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Sibyl Disobedience posted:Let's try a different approach then. This is some  jumping to conclusions.Some game developers intentionally design the first level last, so that it will be the best level, for the reason you stated. But not all developers even do this, where you're making it out like its a law and it would be unspeakable for a dev to do otherwise. Its pretty natural that you get better at making levels over time as you have more experience working on that particular thing. Dark Souls features a heavily interconnected world that would make huge changes later in development hard to do, but would also require designing levels in order to connect properly. Furthermore, the first level, the tutorial area, is exact what it should be. If you polled 10 dark souls fans, they would come away with at least 5 different "best level in the game" answers. Its not definitively painted world like you're saying. This is fun lore analysis and almost creepypasta levels of fiction, but it feels like you're getting away from the spirit of this thread... This is some extrapolation about the perceived deep secret meaning of a game, ala Paul is Not Dead, not really "why dark souls is the best game" Oldstench posted:Uh...what? Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 20:37 on May 18, 2021 |
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May 18, 2021 19:56
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 06:10 |
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To contribute to the thread, I'm going to post about a game I've been thinking about writing up for awhile. A game I don't see goons talking about much, but I think is fairly special and unique. Its not my favorite game of all time, but there's nothing else quite like it, and it is one of my favorite games to just relax and chill with This game is the best sniping FPS ever made. Its also the Dark Souls of FPS. No, not call of duty or counter-strike, hardly. Those games are too arcadey, the maps are too small for real sniping. No, not battlefield. The maps are bigger... but still, respawning players and mass numbers prevent long-scale sniper tactics. No, not Sniper Elite. The first one somewhat got there, but hasn't aged very gracefully. The more modern ones are more arcadey, and while shooting Nazis in the balls is fun, you don't really hunt the Nazis. Its a shooting gallery. What is it?  The Hunter: Call of the Wild. Wait, What?! Yeah. Hear me out here. This game is really special. Lets have a quick history lesson: The Hunter was originally an MMO-esque game that targeted a niche of gamers who wanted to hunt wildlife. The game had beautiful, massive, realistic outdoor environments and animal behavior, and an interesting tracking system, but it had major issues. The pricing model was outrageous. You had to pay monthly fees to get licenses to hunt anything. Want to hunt deer? Well, there's a license PER species. If you pay the $5 for a monthly White-tailed Deer license, and you get out into the wild and you see a beautiful Black-tailed deer buck with huge antlers, well, you're poo poo out of luck. You're gonna have to just ignore him and keep looking for white-tailed deer. Oh, wow, that's a great Elk over there! Too bad. You can buy the licenses a-la-carte, but they add up. There is a "hunt everything" license, but its expensive. Did I mention you not only have to buy guns, but you have to pay for ammo? Yeah. Ammo costs real dollary-doos. On top of paying a monthly license fee. Yuck. They seemed to know that they only had a niche audience and wanted to get them to pay for this unique game. This game is now called The Hunter: Classic. Only the hardcore old players still play it. Then they did a weird spinoff, The Hunter: Primal. It was a great idea; what if you used the Hunter mechanics in Jurassic Park? T-rexes, Raptors, etc. all running around, seeming far more threatening. Unfortunately, not many people seemed to buy this, and the developers lost interest and basically abandoned it only like 30% completed. Its playable, but its very janky. Not super fun honestly. But then... there was a new hope The Hunter: Call of the Wild was released in February 16, 2017. This game features everything that made Hunter: Classic fun, but with a new "buy it for a boxed $20 and you're done unless you want DLC" business model which way more reasonable. You can buy DLC guns and new range locations, but the game comes with a few ranges and weapons, and ammo is now purchased using in-game currency instead of real dollars, thank god.   So, what is it? Its an FPS, but it plays like no FPS you've ever played before. The maps are HUGE. How big? How about 50 square miles?! Each one feels like something that Rockstar would build. The base game comes with several and there are more as DLC, with more still being updated to this day. Locations include Rocky Mountains USA, Yukon Alaska, Argentina, Spain, Germany, Russia, New Zealand, and Africa. These maps are downright gorgeous. There's so much flora and everything is so detailed, it feels absolutely like a AAA state of the art game. Just seeing the sun filter through the leaves and exploring all the nature is really an experience in itself, before you get to any animals or hunting.       And the hunting, its serious. If you try running around everywhere, you may never even see a single living animal. They'll all hear you coming. Instead you have to creep around slowly, hide in bushes and grass, pay attention to your down-range windage so they don't smell you, and learn "need zones" (like where the animals drink or eat and what times of day) so you can stalk them and catch them unawares. You can use a PDA to track animals similar to Batman-vision. Foot tracks will show the direction the animal went in. Droppings let you know how long ago they were there. You can hear animal calls to get a directional indicator, and you can use lures to call animals to you.   Guns handle realistically, with wind and bullet drop being factors. Higher velocity weapons are more accurate at range. Perks allow you to zero your rifle to different distances. Binoculars and range finders help you estimate distance and get a shot lined up. Where you hit the animal greatly matters. If you hit them in the brain, heart, or lungs, they'll drop fast. But if you break a leg or just hit their gut, they'll run. If you shoot an animal but don't harvest them, you'll get a points penalty. If an animal goes down fast, you get more points than if you chase it and shoot it multiple times to get it to go down. You're rewarded for minimizing the suffering of the animal. You also need to use a caliber appropriate for the game, or you won't get points.   This is a game where getting a single kill can take you as long as several hours. You can play for multiple hours and if you're careless, end up getting nothing. But that's what makes it so rewarding. When you finally do slowly track down that deer you've spent the last 40 minutes looking for, and you finally line up that shot, your heart will be pumping. You know if you miss the shot, the deer will bolt, and you won't have another shot for a long time. One shot, that's all you have. Do not miss your chance, mom's spaghetti. This can really get your adrenaline going, more than an action game where you mow down 200 soldiers. And it can be addictive too. "okay, just one more..." you say, and then hours go by. The game has a wide range of weapons and animals. Shotguns, Rifles, Pistols, Crossbows, Compound bows, even old fashioned bows. You can use blinds and decoys and you can even have a hunting dog! And you CAN pet the dog! You can hunt everything from Turkey, Coyotes, Ducks, Deer (many types), Antelope, Elk, Reindeer, Moose, Lions, Panthers, Bears, Boars, Wolves, and more. Each has different behaviors and calls and lures. Its realistic enough that you'll be able to pick up on which animals are around just by listening, once you've learned the differences. (And you can apply that to real life too!) There are quests for each location (although the story, while fun, isn't very deep) and there are skill trees with perks as you level up. But mostly the game is in the gameplay, just doing your own thing. The game also features co-op! And you can use any DLC the host owns, even if you do not own it yourself! This means you can try before you buy, and even just hop into random public lobbies if you want to play on maps you haven't purchased. The game can be somewhat slow paced at times. The maps are huge and gorgeous natural scenery, but don't feature much in the way of man-made landmarks. (there's a few camps and cave paintings and signs but not much) But I think the base price is well worth it for the amount of fun you can have, if this is your type of thing. If you at all enjoyed playing Red Dead Revolver 2 just wandering around shooting deer and enjoying the sunset, then you may wanna consider it.
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May 18, 2021 20:36
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Ice Phisherman posted:I've always wanted to play this game but the sheer amount of DLC always puts me off games like these. I have the same problem with the newer Total War series like Warhammer or Three Kingdoms in that I would need to spend hundreds of dollars to get the full experience. I don't mind some DLC but if the DLC runs down my screen into infinity it is incredibly annoying. I just checked Steam and with a 23% discount you can get this game and its 21(!) DLC's for just shy of a hundred dollars. Some of those DLC's are free. Some are not. But that is a ton of DLC and I will never pay a hundred dollars for a game. I can understand being weary of DLC since so many developers are really greedy and abusive about it. Even devs I otherwise really respect, like Valve, you look at the cash shop for TF2 and it was insane. A hat was like $5-20. That's way too loving much for a simple cosmetic! If they'd made things cost like .50 cents to $2, then I'd impulse-buy a ton of hats. But costing $15 means I never bought a single thing from the cash shop, not ever. Course, they do it for the whales, ugh. However, I find it weird that some games I think handle DLC really respectfully will get the same reaction from gamers. Total Warhammer, Hitman, Payday 2 and The Hunter: Call of the Wild (BUT NOT HUNTER CLASSIC OMG) all handle DLC in a way that I think is very fairly balanced and priced. They're all games that have a TOOOOON of DLC. And when you look at the steam page for the total DLC price and see that its like $400, its easy to balk. But here's the thing... that doesn't mean anything. Like, if they'd simply put out 3 DLC and stopped, the total DLC price would be like $15. Does having more content added over time somehow lower the value? Does it somehow make the game worse? I don't think so. That's a weird attitude, to me. Like, if you feel that way... just ignore the DLC. Pretend it doesn't exist. Its purely optional. To me, it is entirely a good thing that there is so much Total Warhammer DLC. I don't own even 40% of it yet. That's fine. Why should it bother me that more toys exist I could buy later? If anything, I feel better investing the money in a game I know has lots more value to offer me down the road. Its ESPECIALLY not a problem with Payday 2 or The Hunter, since in those games (as I mentioned in my post above) you can play the DLC FOR FREE by simply joining someone else's multiplayer game.  Also when you consider the base cost of The Hunter is $20 on steam right now, like, its worth way way more than that. You get several ranges and guns and animals to hunt for that $20. You also get some free DLC updates too. So I don't understand complaining that they made more content, as long as it's all reasonably priced (and it is! very reasonable costs! We're talking $4-8 here) If you don't want DLC, don't buy any, and you can enjoy the base game as-is for the boxed price and get hours of fun. Don't let the existence of things you can buy get you down, if you don't want to buy em, don't.
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May 19, 2021 05:15
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Shine posted:I stalked a deer for 40 minutes, then remembered I could just set my system clock ahead two weeks and it would die. Lmao Its especially slow going at first. Once you find a bunch of feed locations and find stations for fast travel you can find deer a lot faster. Hopefully you enjoyed the scenery.
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May 20, 2021 06:14
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I left it out of my writeup, but after seeing Shine's comments one of the best things about The Hunter is its an FPS where nobody will ever attack you. Okay, a bear might maul you, but you don't have to ever be tense that somebody could snipe you. Its totally asymmetric. That makes for a really relaxing, chill game. There's still tension because of not wanting to spook the animals and miss them like I mentioned, which is actually a game design magic trick. It goes into something I've been saying for awhile about games needing to get away from player dying as punishment and allow for soft fail-states that never actually "game over", we're not in a quarter munching arcade anymore. (Of course there's exceptions, games like Dark Souls or Roguelikes depend upon player death reset and build it into something meaningful. But in many games its just a nuisance) Oldstench posted:FYI: theHunter is on sale right now for $6.  Sorry Shine, bad timing. Good news is the DLC is on sale too! Honestly for $6 that's an insane value. You could easily get your money's worth just walking around taking pictures of deer pokemon snap style for $6 even if you aren't interested in shooting things. Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 19:39 on May 27, 2021 |
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May 27, 2021 19:35
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Whizzing Wizard posted:It's probably way too much effort, but could we maybe get an index of what games have been posted in the op? Yeah it is work but would be really nice to avoid accidental repeats. Ideally the OP should just link to the major posts but maybe that's too much.
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Jun 3, 2021 23:00
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Prey is a game I wish I had played much sooner. Goddamn the marketing team hosed them, the name really screwed that game. Call it SpaceShock and it would have sold 10x more copies.Electromax posted:I've beaten the 2002 REmake of Resident Evil more than any other game. It was the reason I bought a GameCube because I was astonished how good it looked in magazines and on TV ads: How does the more recent PC REMake compare to the GC version?
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Jun 29, 2021 23:17
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If you have an hour, the Joseph Anderson breakdown of Prey is REALLY REALLY good. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KS0NtNxlX-s Spoilers, if you haven't played Prey, you REALLY should try it before watching the above video or reading too much about it. Also, FWIW, Erwin the German's writeup stuck to mostly gameplay and avoided a lot of the story concepts, which IMO are the best part of Prey. The mere concept behind the central conceit of the game is so cool and thought-provoking, but I'm not mad because reading about it will spoil everything, and if you don't already know about the implications of neuromods, you really need to play the game yourself. Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 23:21 on Jun 29, 2021 |
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Jun 29, 2021 23:18
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Electromax posted:I love System Shock 2 and the first Bioshock, I never knew Prey was in that vein. I saw your post and thought, wasn't that some game about a Native American guy with superpowers to run on ceilings or something? Eventually I realized there was a NEW game that is very much relevant to my interests - gonna pick it up ASAP. Yep. Prey (the second one, stupid name) is an ImmSim, or a 0451 game, like Deus Ex and Bioshock. Zaphod42 posted:Goddamn the marketing team hosed them, the name really screwed that game. Call it SpaceShock and it would have sold 10x more copies.
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Jun 30, 2021 02:16
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haveblue posted:Prey 2017 has the same sort of map design as Dark Souls, where not only do you have free travel between all the areas but the areas are built to make sense when combined in 3D space and you gradually become aware of how the world fits together around itself (especially when you can go outside and fly around the entire station) Yeah it has the same sort of unlocking and discovering shortcuts and learning to map the space in your head for fast traversal. That said, I agree with Anderson that maybe a little less back-tracking would be nice
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Jun 30, 2021 03:11
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UT2k4 was a golden age in that it felt like you could do anything. There were SO MANY game modes, things like Onslaught and Assault felt like real innovations compared to the team deathmatches and CTFs of the shooters before it. Vehicles felt amazing, maps were huge, and action was FAST. I think I have even more nostalgia for the original UT though.
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Jul 1, 2021 19:30
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I never got into Hunt: Showdown but I keep thinking about it. It looks pretty cool design wise. Also its basically the Gantz videogame I've been saying Epic should make Fortnite into for awhile.
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Jul 18, 2021 19:36
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BiggerBoat posted:Are we allowed to go more than once? Because I have my #2 game locked and loaded. Pretty sure others have. As long as you put lots of thought into your post I can't see a complaint. (Just don't post like "I love game x cuz its good" so someone else can go more detailed if you're feeling lazy haha)
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Jul 18, 2021 21:10
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doctorfrog posted:Link to his Sopranos thread? I’m on my first watch, Season 2. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3879795&pagenumber=166&perpage=40 drat good thread
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Jul 19, 2021 07:09
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Brave of you to post that here but I agree. 2077, like No Man's Sky, is an actually really good and fun game that was released half-baked and I really hope they get the same redemption arc that NMS eventually did. CDPR hosed their employees who made some absolutely incredible and beautiful artwork. The story and characters are legit some of the better I've experienced in a game lately, short of Disco Elysium. (Nothing compares in writing to Disco) I played on PC and had very very few issues. My gf played on PS4 and the game was extremely buggy, ultimately to the point she had to put it down. But she just started playing it against last week, and while performance on console still isn't great, at least it isn't crashing anymore so its definitely playable and she's going to finish the story.
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Jul 24, 2021 19:44
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CyberPingu posted:I'm surprised that no one has done this one yet but Doom (1993). I want to add to this: A lot of people who play shooters these days probably don't realize just how different they play from Doom. Even though its old, its worth playing to this day because of that particular balance of game mechanics. One of those being doomguy's ability to move at 40kmph while strafing, and many enemies having projectile attacks, means that Doom almost plays out more like a twin-stick shooter like Robotron than something like Call of Duty. Ducking behind cover rarely happens because moving at full speed means you're nearly as well protected but can also fire back. Doom also has incredible enemy variety, probably the best and most iconic rogues gallery of videogames. But the best thing about Doom 1/2 in 2021 is that its so easy to make doom content. If you want to make a map for Crysis 3 you're going to spend hundreds of hours, or only use stock assets (and still spend a long time). If you want to make a map for Battlefield 5, you need to work for DICE. But you, yes you, even if you have no mapping experience, you can build levels of Doom yourself in minutes to a few hours, and play them and share them. Its so fast and easy. And because doom is doom, the bar for detail is very low. You're *expected* to make blocky worlds, that's the doom engine. There's no expectation of hyper-detail photorealism. Its possible to make content that is even better looking than what the original developers did with their full budget! (It was 1993 after all) Whoever you are, if you're reading this, please download doom builder and try making a map. Its so fun and easy. https://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=232&t=66745 As a result, the doom mapping community is insanely prolific and has done things that absolutely dwarf the original releases of doom. Custom WADs have pushed the envelope with new technology and game mechanics and both made better doom maps and also used the doom engine to make non-doom things. Doom loving rules.
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Aug 21, 2021 04:05
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CyberPingu posted:The funny thing about the music is a lot of it is actually rock music from the time just synth'd up and changed juuuust enough to avoid copyright. Honestly doom released today probably wouldn't pass copyright, they barely even changed half the songs. They're basically straight midi covers of pantera and metallica. Dominoes posted:My parents wouldn't buy it for me because it was too violent. Duke Nukem 3D came with a joystick, but they wouldn't let me install it. Same, so I had to play doom and heretic at my friend's house. But they let me play Dark Forces which is just star wars doom.
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Aug 21, 2021 17:41
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exquisite tea posted:Somehow Guilty Gear still keeps on truckin' despite all their songs basically being lifted directly from contemporary prog rock and metal. Really? None of their tracks seem as lifted, do you have an example? Like Blue Water Blue Sky or Awe of She rule, and I can't think of any prog rock with those riffs. But doom is LITERALLY the same notes. I did a google for "guilty gear music knockoff" and literally nothing came up. If you do that for doom, there's 200 youtube videos comparing how back to back the doom songs sound exactly the same. What's more, Guilty Gear has started recording wholly original tracks. And Doom doesn't do the same thing anymore, Doom Eternal did original djenty music, likely because they would get sued to hell if they tried to pull the doom 1/2 soundtracks in 2020. E: Okay, I found a comparison video, it seems a few of their really old tracks did sorta sound like some power metal songs, but it doesn't seem as bad as doom and they haven't done it in awhile likely for legal reasons. The games are chock full of music references in the game, obviously. E2: And some of these are beyond a stretch. Somebody is claiming "holy orders be just or be dead" is ripping off Malmsteen's "rising force" and just... no. They're not remotely the same. Chuggy guitars with pedal tones are not all created equal, that's not copying someone's song that's just how you play guitar. Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 18:24 on Aug 21, 2021 |
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Aug 21, 2021 18:11
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Torquemada posted:I loved the look of it, but I think as a 50 year old with hardly any gamepad experience and no Souls-like experience at all I’d be wasting my money. If you want to learn it you can, and in some ways souls lnowledge can actually slow you down. But if you have little gamepad experience you will have to spend some time building muscle memory. You CAN do it, 100%, its just a question of if you want to.
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Aug 21, 2021 18:55
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 06:10 |
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The biggest challenge with Sekiro is its only single player. Souls games even if you were ultra bad you could just summon a goon to play the game for you. But Sekiro you can't do that. Still, all it really takes is perseverance and practice.
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Aug 21, 2021 19:42
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