essentially every week to play one game.

I do get where you're coming from, but I think it's nowhere close to the standard rental business model that we were forced to go through as kids. I think it's a pretty good companion subscription to have to let me discover tons of games that I would have otherwise never played. Do you pay for Netflix/Hulu/Spotify/other streaming apps?

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StrixNebulosa
Feb 14, 2012

You cheated not only the game, but yourself.
But most of all, you cheated BABA

explosivo posted:

I wish my Blockbuster let me rent as many games (that they had stocked) as I wanted and play them for as long as I wanted to without ever having to return them as long as I paid them a flat rate every month. I had to pay my rental place that amount essentially every week to play one game.

I do get where you're coming from, but I think it's nowhere close to the standard rental business model that we were forced to go through as kids. I think it's a pretty good companion subscription to have to let me discover tons of games that I would have otherwise never played. Do you pay for Netflix/Hulu/Spotify/other streaming apps?

No, I don't. I see the comparison, but I also prefer to have my things on DVDs (well, blurays now...) It would be a good example otherwise! My folks have netflix and love it, and if they were into games they'd use gamepass. I'm just a hoarder of media I love, so, well. No gamepass for me!

explosivo
May 23, 2004

Fueled by Satan

StrixNebulosa posted:

No, I don't. I see the comparison, but I also prefer to have my things on DVDs (well, blurays now...) It would be a good example otherwise! My folks have netflix and love it, and if they were into games they'd use gamepass. I'm just a hoarder of media I love, so, well. No gamepass for me!

Fair enough! I think it works particularly well for folks like me who have trouble finishing whole games without moving onto the next thing so I'm willing to pay the price to try stuff out without the pressure of needing to get an idea of it's something I want to play in the 2 hours before the refund window closes up.

Scalding Coffee
Jun 26, 2006

You're already dead

goferchan posted:

IRL hunting is cool but I feel bad about killing real animals
Would you feel better if you could hunt just invasive species that are destroying the environment?

Hub Cat
Aug 3, 2011

Trunk Lover

I think its v nice to have Steam to buy games to keep and also the option of a bunch of subscription services I can take advantage of to play games I'm only going to play through once without buying them at full price.

I'm sure we're only a year or two from somebody ruining it by making their games exclusively subscription, wacky tiers, ever-growing subscription prices or something else but its great(for me personally) right now.

Hub Cat fucked around with this message at 22:56 on Dec 11, 2020

Gromit
Aug 15, 2000

I am an oppressed White Male, Asian women wont serve me! Save me Campbell Newman!!!!!!!

D1E posted:

The first person to quote this post will get a FREE Steam key for THE BEAST INSIDE via PM.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/792300/The_Beast_Inside/

Happy Friday!

Is it me!?

Antigravitas
Dec 8, 2019

Die Rettung fuer die Landwirte:

StrixNebulosa posted:

wait wait wait X4 is good now? As in, actually good?

I think it's pretty cool. It doesn't have X3:TC's plots and cool poo poo like the Hub, but it has a much quicker path to getting a few million in the bank so you can build a station and have a few miners and trade ships.

In a lot of aspects it wins in comparison to X3. Station building is much, much better; fleets work better, carriers actually work, factions can lose gain and lose sectors, a lot more of the economy is actually simulated so you can weaken a faction by blowing up their trade ships or miners (very useful against the Xenon). The map is much better and more like an RTS map.

The space legs part is pretty auxiliary, but it does succeed in making the ridiculous scale of stations more apparent.



That's me standing on the landing pad next to a single fast unarmed shuttle on my defense station. That plasma turret is as big as my shuttle. The tiny little thing being lit up is a Xenon capital ship disappearing in a hail of plasma. I could stand there for hours and watch Xenon get zapped.

Ugly In The Morning
Jul 1, 2010
Pillbug

Rusty posted:

I did gamepass for like a year and never played anything on it but I tend to just play a couple games at a time and just buy them so I can play at my leisure. Even at a dollar I didn't feel like I got my money's worth, so certainly not paying $10 or whatever it is now. I also just hate the xbox app, I would rather play all the free games I get off epic than use that thing.

:same:

Also the download speeds on the Microsoft store are way worse than they are on Steam for some reason, and the file management is always hosed up.

The 7th Guest
Dec 17, 2003

Hub Cat posted:

I think its v nice to have Steam to buy games to keep and also the option of a bunch of subscription services I can take advantage of to play games I'm only going to play through once without buying them at full price.

I'm sure we're only a year or two from somebody ruining it by making their games exclusively subscription, wacky tiers, ever-growing subscription prices or something else but its great(for me personally) right now.
wouldn't be surprised if Amazon tried it for their streaming service. they had done the 'exclusive anime' thing with anime strike (which cost extra on top of amazon prime) until backlash happened

Rusty
Sep 28, 2001
Dinosaur Gum

Ugly In The Morning posted:

:same:

Also the download speeds on the Microsoft store are way worse than they are on Steam for some reason, and the file management is always hosed up.
The file management is awful, the app sometimes has trouble loading some content, the account management is awful and sometimes you have to go to a website for things and sometimes it's in the app. I think it's also funny that out of the beta to whatever they call it now, nothing has really changed, maybe it crashes less. I just refuse to use it at this point and buying games on steam works fine. I thought Microsoft said they were removing the weird file installing directory that is not standard, but doesn't seem like anything ever came of that announcement.

Kibayasu
Mar 28, 2010

StrixNebulosa posted:

wait wait wait X4 is good now? As in, actually good?

You may be thinking of X Rebirth which was the fourth X game but wasn’t called X4 but then they made a fifth X and called it X4.

The Chad Jihad
Feb 24, 2007


There's a ton of games that are worth playing but aren't worth owning; gamepass has saved me a toooon of money so far. Like, Metro Last Light was a good game I enjoyed but I'm never going to play it again. gently caress, I'm just now noticing it has the Yakuza's too. I'm sure they'll move to profit-seeking mode sooner or later and jack the price to hell but as it currently is, and at the rate new games get added, the value gained is just catastrophically outweighing the cost. Signing up was legitimately one of the best gaming decisions I've ever made

Picayune
Feb 26, 2007

cannot be unseen
Taco Defender
So, uh, Ark II! Starring Vin Diesel and a whole bunch of cheap-rear end strawberry-jello blood goo!

The gently caress. Didn't the first Ark just come out of early access like a year ago? And there was that Pixark thing? I mean, I like Ark well enough - for all that it's a jank-rear end mess you can tame and ride dinosaurs and that's good times - but that trailer is kinda dire.

municipal shrimp
Mar 30, 2011

Rage McDougal posted:


Is is fair to describe RDR2 as having those two components? And if so, how much does the latter get in the way of enjoying the former?

I have alsmot 50 hours in RDR2 and I haven't even completed the tutorial missions yet. Once you finish the prologue the game just let's you loose in the world and you can go do anything you want. I was hesitant after gta 5 which has a lively world but not a whole lot to do in it but RDR2 feels like it was made by a different company all together. I've just been riding around following treasure maps, hunting, gambling, exploring and I feel like I haven't even seen half the map yet. As you ride along roads and paths you'll encounter random events that give a ton of life to the world. I've only seen one or two of them repeat and some of them are location specific. I did this all after only doing one or two short story missions.

explosivo
May 23, 2004

Fueled by Satan

Picayune posted:

So, uh, Ark II! Starring Vin Diesel and a whole bunch of cheap-rear end strawberry-jello blood goo!

The gently caress. Didn't the first Ark just come out of early access like a year ago? And there was that Pixark thing? I mean, I like Ark well enough - for all that it's a jank-rear end mess you can tame and ride dinosaurs and that's good times - but that trailer is kinda dire.

Lol the gently caress? I saw these shots of Vin Diesel on twitter but had no idea this was for a sequel to Ark :psyduck:

Palpek
Dec 27, 2008


Do you feel it, Zach?
My coffee warned me about it.


The Chad Jihad posted:

There's a ton of games that are worth playing but aren't worth owning; gamepass has saved me a toooon of money so far. Like, Metro Last Light was a good game I enjoyed but I'm never going to play it again. gently caress, I'm just now noticing it has the Yakuza's too. I'm sure they'll move to profit-seeking mode sooner or later and jack the price to hell but as it currently is, and at the rate new games get added, the value gained is just catastrophically outweighing the cost. Signing up was legitimately one of the best gaming decisions I've ever made
Yep, same. It also lets me check out smaller promising gorgeous games that I would otherwise contemplate buying but in the end probably never play like Unto the End, Call of the Sea and Morkredd this month.

Hell, they just added Greedfall and I was thinking about buying it during the Black Firday sale. Game Pass owns.

municipal shrimp
Mar 30, 2011

Game pass is a much better deal these days than it was a year ago because of the quality of games they've added to it. A year ago it barely had any AAA games and these days it seems to be adding a new big game every week. They just added Dragon Quest 11 and Doom Eternal.

Fruits of the sea
Dec 1, 2010

A subscription service may work for me at some point (probably if I have kids into gaming) but my habit of exhaustively playing a specific 2-5 year old game for several months, possibly with a bunch of mods isn’t a great combo.

Also looking at what I played this year, I would have needed to subscribe to Gamepass, EA and Humble lol.

Hub Cat
Aug 3, 2011

Trunk Lover

The 7th Guest posted:

wouldn't be surprised if Amazon tried it for their streaming service. they had done the 'exclusive anime' thing with anime strike (which cost extra on top of amazon prime) until backlash happened

I would be concerned about Amazon if any of their gaming stuff panned out at all, they have the capital and capacity to bully their way into the market but everything they touch falls flat :lol:

Hub Cat fucked around with this message at 00:58 on Dec 12, 2020

pentyne
Nov 7, 2012
ho-boy, I'm gonna try and review/defend/explain The Outer Worlds

So, from my perspective, every time I see the game mentioned here people talk about it like it killed their pet. Going from casual goon opinion the game is a monumental gently caress-up of a game that isn't worth watching a trailer for.

The worst part of this, is I can kinda agree with them depending on their perspective. To elaborate, Obsidian has a pretty storied history with writing and games, so there are certain expectations for what they put out. Fallout New Vegas is still one of the best examples of a free roaming dialogue/action RPG and despite the bugs/glitches almost everyone agrees its easily GOTY all years and a 80-100 hr game from even a moderately deep play-through.

Outer Worlds is not that, not by a long shot. The best comparison I can give is that the development of the game was inspired by Fallout 3/NV, but also Borderlands, and the resulting mashup plucked ideas from each game and threw them in half-baked to a decent/serviceable raypunk setting game. The dialogue system has tons of options, based on skills and stats, making it seem like different builds will have wildly different options. The combat is 4 max weapons equipped, 5 different damage types, and geared towards more of a full auto circle strafe type of combat then a calculated sniper approach. You see the skeleton of what made those 2 games wildly successful in OW but not the depth or flexibility.

The weapon system is pretty basic. There's 12-15 ranged weapon types, about the same melee types. Variety comes from being able to equip mods, and that weapons have levels that determine their damage. The armor system is very similar, with armor sets have bonuses to skills that make make you prefer light over heavy gear. It's saving grace is that it is very easy to figure out, breakdown is quick, repair all is easy, and you can unlock the Tinker ability to simply pay cash to level up your weapon for convenience.

Overall? The weapon/armor system is one of the simplest I've seen in this kind of game, and it at best doesn't hold you back or make it artificially difficult by having to grind until you can find the right gear to raise your DPS. There's 3 ammo types, light/heavy/energy, and if you play the game as people typically do looting everything you can find you'll have thousands of rounds at any given time unless you only use full auto weapons like mini-guns or flamethrowers. There are tons of mods you find and many of them will change your damage type of your weapon so enemy resistances aren't a real problem.

The dialogue/skills are definitely a "highlight" if not the major focus of the game. Almost every conversation is going to have a persuade/lie/intimidate option at some point, and the stats like perception & intelligence show up as well albeit with less frequency. I'm pretty sure I was able to skip huge swaths of combat from focusing heavily on non-combat skills. There are other skills like Leadership you level to improve your companions that make them insanely effective, almost trivializing the game on normal, Tech skills that effect your ability to break down/use science weapons, etc. It's varied up enough that early on you'll be making tough decisions on what to level as the benefit from raising some stats up to the "added benefit" threshold is greater then being able to pass skill checks. For every 20 points, you unlock a passive ability, and even some skills you'll never use benefit just from that first passive ability. All in all, the meat of the game is clearly focused on this aspect. It really feels like this was supposed to be fleshed out more and get much more focused before the combat was put to more of a Borderlands style.

The story/setting. The word I've seen repeated ad nauseam is "bland". I disagree, but I'd say its overall decent only because I love the retro futuristic aesthetic. There's some bits of brilliance here and there but its mostly down to good writing for the NPCs you run around with. The main story is just kind of "uh, okay I guess?". The part that people really hate is how the whole "both sides" thing comes into effect during the major story missions. The game setting is a capitalistic hellhole where if you kill yourself, the company punishes your coworkers for "destruction of property" and docks their wages, so you can imagine how political some people's opinions will be for this game. The both sides bullshit comes down to making a major choice in siding either with the corporate entities or the freedom fighters. It's not enough you smash the system, they have to make the rebels cripplingly stupid or moronic with some major flaw to make siding with them a "decision". It was executed is such a dumb and clumsy manner it was almost embarrassing to see.

So, why did I keep playing this game?

Well, even going in pretty deep on side-quests and trying to get everything the game was ~20 hrs. There was no sense of grinding or wasting time traveling from point A to B everything quest wise went off quick and easy so it felt like I was seeing progression from everything I was doing. Fast travel was super convenient and vendors/workbenches were always easy enough to find to unload gear and fix things. The combat, when I bothered to engage enemies, was fun when sniping from a distance and spamming the companion special attacks over and over. What really kept me going were some features that were so well implemented they should be mandatory for future games like this.

Companions: You get six companions, all sufficiently varied in appearance and personality. Equipping them is a matter of giving them 1 gun, 1 melee, and armor/helmet from the inventory screen. They take no ammo so you can give them high ammo cost weapons without worry. The biggest benefit is having party members gives you a flat bonus to your inventory weight, and a possible major skill bonus. Party members have ~4 skills they level up automatically in that give a bonus to the player in the party. Leveling up the leadership skills raise that bonus, so its possible for party members to give you a boost of 25-30 points in a skill. Having 2 party members with the lockpick skill will give you a boost of almost 50. It frees up a ton of skill options and encourages you to swap party members around. All in all its such a streamlined feature and a massive improvement over how it was done for the Fallout games. They also each get a special attack ability that you can activate with a special animation that does that livens up combat quite a bit.

Inventory: Set up in categories, easy to swap between, hassle free and icon/grid based so no scrolling through dozens of text lines to find what you need. You get tons of junk but its extremely easy to manage the inventory glut. For the health/food items, your healing item has 3 unlockable slots you can add those items to, so each time you heal you get the other effects too. It's also super convenient because when those slots empty they automatically refill from a health/food item that causes the same effect. If you have a dozen different items that are all +10% to melee damage it will keep cycling through them as you consume them without you having to manually do it.

The leveling/perks: Nothing fancy or complicated, you can easily figure out what skill points will do what. The perks are pretty simple and not gated by any other restrictions, just things you'd take to accommodate your play style. The character screen will display both your current skills, your current bonus, and the source of the bonus. So if you need Persuade 75 you can add the party members you need and then confirm in the screen you're boosted skill is 75+.

Story: You see a lot of potential different outcomes and do feel like you're charting a unique course as you play. The companion dialogue is good and there's enough inter-party conversations while you wander it always feels like they are actively involved in the game with you. They interject during conversations fairly often as well. The small stuff you discover and encounter brings life to the dystopia around you and is usually much more interesting to read about then the grand adventure you're on. The companion quests are also fun, as you can kind of guide them down the good/evil path by encouraging certain outcomes.

All in all, it's playable, but it's absolutely not the game I expected from Obsidian. Had I come off of Fallout NV and someone tried to sell me on Outer Worlds as New Vegas in space and I bought it based on that I'd lose all respect for that person's opinion. I had fun playing a lockpick/hack/persuade character and managed to walk through the last level without a single combat encounter until the forced boss fight, and only then because I didn't have hack 100 to skip it. What occurred to me the most is that the game would've benefited massively from having a tighter focus and being more of a survival/rogue-like. The Supernova difficult has a lot of features that support that, but I'm not amped enough about the game to replay it.

So, its it worth it? At $60 I say absolutely not. I got it on sale for $30, and that seems like a good deal. It has the feeling of what you expect a $40 surprisingly good game from a new studio/mid tier developer rather then the product of a legendary game studio. The biggest limitation to me is the combat wasn't that much fun, so if I did want to play-through it again I'd probably do story mode so I could do the low INT "dumb" character for the gimmick of see how that worked without worrying about combat.

pentyne fucked around with this message at 01:37 on Dec 12, 2020

Wiltsghost
Mar 27, 2011


Speaking of game pass I cancelled it last month, loaded it up just now, and got 3 months of game pass ultimate for 1 dollar. Seems like a pretty good deal.

CharlieFoxtrot
Mar 27, 2007

organize digital employees



Any thoughts on Per Aspera?

https://twitter.com/PerAsperaGame/status/1334541136136900611

Arsenic Lupin
Apr 12, 2012

This particularly rapid💨 unintelligible 😖patter💁 isn't generally heard🧏‍♂️, and if it is🤔, it doesn't matter💁.


Did Humble ever provide a way to navigate through the enormous number of games/shoveljunk that wound up being included in the bundle? Or is it just paging through until your fingers fall off?

Peaceful Anarchy
Sep 18, 2005
sXe
I am the math man.

Arsenic Lupin posted:

Did Humble ever provide a way to navigate through the enormous number of games/shoveljunk that wound up being included in the bundle? Or is it just paging through until your fingers fall off?
There's a search filter and a revealed keys filter. Not sure what else you could expect.

HopperUK
Apr 29, 2007

Why would an ambulance be leaving the hospital?

Arsenic Lupin posted:

Did Humble ever provide a way to navigate through the enormous number of games/shoveljunk that wound up being included in the bundle? Or is it just paging through until your fingers fall off?

Do you mean the itch bundle? There are a few articles and websites here and there and there's a forum thread on SA though I don't have a link, I'm afraid.

Hub Cat
Aug 3, 2011

Trunk Lover

If you mean the itch blm bundle they added a search box. To find what to play there is a pretty comprehensive spreadsheet that lists by genre and a million other things https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1cbOqO6rq0YYWPKmci8Pgv4YGWcl4NQUX9EAj221Ze30/edit#gid=782418878

and this website here too:https://randombundlegame.com/browse

Hub Cat fucked around with this message at 06:53 on Dec 12, 2020

Arsenic Lupin
Apr 12, 2012

This particularly rapid💨 unintelligible 😖patter💁 isn't generally heard🧏‍♂️, and if it is🤔, it doesn't matter💁.


Thanks, I did mean the itch bundle (started to say itch and corrected to Humble, who knows why), and a search box is exactly what I wanted when it came out.

Jokymi
Jan 31, 2003

Sweet Sassy Molassy
In regards to Game Pass: sign up for Microsoft rewards and look up the Rewards Automator app.

You just have to remember to push one button a day and it will do a bunch of Bing searches automatically that will get you enough points for Game Pass.

I'm sure its not something that will work forever, but I've been using Game Pass for over a year and haven't paid anything beyond the initial $1.

twistedmentat
Nov 21, 2003

Its my party
and I'll die if
I want to
If Ark 2 just gives better building options and updates dino designs to be in line with current paleoart, I'll be pretty happy. Gimme a chonky Meglodon rather than just a big great white.

Also i realized back a few pages I asked about the expansion for Terraforming Mars, when I meant Surviving Mars's expansion.

Borrowed Ladder
May 4, 2007

monarch of the sleeping marches
On the old Yakuza games, are there any mechanics present that are better than in 0? I played probably half of 0, and it is fun, but it did feel a bit repetitive and the dialogue scenes were too long sometimes. If the only thing that's better about the older ones is story i probably won't dip in.

gimme the GOD DAMN candy
Jul 1, 2007
0 has the best story in the series, so if that part isn't grabbing you the other games probably won't, either.

Rebel Blob
Mar 1, 2008

Extinction for our time

CharlieFoxtrot posted:

Any thoughts on Per Aspera?
Disappointing, unfortunately. The gameplay is all about logistics but has some painful problems with its balance, something that at least the developers seem to be working on with patches. Deposits of materials run out far too quickly and are spread around unevenly. Leading, for example in my playthrough, water being an enormous bottleneck in my production chains because the majority of ice deposits ended up under the terraformed oceans. And ice mines are the only way to produce water, can't do anything with the oceans you create. It is easy to fall into a failure spiral if vital supply chains break or you run out of raw materials without the resources to stretch your base to new deposits. There is also an unpleasant amount of micromanagement, trying to get your rovers (which move all resources in the game besides colonists) to prioritize where you need them.

The end-game is also pretty lacking as the terraforming doesn't change things. You can turn the surface of Mars green, but the change is mostly cosmetic, with some effects on the atmosphere. Even when you introduce plants and animals on the surface (which you can't see), you still are forced to rely on chemical and water mines that feed into food factories for you colonists. The last hours of a playthrough are just putting the game on maximum speed as you finish out the research tree and build the last major projects needed to win. Finally, there is a rather extraneous combat system, which can completely derail your playthrough when you are first attacked if you don't prepare for it. It is both simplistic and poorly balanced, every fight is one-sided and comes down to throwing enough resources into combat drone construction until you can overwhelm the enemy.

It isn't as bad as I've made it sound, as I've focused on the negatives. I also do hope that the developers can fix some of the problems. For a strategy game, it has an interesting introspective storyline as your character, an AI created to terraform Mars, figures out its existence. For example, what is the primary mission directive? What mission control back on Earth says? Protecting the human colonists? Or terraforming Mars? The gameplay itself isn't bad either, just poorly balanced and doesn't adapt as conditions on Mars radically change.

CharlieFoxtrot
Mar 27, 2007

organize digital employees



Thanks for the write-up!

Rebel Blob posted:

It isn't as bad as I've made it sound, as I've focused on the negatives. I also do hope that the developers can fix some of the problems. For a strategy game, it has an interesting introspective storyline as your character, an AI created to terraform Mars, figures out its existence. For example, what is the primary mission directive? What mission control back on Earth says? Protecting the human colonists? Or terraforming Mars? The gameplay itself isn't bad either, just poorly balanced and doesn't adapt as conditions on Mars radically change.

Yeah, it's the story stuff that had me interested. Maybe I'll wait until it's on sale and also balanced

FastestGunAlive
Apr 7, 2010

Dancing palm tree.
Fellow Project Wingman pilots: can you earn money for the campaign with free missions? I’m like three missions from the end and there’s no way you can earn enough to buy all planes or even one of the top tier options in one playthrough

HerpicleOmnicron5
May 31, 2013

How did this smug dummkopf ever make general?


FastestGunAlive posted:

Fellow Project Wingman pilots: can you earn money for the campaign with free missions? I’m like three missions from the end and there’s no way you can earn enough to buy all planes or even one of the top tier options in one playthrough

Yes. You're not expected to get every plane in even two full playthroughs.

MonkeyforaHead
Apr 7, 2006


God, you vindictive bitch, why can't I ever have any "me" time

Mierenneuker posted:

On one hand I’m glad that Dungeon of the Endless is getting a follow up, on the other hand it looks like it plays differently from the original, and it didn’t stand out from all the horde shooters at the Game Awards.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ER3dOPx0ZH0

Also, the followup/spinoff to Dungeon of the Endless being called Endless Dungeon is both asinine and confusing as hell to someone not in the loop.

nordichammer
Oct 11, 2013
On quite the streak, I beat Moonlighter today.

This game is gorgeous. The music, sprite work, and small touch animations are among some of the best I have ever experienced. They serve as a warm, revenant coat of paint.

Unfortunately, that coat of paint is applied to a fairly mediocre vehicle. The game is half action dungeon crawl, half merchant simulator. The basic gameplay loop is explore a dungeon, sell loot via active sequence in your store, upgrade weapon and armor, repeat until you knock out the 4 dungeons. While that may sound reductive, I think that it is reflective of the gameplay depth.

For the dungeon parts, you carry two weapons, three pieces of armor, two rings, and some potions on you. There are 6ish different weapon types, and all weapons in each class are functionally identical. The weapons types do vary in attack style, but ultimately I felt that it didn't matter. There was little reason to care about the advantages or disadvantages for each weapon type. All of the stats for each tier of weapon were close enough together and the upgrades were drastic enough that you only cared about upgrading a weapon instead of maximizing output with a specific type. The most I thought about different weapons was needing a short and a long range weapon. Beyond that, I just upgraded the two types that I had resources for. The armor and rings are less divergent. There are drawbacks to consider if you don't just want vanilla defense, but they are minimal enough not to care.

The combat also doesn't help because it's not deep enough to care either. You get a dodge roll, a standard attack, and a special attack that varies a bit more per weapon. Most special moves cannot be chained into, so combat is just spamming standard attack and rolling occasionally. With the exception of some bosses (even vanilla versions don't necessarily apply), enemies are fairly predictable. On one hand, I am thankful for not being challenged with a limited tool set. On the other, things became rote fairly quickly. Thankfully you heal right before a boss on each floor, so you are given the liberty to turn your brain off for the most part.

You explore the dungeons to beat the big boss after the third floor of each of the 4 dungeon in order to get a MacGuffin. To get to that point, you sell the items you find in your dungeon in your store. You set items on your sale tables, manually set the price, and open the store for customers to come purchase in real time. Each item has it's static going prices that customers will pay. You try to find the sweet spot that customers will buy, and roll with that. There is a changing market, kind of. If you sell an item below its sweet spot price, you raise demand for it, and vice versa. You can manipulate demand, but again the reward for doing so is so minimal it's not worth engaging in the system at all.

This further diminishes the dungeon delving because all of the items, with very select exceptions, that you get in the procedurally generating floors boil down to money. Your upgrades come slowly and are unexciting. If it was so unexciting, why did I stick with it for 20 hours? Well, its presentation is extremely charming. I wanted to enjoy it more, and I played in hopes that I could convince myself to do so (also I have the brain worms that don't let me leave things uncompleted without guilt). Was the journey worth the disappointment of the destination? Probably not, but I say that having beaten it anyway.

I also had the DLC, so I gave it a look. It basically adds another dungeon that is nearly as long as three of the other dungeons combined. There are also new weapons, armor, and shop upgrades. However, it was more of the same. Well, more of the same with worse grinding. The dungeon's gimmick is having health buffed versions of previous enemies that drop loot from their dungeons. The loot scales per dungeon, so you are effectively getting items from 5 different tiers of pricing. The weapon upgrades, the upgrades most integral to your success, are strictly tier 5 pricing, and all pricing jumps up quite a bit tier to tier. In other words, you have to grind for the most expensive items in the game with only like 40% of the items you get being able to get you there instead of 100%. I didn't have the heart to spend more hours doing the same, so I'm calling it here.

Overall, I think I give it a 5.5. Presentation is wonderful; you can only put so much lipstick on a pig. I am curious how I would take to something like Recettear given that they are in the same genre. I wonder if this is just a bad fit for me as a game or as a genre.

edit:

MonkeyforaHead posted:

Also, the followup/spinoff to Dungeon of the Endless being called Endless Dungeon is both asinine and confusing as hell to someone not in the loop.

I was under the impression that Endless Dungeon was an offshoot of the 4X series with Endless Legend and Endless Space and such instead of Dungeon of the Endless. Was I off base there? Or are they all the same universe?

nordichammer fucked around with this message at 07:14 on Dec 12, 2020

Ragequit
Jun 1, 2006


Lipstick Apathy
Usually have to pay for this sort of thing

Triarii
Jun 14, 2003

Goddamn Cyberpunk is bad. I'm in a lengthy combat sequence where I have to fight my way out of a place. The combat is not good. Enemies are very bullet-spongey, and don't do anything more interesting than crouch behind a box, pop up to shoot, and occasionally throw a grenade. You can't save while in combat, and this entire sequence is considered to be in combat. So I'm grinding my way through these boring meatshield enemies. I collect a bunch of loot, change my gear around a bit through the cumbersome menus, level up and spend my character points, interact with some computer terminals, read a few lore files sitting around, and do a little sidequest for a character and go through a conversation with them. Probably 20-30 minutes all told. Then, when I'm presumably getting close to the end, my character up and dies.

https://i.imgur.com/ROU7oGb.mp4

I still can't tell what killed me. (Or, well, "killed" me since I seem to still have 1 health.) But I'm dead, and it turns out there weren't any automatic checkpoints during that whole sequence because I'm right back at the start of it and all that laborious progress is gone.

Also, it's weirdly difficult to see and pick up loot. It puts icons above lootable things, but they're inconsistent and flickery, and in order to get them to show up more than 5 feet away you have to turn on your dumb detective vision that slows you to a walk. And it can be really hard to get the button prompt to pick things up to appear sometimes, like I have to keep rubbing up against the thing and moving around to different angles to try to find where it wants me to stand to interact with it. Sometimes I can't get the prompt to come up at all and I just have to walk away and leave it.

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booksnake
May 4, 2009

we who are crowned with the crest of wisdom
Given that he ran up behind you and you didnt immediately begin shooting him, I choose to believe that guy is your ally and he killed you by pushing you down the stairs

(I know absolutely nothing about the game, I just think it's kind of funny)

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