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I'm Planet Coaster (basically the newest Rollercoaster Tycoon), you can expand the width of the paths you place. This is not only cool because you can delineate a main path of which thinner paths branch off, there's a mechanical positive for it: the game simulates what happens when too many people are on too thin a path: a logjam where people don't move as fast simply because they can't. They even animate the awkward shuffle-walk people naturally do when they are in a horde of people that aren't all going the same direction.
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Nov 23, 2016 00:22
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In the mobile game Motor World: Car Factory, the limiting factor that prevents you from grinding out cars 24/7 is the doughnut system. Your workers stamina goes down over time (whereupon they flail on the floor in a cute way) until you feed them a doughnut to keep them going. It recharges rather quickly (a Little Thing in its own right), but the best part is that the game doesn't punish you for being randomly rewarded with doughnuts if you're already at cap. Right now I'm 45/33 on doughnuts, and most games would've just kept you at cap. Alternatively, you can have your workers working on a super high end car until they need food, ignore them, and bring in another person to continue to work. So you have a ton of supposedly-adult mechanics and engineers flailing on the floor, begging for doughnuts.
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Nov 24, 2016 05:56
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ArtIsResistance posted:Obviously the topic switches back to New Vegas, the game goons will never stop talking about for some mysterious reason It's not really mysterious. New Vegas was the only modern Fallout game that Obsidian made, which means something to them (and only them, since your standard Fallout fan has only played the ones by Bethesda before NV came out) , and if it's not brought up enough. it'll slide into obscurity like Tactics and Brotherhood of Steel did. Which it would, because game-colon-name doesn't have the innate pull of game-number, especially when game-number is made by the people who own the property. To use an nerdy but appropriate analogy, goons bring up NV because they are basically roleplaying the Crier from a game you never played.
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Nov 24, 2016 09:11
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Skyrim had a great third option for the Dark Brotherhood questline. Have to kill one of the three people? Nope, I'll kill the DB guy, run off to an Imperial dude, and single handedly wipe out the faction entirely.
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Dec 3, 2016 13:00
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AlphaKretin posted:Why would you turn down all the, sometimes unique, rewards for that questline, including a chance at one of the 24 stones of gently caress you, for like 1000 gold, though, especially when you have to express a tendency for murder to get that far anyway? It's the Dark Brotherhood, and the only time I capital-m Murder someone is on accident. E: vvv doesn't it trigger on any murder? The old lady is just the only one you don't get the murder bounty from. MisterBibs has a new favorite as of 18:30 on Dec 3, 2016 |
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Dec 3, 2016 18:22
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Hardly little, very generic, but this seems like the best place to put it. I had a bit of an epiphany today as I was installing a random game. While it had a bit of a hiccup (translation: I temporarily wasn't patient enough to wait for a stalled progress bar to catch up), I realized that holy poo poo the age of difficulty with setting up games is basically past. Oh sure, there's random crashes and poo poo, but by and large games come out actually working. No setting poo poo up (IRQ 5, DMA 3), no being utterly screwed if something doesn't work (no internet to suss out your edge case that a hundred other people have). poo poo, by and large, works. We're living in the future.
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Dec 27, 2016 04:41
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While I'm not really sure on the game itself, the faction-creation system in Stellaris is really great, with a wide variety of not only mechanical options, but visual ones as well. Want your faction to be a Star Trek human-with-a-thing-on-their-forehead? Five options. Anotherwise mammalian? Seventeen. Bugs? Sixteen, with a lot of variety in there. But what really sticks out as interesting to me is the random-generation system it has for pronouns. Not only does it randomly generate all the -ian and -ist titles automatically for you (Mishar / Misharan), but the randomly-generated official title of your faction can be based somewhat on your faction's philosophical choices. Christ, your faction's philosophical choices actually determine what sort of image background your leader has! I bet this is all commonplace in 4x games now, but it blows my mind. I remember faction-making in SMAC being a image and text file.
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Jan 1, 2017 01:01
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Kinda meta, but gently caress it: One of the things that always winds up bugging me about Blizzard games is that the lingo for certain things becomes so impregnable that I have no idea what people are talking about. However, I was looking at Icyveins for some information on a character I'm playing in HotS, and holy poo poo, every time the page mentions things like frontline/backline/soaking/scoobingthedoobing/etc, I can mouseover those terms and actually find out what they are talking about in normal English. It's incredibly helpful!
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Feb 13, 2017 07:05
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muscles like this! posted:The rumor at the time was that the video they put out was literally all there was. I remember people being upset that it was Prey In Name Only, so the folks in charge said that they were going to retool things so that they could add Tommy and those formerly-Native-American-folks-who-have-lived-on-the-sphere-for-generations folks to it, then poo poo went dark.
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Mar 1, 2017 22:01
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Veotax posted:I remember some guy saying that SkyUI's inventory being an easy to read spreadsheet was "spergy" I don't think that was me, but I've never understood the need to make the UI into a giant spreadsheet in the first place. Generally, you want to avoid making things into spreadsheets. I use the vanilla UI because it took (generously) five minutes to master it.
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Jun 24, 2017 19:12
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Brother Entropy posted:it probably also takes you five minutes to do anything in it Not really, though? It wasn't hard at all to do everything. Complaints about Skyrim's default UI struck me as the reincarnation of people having problems drawing symbols in that old game Black & White. I just never understood how it was such a hard thing. Hell, make that content: while the game had its flaws, being able to draw symbols to select spells in B&W was awesome and intuitive. Made you feel like a wizard being able just make a hand motion (literally) to draw up a spell and overpower it with a doodle.
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Jun 24, 2017 22:57
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Nuebot posted:But then you look at fallout 3, and people are still really mad at it. People being upset about Fallout 3 totally made sense, though. Bethesda took "their" game, made it for others (read: modern gamers) and were massively rewarded for doing all the various and sundry things they considered wrong. Agents are GO! posted:And of course it's MisterBibs because of loving course it is. It wasn't me, though. I understand that reading is a skill, but I just said a few posts ago that my 'motivation' for using using the vanilla UI was purely that it worked fine for me. None of that developer intent stuff, or opinion on sperginess. MisterBibs has a new favorite as of 09:08 on Jun 25, 2017 |
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Jun 25, 2017 08:50
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I'm playing Mushroom 11 (you can find it on Steam, too), a platforming puzzle game where you're a big green blob and you move around by destroying some of your cells to grow new ones. Hard to explain, but rather fun so far. The little thing I'm loving about it is that there's save points after pretty much every puzzle. So if you die because of the purple acid that eats you, you never have to repeat the part where you put half of your mass onto a switch so the rest of you could squeeze through the door it opened. It's refreshing; a lot of these indie puzzle-like games seem to be made with the intent to make you repeat whole slogs until the one point where you failed.
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Jul 8, 2017 20:47
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Admittedly it makes the mechanic a misnomer, but I love that 100% Completion in Grand Theft Auto V isn't literally complete-everything. It's so much more accessible and reachable when the game says "As far as we're concerned, you've completed the part where you have to fly through buildings done after eight, not all thirty".
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Jul 19, 2017 05:18
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I've had it installed for a while but never really looked at it, and Creativerse is a fun little minecraft clone with a lot of little QoL benefits that I can see myself playing this instead of Minecraft when the mood hits me. Notably- - You start with a teleporter back to wherever you want to start, that keeps a marker on your map - Only one tool is required to collect all blocks. Sure, you need to upgrade to a new tool to be able to harvest deeper things, but it's still much more fun than having to carry a this for that and a this for that and a this for that. - There's no need to have a list of crafting tools either memorized or listed somewhere. The game tells you what you'll need to make everything, it's just a case of getting the materials. - Every item has a tooltip that tells you where to get the thing. No wondering how to get twine, the tooltip tells you that its a processed good from a processor. - The map tells you what sort of place you're in, making it easier to identify where certain materials can be found. Above-ground, you'll be told your biome. Underground, it'll tell you you're in the fossil layer, or the Stalactite/Lava/Corruption layer. Extremely helpful. - The enemies are reasonably good looking, with a real sense of poo poo-I-might've-gone-too-deep about them. When you come face-to-giant-eyeball with a Miru, it's scary. When the thing decides to leg it after you, so that said giant eyeball monster is always on your rear end, it really works. - Lighting is really cool and gives a sense of progression that you wouldn't figure for something otherwise so trivial. At first you'll be using cheap lighting to barely hold back the creature spawns in your mine(s), as you progress you'll replace 2-3 with a better version, and replace 4-5 of those with something even better. (now I'm half considering posting the annoying things about it (GO PRO! GO PRO! GIVE US TWENTY BUCKS TO GO PRO!) in the sister thread...) MisterBibs has a new favorite as of 20:00 on Jul 31, 2017 |
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Jul 31, 2017 18:23
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Bethesda's games don't succeed by some elaborate conspiracy, they succeed because they know what their audience wants, and delivers consistently. The quality of their games has generates brand loyalty, which attracts the audience to the next game, etc. Fallout 3's successful revival of the series was significantly dependent on the knowledge that Bethesda was making it from the get go. Even if you had no idea what Fallout was (and why would you have, since the last game came out when 2D isometric was cutting edge and/or came out when you were five), you knew it would be good, since it was in Bethesda's hands. Which it was, despite what the past and future NMA folks would try to convince you otherwise.
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Aug 2, 2017 03:49
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Nick Valentine is awesome, but every time he's on screen that little still-connected patch of robo-skin between his face and chest bothers the poo poo out of me.Cleretic posted:Hence why their later games struggle to cater to it, either placing too much specific character into the protagonist that can be at odds with how the player wants to play it (Fallout 4), or more subtly, with things like unconsciously guiding players towards certain prescriptive playstyles (Skyrim, but Fallout 4's got this to lesser degrees). I'm not entirely sure what you mean by 'certain prescriptive playstyles', but outside of neo-NMA sorts, most people weren't complaining about being a specific character - if anything, most were praising the specificity of character in how it connects the player to the world of the game in a real and natural way. It was a selling point for the game, not something they hid in the corner. If not a "little thing", I'd list it as an example of Bethesda knowing what their audience wants to have in their games. They were able to read their audience in such a way that they knew would enjoy having a greater specificity of character, so they did it. Unrelated, another really neat thing about that Creativerse game I was talking about : the teleport system is rather clever. Instead of just naming or punching in some text to connect two teleporters together, instead it uses codes based on three blocks / items you put into it. For example, I can tell the game that a teleporter in a distant jungle is Jungle Tree Block / Jungle Mob Drop / Jungle Floor Block. As long as I have one of each of those items, I can tell any other teleporter I create to send me to that portal. It's definitely a little thing, but it's kinda charming.
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Aug 2, 2017 06:56
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Calaveron posted:Apparently Portal/Apperture Science is super duper important and vital for Half Life 3 and would've been responsible for a super cool setpiece involving dimensional and temporal travel or something that surely would've filled this thread for months Eh, not really. I'm not going to bother spoiling it because it was a rough first draft for Ep3: The AS ship was going to be seen as a potentially powerful tool to gently caress with the Combine for good, with which some disagreed and felt it should be destroyed. After a brief talk (and murder), it's learned that it's not going to do poo poo to the Combine, because the Combine is way bigger than anyone could've imagined. Given the engine constraints of Episodes, all the textual talk of the "dimensional and temporal travel" would've probably just been some odd rooms and strange skyboxes. I think it would've gone in the sister thread, mostly, not this one.
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Aug 28, 2017 20:02
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There's this generally-otherwise-unremarkable idle game called Castaway Cove that does something a lot of other mobile games refuse to do. It has entirely different UIs (in terms of button locations) depending on if the device is on portrait or landscape mode, which it switches to on the fly. I dig that, as someone who usually plays games on his tablet for the larger screen size.
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Oct 11, 2017 21:04
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Wrong thread, derp
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Oct 25, 2017 17:55
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It wouldn't surprise me if I posted this somewhere up or down the dial, but I loved the possibly-intended oversight in the old Lucasarts game Afterlife. Part of the setup for the game is that Heaven likes Good Vibes, and hates Bad Vibes. Hell, as you might expect, hates Good Vibes and loves Bad Vibes. One of the in-game disasters has flying birds (or bats) poo poo all over Heaven or Hell, respectively. It puts them into a state of Very Bad Vibes. The oversight that might have been intentionally overlooked is that nobody changed that state for Hell buildings. Every building with bat poo poo on it (or around that building) works a bunch better because it's under Very Bad Vibes. It makes disasters in the game a thing of the past, because it's in your best interests to constantly be triggering the Bat disaster on your own.
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Oct 26, 2017 06:27
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Probably been mentioned up or down the thread, but Super Mario Odyssey has no time limit in its levels, and death costs you ten coins (which all respawn when you die, I think). It's so much fun to have no time or significant death penalty. Oh, and another one: I love that it has an in-game map and list of Moons.
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Oct 30, 2017 19:51
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I wouldn't be surprised if this is a repeat from me, but it came to me today: Black & White 2 has you fighting a God of Death, whose main troops are skeletons (iirc). At the end of the game, there's cheeriness abound as everything was cleaned up. But then, gasp, a skeleton crawls out of the ground with a familiar, evil laugh. Cut to credits. But if you wait for the credits to finish, we cut back to said familiar, evil laughing skeleton. Boom, one of your archers (or maybe your God Finger) snuffs it out. Nope, God of Dead is dead, no worries.
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Nov 5, 2017 22:54
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I can't remember if it's actually mentioned in the games or not, but there's a thing about the two-headed cows called Brahmin in the Fallout games that I irrationally love. They've been around in that form for so long that when an unmutated/one-headed/actually-tastes-better cow comes along, the people shrug and assume it's a bizarrely mutated brahmin. It's such a clichéd, dumb joke, but it gets me grinning every time I think about it.
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Dec 11, 2017 10:39
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You can click on gates in War For The Overworld and disable certain minions from spawning there. Invaluable in levels where you're supposed to be a bit stealthy, and can't have the goddamned "I have flying so I must explore randomly" minions existing.
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Jan 2, 2018 04:00
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In War for the Overworld, having your minions train up their levels doesn't cost gold, nor does it have the level limit like Dungeon Keeper 2 had. It smooths out the training process, and lightens up on the gold pressure having a ton of dudes leveling up. Also, the little armor stands your minions wail on have little piglets chilling in the empty helmets. 
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Jan 3, 2018 20:44
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I impulse bought My Time At Portia (kinda like Stardew Valley, but less of a focus on crop-farming and more on being a town's construction dude), and one of the things I like is that crafting things seems to take just long enough (say, something will take 6 hours of time to craft, but every real-life second is a minute in-game) that it really lets you do a decent amount of exploring and villager-talking-to that I never seemed to be able to do well at in Stardew.
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Mar 2, 2018 07:34
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Hel posted:The entire survival game genre is build on meter management but I really wish more of them did the tiny thing Metal Gear Survive did: In Survive when you max out you Food or Water Bar it disappears for the UI until it reaches ~88% and I think it drains to that point slower as well. It makes it so that you feel prepared when you set out and feel drained as you go on expeditions instead of every other game where you start panicking because you bars are draining 5 steps from your base. Kinda the opposite of this thread, but there was once an article that praised when games do that sort of thing, because the alternative is precisely what happens when you don't. I even noticed the developers of Subnautica putting it on their public-viewable development planner thing as a "we need to look into this and adapt it to our game" thing. Made me hopeful. Never got added to the game, in the end. 
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Mar 2, 2018 09:39
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My Time In Portia drastically reduces the Second Monitor Problem, and its great. The SMP is when you've got a game with a craft system that doesn't give you any handholds on how to make everything. You'll need to find what parts make up a Big Machine, where those parts are, and where those part's raw materials come from. In MTiP, your crafting journal helpfully puts all of that in-game, very clearly, written in a style of someone intentionally being as helpful as they can. If something need four parts to build, each part is listed with the number of raw materials needed to create it, and where they are found. It's great to just read in-game how much copper ore I'll need to make how much copper ingots to make how much copper tubing. Bonus related thing, the crafting system doesn't operate on the "you need everything before you start to make this thing" system. Got the tires and radio parts done for a transport? Just chuck them on the blueprint while you're off looking for ore to turn into metal to turn into sheeting. It's pleasant to avoid the wait-what-did-I-make-these-things-for problem.
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Mar 4, 2018 04:04
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Nuebot posted:It's called memory. You remember these things you encounter. You use your brain to perform the simple arithmetic. I'm dumb as gently caress and I've never felt the pressing need to get a second monitor just for use in crafting games. Math is hard (do not pass go, do not collect 200 bucks, do not attempt to say it's not because that's about as defensible as saying blue is red) and I've got the memory of a gnat that barely holds grown up stuff, much less crafting recipes in video games.  I get that some people dig games not telling you poo poo and hate the notion of games being helpful, but hey, it's a Little Thing that makes the game more pleasant than others.
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Mar 4, 2018 05:24
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I suppose it's not a little thing, but the thing I liked about Infinite was the "It's always a Man and a Lighthouse" concept, because it's not a bad way to handwave any kvetching why there'd be future Bioshock games in which you're a dude going to a Lighthouse or Lighthouse-like place every time. poo poo, there's some deleted / hidden away content that are variations on the Man And a Lighthouse concepts that felt ripe for exploring. Infinite wound up being, ya know, Infinite, so that was never paid off.
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Apr 1, 2018 05:49
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It's not much of a little thing, given its an update to the game centralized on it, but the automation / drone feature in Slime Rancher is really helpful. Just tell the drone what you want to pick up, from where, and where to deposit it, and it just works. It's really helpful for my free-range segments of my farm. No more having to hunt for slime poop in the long grass!
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Jul 28, 2018 19:22
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I loaded the phone game Ingress while walking around (a poor life choice, given how cold it is), and I realized that if you have the phone at your side (thus hanging upside down), the game gets told that you're not staring at the screen and turns off the display until you bring it up to your face. For a game that relies on your GPS and is a bit of a visual powerhouse (and thus has a reputation for draining your battery), it's a nice change.
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Feb 9, 2019 00:23
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Notch is an assbag so it kinda sucks when his game does something nice, but I've been playing a Minecraft clone out of boredeom and I really miss the mechanic where if you chop down a tree, eventually all the leaf blocks wither and vanish that Minecraft has. Like, I get that the whole drat genre is about being mild-to-significantly  over stuff, but man, flying chunks of leaves are ugly and I don't think I can get to the level of deciding to cut them down manually.
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Mar 15, 2019 08:38
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One of the main reasons I've kept checking in / loading the idle game Zombidle over time is that the developers consistently add new stuff (and QoL changes) that count for this thread, that I've probably mentioned before. But a new one that I found definitely counts: Whenever you're offered a boost that would require an ad view (on mobile) or a secondary currency that I've gotten hundreds of without paying for (Steam), it used to be a random one. But at some point between the last time I decided to pull the game up and now, it's always customized to provide the best benefit for your situation. If you're burning through lower levels, it offers you the ability to cut down the amount of drudgery you have to sit around for. If you need currency, the game offers that as well.
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Apr 30, 2019 21:33
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GamesAreSupernice posted:What is the game, exactly? I like the character design and the humor reminds me of a webcomic, but is it a clicker-style game or are there additional mechanics? I'm on my phone so I have to be kinda brief, but it's an idle / clicker game that has enough QOL mechanics / additional stuff behind it that I keep coming back, if for no reason other than not having another game to play. Every time I do, I generally find that there's something new added to the experience that I dig. More levels, new items to craft, a catch up mechanism, whatever. Like, one thing you can do is use crafted items to automate farming on previously completed zones. So while I'm sitting on Land 5, I'm automatically backfarming Land 1 and it'll hand me items from sub-bosses or whatever.
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May 2, 2019 00:35
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It's kinda the antithesis of something I was bitching about in the sister thread, but an issue with another game made me realize how Descent 2 really set the mark for helping players navigate a game's space. How did they do it? Maps? Alerts? Nope, they gave you Guide Bot; you release your little robot buddy and he'll guide you exactly where to go, every step, and never once slammed its cute little guidebot face against a wall or anything.
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May 27, 2019 19:49
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haveblue posted:I'm not really sure this was a good decision, because it led them to make a lot of maps that are almost impossible to navigate when you aren't being led by the guide-bot. It was Descent. You couldn't really make a map that was possible to navigate without him, which is why he was put into the sequel. Content/addition: it wasn't very good overall, and its low-hanging appeasement, but I loved in Descent 3 one of the levels was set on the moon. They put the little "hey here's the first level of Descent 1!" moment in a perfect spot, where you're going around all this stuff without thinking too much, and then oh man, I know this room.
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May 27, 2019 21:08
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Inco posted:otherwise no one would have beaten Descent 1. Look at this guy who doesn't have GABBAGABBAHEYBIGREDRACERX encoded into his muscle memory. 
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May 27, 2019 23:58
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Chuck Buried Treasure posted:Breath of the Wild... skeletal versions of some of the monsters will come out of the ground to attack you. I know it's clichéd and well known, but I always loved that in Ocarina of Time, the skeleton mobs that come out at night become larger the more you kill. Same hitpoints, just bigger. There's videos on YouTube of giant-rear end skeletons existing just by using a cheat to prevent the sun from coming out, and they get super big. It's oddly cute.
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Jun 10, 2019 15:53
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