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Replaying MGSV: The Phantom Pain at the moment and while there are a lot of pretty huge things dragging it down, one smaller thing that I didn't like is that for 95% of the game you're very much incentivized (expected? supposed?) to sneak around, put dudes to sleep and kidnap them to populate your weird offshore war treehouse but there's also a very back-loaded 5% for which you kind of need rocket launchers and anti-materiel rifles. The problem is that weapons have to be developed at your base, they follow a strict tech tree and they take real time to be developed, so if you didn't spend your limited resources researching rocket launchers in the early game, when they would have been pretty much useless, even detrimental, once you reach the later boss fights and need them you have to kind of put the game on hold and spend time and resources developing them. This kind of plugs into a more general little thing dragging the game down: the game has way too many things, obviously including weapons. There are a million things you can develop and beyond the 5 or 6 things that are actually useful and the 2 or 3 that are situational but kind of required, all of them are either super niche, novelty, basically duplicate or, at best, incremental upgrades over what you probably already have. It's cool to have variety but it really slows down the development of the things you need on your first playthrough, when you don't know what's coming, and it highlights the fact that half of the more narrative stuff is missing from the game.
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Aug 8, 2023 14:53
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Maxwell Lord posted:Final Fantasy as a franchise has had problems with that sort of thing- the games are all very story driven and sometimes the narrative splits up the party or makes a character unavailable or outright kills someone you put valuable upgrades on, etc. FF8 was both the worst and best at this; worst because it kept splitting your party or switching characters multiple times (so many times...) during the game, but best because it was trivially easy to just transfer every junction, GF and magic a character had and basically just turn a character into another one, but then also the worst again because since it was so easy it made a lot of sense to just build a team of 3 and move those setups around but the game would gently caress with you by switching constantly between 2 parties or messing up who became who when moving to the Laguna timeline.
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Aug 18, 2023 18:42
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RenegadeStyle1 posted:I am about 3 hours in and still can't tell if I like or hate Sea of Stars. Overall I'm really enjoying Sea of Stars but I think they went a little too far in taking the grinding out of the game; instead it feels like leveling up is kind of useless, and as much as I appreciate the effort it makes fights seem a little pointless, especially when you're backtracking. Plus, in my opinion it robs the characters of some characterization since the whole party is always at the same level. I remember thinking the same thing about Child of Light so maybe it's just something about game studios from Quebec and RPGs. Another thing SoS and CoL have in common is bad French puns as enemy names.
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Sep 1, 2023 16:27
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Morpheus posted:What french puns are in SoS? I'm not that far into the game yet but one I remember is the enemy that's plugging the holes in the mines is called something like Bushtru (Bouche-trou, a stopgap but translated literally means to plug a hole), and the wizard you're after in that same area is called something like Malkumud (Malcommode which means Inconvenient but in Quebec is way more often used as an endearing term to describe a misbehaving kid). Also the boat captain's name is Klee Shea (Cliché) but that's not strictly French, even though it also kinda is. Maybe "pun" is stretching it.
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Sep 1, 2023 18:34
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Morpheus posted:This audio is seared into my brain and will be there until the day I die I can't leave without my buddy Superfly! I think my enthusiasm for Sea of Stars is gone. It makes a drat fine first impression but I feel like the game doesn't bring anything new after the first few hours. You barely get any new party members, there are no new combat mechanics, there's one cool thing you get mid-game but I feel like it's really underutilized... But the 2 things that killed the game for me were; 1. The story starts out fine but quickly becomes a seemingly endless series of fetch quests. Ultimately there are only 3 main goals (I think, I haven't finished the story) in the game but to complete each you have to trade seashells and crystals and balls with the entire world. 2. There's very little incentive to explore. The world map is extremely linear; everything is locked until you're supposed to go there, there are very few side areas on the world map (actually I'm pretty sure I haven't found any so far) and very few, small ones on the field, and while there are some "metroidvania"-esque bits where you need to backtrack and use an ability that you unlock later, backtracking is such a god drat chore until you get a super late game ability that I would honestly say that you shouldn't do it at all until then. The game also seems to work on a log scale for XP requirements so hanging out in an area you've already cleared barely gives you anything. Separately I don't think either is too bad; I don't mind video game stories at all when they're just an excuse for more gameplay, and I actually like that the game's trying to make you play at a brisker pace and not run around in circles killing slimes until you're strong enough for a boss, but it's making me rush through a story that really feels stretched out and I got bored of playing the game bits hours ago. I got the game for free (well, on Game Pass) so maybe that's skewing my perspective a bit but I would have absolutely loved the game if it lasted 8-10 hours, but I'm closing in on 20 and I'm not done yet. Edit: Oh, and I posted earlier about bad French puns in the game but I've encountered the worst one since then: the underwater place is called "Antsudlo" ("En dessous de l'eau", literally Underwater) which crosses the line between Bad Joke and Not Even Trying Anymore. CordlessPen has a new favorite as of 14:14 on Sep 5, 2023 |
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Sep 5, 2023 14:10
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I was just about to post in the other thread that GTA4 on PC has amazing traffic if you have the hardware to bring the slider all the way to the max, like you get actual gridlock and jams and it's the closest a videogame has ever felt to actual city driving, but apparently this breaks every tailing mission in the game. I'm guessing here but I think it loads cars further than the traffic lights work so inevitably someone will get stuck at an eternal red light and everything will stop and the car you're supposed to tail can never move again. That might explain why even GTA5 doesn't have traffic that dense.
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Sep 14, 2023 01:52
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AC: Odyssey: Was there ever a worse leveling mechanic in any game, ever? It has absolutely no upside; all it does is make enemies virtually invincible unless you're within 2-3 levels of theirs and your old weapons/armor useless after a level or 2. It also only works one way because lower-level enemies scale with you. I'd love some rubberbanding normally but enemies are already damage sponges so I really wouldn't mind SOME of them becoming vulnerable to being stabbed in the head at some point. As it is I can barely assassinate anyone in my assassin game.
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Oct 16, 2023 14:58
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credburn posted:Well I beat Assassin's Creed: Origins and here are the things I hated about it: The thing I hate the most about the title Origins is that the very next game is set before this one.
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Oct 22, 2023 23:13
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Randalor posted:I know it's technically nit a "score" system, but wasn't that also an issue with the older Fire Emblem games, where the most optimal way to play was to wait around on maps to make sure that you were able to farm as many enemy reinforcements a possible for exp, despite how counter-intuitive that was on the face of it? This is from decades back but I think I remember the first Homeworld doing something similar; in the campaign every mission started you with the resources you had a the end of the previous mission so the optimal way to play was to spend 10 minutes at the end of every mission to scavenge every bit of resources before continuing to the next one. Also maybe the levels ended automatically when you completed the last objective so you had to do that while keeping a single enemy alive? I honestly don't remember. I think I remember the sequel automatically giving you all the resources available on the map when the mission was over, but that was kinda countered by the fact that missions' difficulty was scaled to the units you brought in from the last mission so, again, the optimal way to play was to destroy and salvage your own units at the end of every mission so the next one would be easier.
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Oct 27, 2023 15:28
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Captain Hygiene posted:It's nothing terrible, it's just one of those things where the extra fiddling with the menu interface just gradually becomes more annoying the longer you play. The map's basic enough that I would happily give up one of the assignable shortcut buttons if it meant I could just jump straight into it without any extra nonsense. I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding but you can press M to go directly to the local map, I believe.
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Oct 30, 2023 23:28
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Silly little thing dragging a game down: I don't like Wordle's hard mode. Quick explanation if you haven't played: In Wordle you have 6 attempts to guess a 5 letter word as the game tells you which letters you get right and which ones are in the right place. In normal mode, those are the only rules. On hard though, you have to use every clue that you found previously in each subsequent guess, so if you find out the first letter is a T and there's a C somewhere, every guess now has to start with T and contain a C. It may not sound so bad, it even sounds like something that you should do since the only thing this does is prevent you from making guesses that can't be the answer, but one of the most annoying effects of this is that if you get something like *ATCH after your first guess, you now have 5 attempts to guess between latch, catch, hatch, patch, watch, match, batch, etc. Wordle scholars will say that it's your own drat fault for guessing a *ATCH word as your first guess, and they're right; that's what hard mode is about : not painting yourself into a corner, but Wordle isn't a god drat chess game, it's what I do for 2 minutes when I take my morning poo poo. What I like to do when I play Wordle is wing it and sometimes use a word that doesn't have any of the clues I've found but instead uses 5 new letters to help me on my next guess, and in that light all hard mode does is limit the way I play. Now you'll say that I should just shut the gently caress up and play on normal and you're absolutely right.
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Nov 18, 2023 14:55
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rydiafan posted:This sounds extremely stupid, and actively reduces the amount of tactical choices you have as a player. I mean, technically yes, but the intent is to make you think harder about your guesses; instead of just trying to work out the most letters at any cost, you're trying to find good guesses that also won't lock you into an impossible path. I get why other people like it, I just really don't.
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Nov 18, 2023 20:35
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Digging up an oldie: I don't like how Terrorist Hunts feel like an afterthought in Rainbow Six Vegas 2. In the older games (up to Raven Shield I think) the hunts took place in mission maps so there were entry points and a logical progression through the map, but in the Vegas games they're in MP maps so everything is more circular and loopy, which wouldn't be too bad by itself but it really doesn't gel at all with the fact that enemy spawns are horrible (they spawn according to location triggers that are super close so they'll often spawn in a room seconds after you cleared it with a grenade, they'll also very often spawn behind you in rooms you already cleared). The spawns are poo poo but also super predictable so after playing a map a few times you know precisely where to step to spawn enemies, where they'll spawn and exactly how many there are, which makes the game... not easy but predictable. At higher difficulties you'll probably end up rushing forward a bit to have enemies spawn in, run back to a choke point, camp for a bit and repeat. The AI is also extremely bad. It works alright in the set pieces from the story but in Hunts you'll often have 5 or 6 guys queuing up to use a rope and just waiting to be shot dead.
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Dec 13, 2023 18:18
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Nuebot posted:The best part about X's stupid celestial weapons is that most of them kind of sucked and you could just craft better weapons. Well, Celestial weapons ignore enemy defense, which is an ability that you can't customize yourself and doesn't use a slot, so there's that. Their only real flaw (other than the inane way in which you unlock most of them) is that their damage depends on your current HP / MP.
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Jan 10, 2024 15:57
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Elissimpark posted:Also, Jim Rash as Patches.
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Feb 23, 2024 15:11
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I just started Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night and I really like it but the beginning of the game has a few really annoying things that, thankfully, are gradually fading out. I feel like a lot of enemies are way too strong. It gets better as the game goes on but I think it's mostly because the game opens up and when I find an area that's too difficult I double back and try something else, and by the time I realize that it's the same everywhere I levelled up a bit and can manage. I just found Bloodless and she takes close to 20% of my health when her flying umbrellas hit. 20% from a boss doesn't seem too bad, or at least it wouldn't in an action game, but RotN definitely feels more like an RPG, where you're supposed to trade blows and either have high defence or some kind of skill to block; I don't feel like I could just practice and get better, mostly because of the next point: The game feels super rough around the edges. A lot of the weapons I found have garbage hit boxes. If you attack when jumping, your attack will be cancelled when you land, which is unfathomably annoying. You can't aim regular attacks up or down and there are a LOT of slopes and tiny or flying enemies. There's a pretty big delay when jumping which makes platforming really frustrating. I know it's pretty standard in most video games but I hate contact damage, and in this game it really doesn't pair well with the bad hit boxes. The 3D levels, and especially the rooms where the camera moves in 3D like the Dragons' Tower, make it super hard to know what you can and can't stand on. I don't understand why teleport rooms aren't also save rooms since I can always teleport to the home base, it just makes it take 3 minutes instead of 5 seconds if I want to save when I reach a teleport room. I don't think I'm that far into the game yet and at the moment it does feel like the game opened up, but I want to say that the first few upgrades don't really let you explore that much, like one area each. It's especially frustrating in the case of the double jump because in most games that's the big, like, game starter, but in RotN it barely does anything exploration-wise. Related, the upgrade after the double jump, the laser teleport thing, kinda fills that game starter role but I don't know if it's by design. The description makes it feel like it's only meant to squeeze you through tight spaces but one thing it lets you do is teleport straight up and then double jump which opens up a LOT of areas of the map, but the timing is so clunky that it sort of feels like you're not supposed to be able to do that. Jeez, sorry for the long post! All in all, I like the game, especially now that I've unlocked the laser teleport skill and can finally stop, turn around and explore when I hit a brick wall, but that early game was rough...
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Feb 26, 2024 20:02
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John Murdoch posted:Check the options, there's a setting that tries to correct the delay. It's not 100% perfect but it was a noticeable improvement. CzarChasm posted:I would add that while you are correct about the melee weapons having limited range/use against small enemies or foes at angles, that's where the entire enemy skill function comes in to play. John Murdoch posted:Oh also the attack cancel thing is technically for your benefit, because it means you can instantly attack again. I think I was unlucky there; the first weapon I used for any length of time was an ice spear that I got from an 8-bit coin and it was generally pretty good but the slow attack speed meant that if I tried to attack while landing it would stop before hitting anything. With swords it's not as bad. Now I use the crissaegrim lookalike and things are going swell.
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Feb 26, 2024 21:41
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jjack229 posted:I agree, I think that dodging i-frames are bad design. Using a dodge to move out of the line of fire quickly (and possibly with a smaller hot box) makes sense, but staying in the line of fire and using the i-frames to have the attack phase through you does seem like just another version of parry. (Also, not that these games are based on realism, but why would why a giant warhammer pass through my characters body with no damage just because they are curled up?) I respectfully disagree; I think you need invincibility frames in most dodge moves to make up for the fact that games only have canned animations with hitboxes/hurtboxes that don't really match at the best of times. I get where you guys are coming from and to be honest I agree on paper: it can obviously be done wrong, and dodging forward into gunfire and not getting hurt is silly, but if done right the i-frames are there to compensate for the fact that you might have wanted to slightly twist your torso to dodge a swing but the only thing you could do is roll 10 feet to either side, plus even if you did move your hitbox would still have to be an upright rectangle so you're getting hit anyway. I think DMC5 is an amazing example of i-frames done right; it has very specific timing and the animations lend a lot of credibility to your avoiding damage so it looks pretty good (and feels amazing). I MAY be saying that mostly because FF7 Remake has a dodge with no i-frames and it's the worst feeling move in video game history. CordlessPen has a new favorite as of 21:13 on Mar 5, 2024 |
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Mar 5, 2024 20:05
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I absolutely love Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance but like a lot of Platinum games it seems a bit ashamed to be a character action game so 2/3 of the VR missions are gimmicks based on bad mechanics like stealth or platforming. Neither are too bad in the regular game because they feel absolutely optional (stealth can actually be detrimental in a few places and the only platforming is there to hide a few collectibles) but obviously in the VR missions there's a ton of auto-fail stealth and platforming over bottomless pits. I'd trade every VR mission for a simple Bloody Palace type thing. Lesser complaint: like every other Platinum games, despite being a short game meant to be replayed to get a better and better score/grade, getting all S ranks is pretty tedious. It's not as bad a Bayonetta was but there are still hidden optional fights that you have to backtrack and do every single time (I'm pretty sure they count as Ds if you skip them), there are still gimmick sections that you have to S-rank (although there are way fewer and they're way less gimmicky and way easier to S-rank) and you still have to replay an entire mission for your new score to update.
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Mar 22, 2024 16:45
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An Actual Princess posted:scarlet was the best pokemon since gold though Was it really? As a non-Pokemon-player all I heard at release was that it was uglier than Arceus while also running more poorly, super buggy and had fewer Pokemons than earlier titles. I know it sold well but I thought it was an AssCreed 3 situation.
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Apr 5, 2024 13:59
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Randalor posted:It can be all those things and still the best since Gold. Then again, I'm pretty sure all those complaints have been leveled at every pokemon game since Gold anyways, so Maybe, but (again, as a non-Pokemon-player) Scarlet/Violet was the first time that I heard about it. Actually, I think the "fewer pokemon" thing might have been about Sword/Shield so that might have been the first time that complaints reached further into the mainstream but I for sure remember thinking that Scarlet/Violet was particularly bad specifically because I heard about it. I remember a ton of YouTube shorts (ugh...) showcasing glitches, a Digital Foundry video outlining the poor performance, screenshots comparing it unfavourably to Arceus, etc. I'm honestly not trying to poo poo on the game, I legit was just surprised to hear that it was good because I really thought that it was "common knowledge" that Scarlet/Violet was a huge miss.
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Apr 5, 2024 15:47
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