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Cleretic posted:This unfortunately means that right now I've got no reason to get excited to play, since the the event dungeons currently available are for FF games I don't actually like. As an FFRK addict I will say you will hit a roadblock pretty quickly if you approach it with this mentality because each event is a source of 10 mythril, bare minimum.
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Mar 7, 2016 16:05
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FactsAreUseless posted:The biggest issue for me with Borderlands 2 is how much it resists letting players have distinct builds for a good 20 hours of the game. It takes five levels just to get your active skill, and most of the abilities you get in the next ten levels are gradual bonuses to reload speed, fire rate, etc. You don't get to do the things your class is designed to do for a crazy long time. This kind of thing annoys me in general. Plenty of games make your characters so generic for most of the game, with builds only really going anywhere much later in the game. I'd much rather get a distinct playstyle going with your early level ups, then have the later levels be all about tweaking the specifics. I remember Gaige's anarchy skills being pretty frontloaded in how they change the way you play, which made her pretty fun to play even fairly early on.
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Mar 7, 2016 16:09
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ChogsEnhour posted:I watched the Bro Team video of it on Youtube and it's hilarious. He pressed maybe four buttons throughout the entire thing. The game just plays itself with minimal input and 80 percent of it is people standing around talking... Y'know, the think Minecraft is famous for. I think the best part was when he started doing his fat man wheeze after he said the one character was going to walk away, say something super dramatic, then turn around and walk back to them. That entire game is a mess and I'm glad someone is screeching about how bad it is instead of screeching that it's amazing. Also, the game has a hysterically funny moment when they tried to make a character's death seem very sad and poignant but it's a loving pig. The second it dies and fades out it leaves behind a porkchop that the main character picks up and looks all sad. Telltale had to be trolling Microsoft by making this game.
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Mar 7, 2016 16:11
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Simply Simon posted:Everything I hear about Borderlands makes me think that loving Hellgate:London really was an underappreciated classic and not, you know, pretty bad... - The aforementioned skill problems. - Extremely stingy drop rates for a mostly singleplayer game. (Patched very late, but still bad). - One of the worst beginnings I've ever seen in a game. It takes way too long to give you any abilities. - Amazingly bad class balance and scaling that means some classes don't shine until the highest levels and others become useless once you level too high. Likewise, some classes depend entirely on getting the right drops and others don't care. - No dodging or on-demand healing. There are no Diablo-style potions, no dodge button, no way to avoid damage. Only certain classes get powers that heal them. Since damage way outpaces health at higher levels, most characters have to rely on one of a couple healing weapons to survive, one of which is a quest weapon from the DLC. You could fix most of the game's problems with math adjustments: give players more skills and more, faster levels if you want to do a ton of small passive bonuses. Increase drop rates. Give every class healing abilities, or better yet just make all attacks heal for a percentage of their damage (most people use equipment combinations to make this happen at high levels anyway). Don't make players wait so long to do cool things. The only non-math change I would make would be to add a dodge button or more mobility options.
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Mar 7, 2016 16:13
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Horrible Smutbeast posted:I think the best part was when he started doing his fat man wheeze after he said the one character was going to walk away, say something super dramatic, then turn around and walk back to them. That entire game is a mess and I'm glad someone is screeching about how bad it is instead of screeching that it's amazing. That spoiler moment made me want to buy the game. I could be entertained the whole way through, knowing that moment was coming.
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Mar 7, 2016 16:31
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This pretty much applies to most, if not all of the Telltale games (unsure about the Game of Thrones series), and is really my biggest problem with the "YOUR CHOICES WILL MATTER" poo poo the games pull Whenever they give a supporting character a focused amount of character development, especially alone with the main character, they're sure to be dead by the end of the next scene. The worst of it is when you have "MASH X TO SAVE PERSON" and they still die because drama Or they can just die off screen  So whats even the point of giving these guys character development if you're just gonna drop them into a pit of spikes in the next scene?
spit on my clit has a new favorite as of 16:39 on Mar 7, 2016 |
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Mar 7, 2016 16:36
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Morglon posted:There are old games I can replay to this day without a problem and some I just can't get into anymore. I recently tried to get back into Baldur's Gate and while I don't generally mind most things second edition D&D rules are much more tedious than I remembered them. Baldur's Gate is one of those series that I can play today, no problem. I actually replayed both games just last year. It's fine. I won't argue about the D&D rules though, it's a miracle that the game works as relatively well as it does.
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Mar 7, 2016 16:56
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The big issue with BGII is that 2e had the most needlessly obtuse system for wether or not you hit something. Also, there were way, way too many types of saves against spells.
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Mar 7, 2016 17:02
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FactsAreUseless posted:It isn't all bad, there are things I like about BL2 (not having played any of the others). There are just a handful of stupid decisions that stop it from being really good: The interesting thing is how a lot of this compares to the first game. BL2 actually represents a significant step forward from the first game, which was way more awkward and unrefined by comparison. Two's opening chapter has some awful pacing problems, but the beginning of 1 is much, much worse. And oddly enough they actually did have potion-equivalents in 1, but they took inventory space and weren't hotkeyed or anything. Basically they just acted as top-ups in places where vending machines didn't exist. They're at least still slowly improving; in the Pre-Sequel you get your action skill at level 3 instead of 5 (though I still don't get why they don't bite the bullet and just give it to you immediately...the answer might literally be "because console babbies" for all I know) and from what I could tell all of the skill trees have that Krieg/Gaige-style crazy, involved builds with varying playstyles thing going on. I've also wondered how you would solve the survivability problem inherent in the games. A lot of it has to do with balance issues big and small, including map and enemy design, but I think the core problem ultimately stems from them trying to merge the shield and health shooter system with Diablo loot, which results in really weird survival curves thanks to the variable Shield Delay and Shield Recharge stats. If massively simplifying them is out of the question, I'd at least change the banding on those values to be less obnoxious. When those numbers are inflated for a specific purpose (like for various uniques with goofy properties), it's all well and fine, but when it's just "this shield has a six second delay because you're level 5 and gently caress you" it feels awful and naturally compounds with the likely equally lovely shield capacity and your equally lovely guns not killing things efficiently enough. Other shooters can build their pacing around a static shield delay and/or recharge and it usually leads to a satisfying gameplay rhythm, whereas in BL you're often just left hoping for the best. Health has a similar problem where it often feels more like it directly overlaps with your shield rather than being a separate, distinct resource. And somewhere in here is their weird focus on Fight For Your Life mode...
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Mar 7, 2016 21:46
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I think BL2's biggest problem over BL1 is the new game+ is a complete slog unless you're kitted right for it. In the first one I actually bothered to reset my quest progress on 360 using a USB drive to replay the whole thing at max level. The constant need in BL2 to be using slag and elemental effects always really makes it no fun to play for me.
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Mar 7, 2016 21:58
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Simply Simon posted:Everything I hear about Borderlands makes me think that loving Hellgate:London really was an underappreciated classic and not, you know, pretty bad... Hellgate was the basis of a good game that drowned in a sea of bugs and bad design decisions. When it was actually firing on all cylinders I thought it was pretty great, and I didn't even have those sweet lifetime membership perks.
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Mar 7, 2016 22:31
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The Moon Monster posted:Hellgate was the basis of a good game that drowned in a sea of bugs and bad design decisions. When it was actually firing on all cylinders I thought it was pretty great, and I didn't even have those sweet lifetime membership perks.
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Mar 7, 2016 22:35
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RagnarokAngel posted:As an FFRK addict I will say you will hit a roadblock pretty quickly if you approach it with this mentality because each event is a source of 10 mythril, bare minimum. Yeah, and they're an easy way to train up low-level characters, but I started playing because I was interested in playing with characters I actually like. I can't get excited about unlocking Laguna.
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Mar 7, 2016 22:48
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John Murdoch posted:I've also wondered how you would solve the survivability problem inherent in the games. A lot of it has to do with balance issues big and small, including map and enemy design, but I think the core problem ultimately stems from them trying to merge the shield and health shooter system with Diablo loot, which results in really weird survival curves thanks to the variable Shield Delay and Shield Recharge stats. If massively simplifying them is out of the question, I'd at least change the banding on those values to be less obnoxious. When those numbers are inflated for a specific purpose (like for various uniques with goofy properties), it's all well and fine, but when it's just "this shield has a six second delay because you're level 5 and gently caress you" it feels awful and naturally compounds with the likely equally lovely shield capacity and your equally lovely guns not killing things efficiently enough. Other shooters can build their pacing around a static shield delay and/or recharge and it usually leads to a satisfying gameplay rhythm, whereas in BL you're often just left hoping for the best. Health has a similar problem where it often feels more like it directly overlaps with your shield rather than being a separate, distinct resource. And somewhere in here is their weird focus on Fight For Your Life mode... That would solve a lot of survivability problems. It doesn't fix all of them (about three-quarters of my deaths are from taking damage immediately after I kill the last enemy, or getting knocked off a ledge by an attack). I have played way more BL2 than is at all reasonable, and I'm certain this will help. Basically they need to make a modding system for BL2. It really needs it.
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Mar 7, 2016 23:35
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Actually the survivability issue is kind of weird in Borderlands versus other ARPGs like Diablo simply because, at its core, Borderlands is a skill game. In a game like Diablo, incoming damage is kind of a constant thing and you mitigate it mostly through smart gearing and skill choices and poo poo like that. Success in Diablo is mostly being intelligent about how you lay out your skills and optimize the gear that you'll eventually get; it only takes a small amount of actual skill. In Borderlands, there really isn't any damage mitigation gear other than shields (which are really just more health) and it's sort of an odd balance because if you make most/all incoming damage hitscan or otherwise unavoidable like in Diablo, you punish people that are good at shootmans (or reward bitchmade play), and if you make most incoming damage avoidable then you really reduce the value of tanky characters and high-strength shields since you can just Git Gud and not get hit instead. It's just an odd situation and I'm not sure what the actual answer is when you're talking about balancing ARPG conventions and FPS conventions. How they have addressed it is definitely Wrong (especially once you get to TVHM) but I don't think making Fight For Your Life endlessly abusable for extra lives is the answer to that.
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Mar 8, 2016 01:20
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Borderlands 2 starts out as a skill based game and eventually overtaken by a numbers based game like most ARPGs. I played a ton of it since I like the presentation and it still vaguely feels skill based later on, but it's a very disappointing transition. Every levelup your stats scale at one rate, while weapons scale at a higher rate, and enemies scale at an even higher rate. This means that each levelup makes you effectively weaker against same-level enemies, and it gets exponentially worse each levelup. By the end of TVHM if the game decides to spawn an enemy with a rocket launcher then you are instantly hosed and better hope there's someone around to use for FFYL. Then ultimate slag hunter mode just got more and more miserable as time went on, where the gulf between you and the enemies gets greater and greater until getting hit by one hitscan attack drops you to the health gate. But the most critical problem with UVHM was the point where somebody stood up at a design meeting and said "Let's give every single enemy 4x as much health," but then nobody else at that meeting said "No, you loving dumbass" like they should have.
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Mar 8, 2016 01:31
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All my friends beat Borderlands 2 and played so much they got tired of it two years ago. I just bought it during the most recent Winter Steam Sale. The thing dragging BL2 down for me is that it was obviously designed with co-op in mind, but nobody I know wants to play it any more. Fight for Your Life, vehicles having independently targeting weapons, bad guys with ridiculous opening spike damage, the crap single-player drops; it all makes a lot more sense if you look at it as a co-op game first. Curse my frugality!
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Mar 8, 2016 01:38
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It's still a skill game, it's an FPS. You need to aim and hit headshots and that kind of thing. The problem is that they addressed difficulty in a strictly ARPG sense by inflating numbers and never addressed the skill issue by rewarding skillful play. I mean I guess the argument is kind of pedantic, but I'd say that it's just a skill game that you can only beat on TVHM+ by cheesy bitchmade play rather than actually being really good at shooting people and not getting shot yourself. I think even if they inflated player strength in a strictly ARPG sense by making guns do a bazillion damage, it still would be kind of an underwhelming game because it also wouldn't reward skillful play, it would just reward having a gun that shoots out billion damage crits rather than 100 million damage crits. Which is what I expect out of a game like Diablo, where engaging with the enemy begins and ends at moving your cursor somewhere near them and striking a key. Borderlands does revolve around FPS conventions, though, and I think they need to come to the conclusion that if you're going to make an FPS game, then I should be able to theoretically win by headshotting my way through the entire game with a level 1 character using the starting gun. Dark Souls and Doom are not worse games for this sort of thing.
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Mar 8, 2016 01:39
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Aleph Null posted:All my friends beat Borderlands 2 and played so much they got tired of it two years ago. This is a pretty big one "Get borderlands, it's fun!" but the few people who aren't bored of it by the time it's not expensive as hell for a multiplayer game, because I don't like paying a lot for a game that depends on other people to be fun, already know the optimal routes through every quest so there's no time to enjoy the game because everyone just rushes through every quest and kills everything before I'm even in the room.
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Mar 8, 2016 02:14
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Shields drag down Borderlands 2 for me. With guns, the whole loot game matters, because different weapons have different attributes and tactical advantages. With shields, it's a bunch of numbers regardless, and finding the difference between a 2.5 second and a 2.75 second recharge delay isn't really worth my time, so lately I've just used the save editor to level up one of the few shields that I like along with my character. Also, there are some enemies and fights that are just badly designed. So you've usually got bosses surrounded by flunkies so if you get put into FFYL, you can kill a flunky and get back into the fight. But for the Skeleton King boss, the flunkies are a special type of skeleton who you can't actually kill while in FFYL mode - why the hell are they there?
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Mar 8, 2016 02:38
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Aleph Null posted:All my friends beat Borderlands 2 and played so much they got tired of it two years ago. I'm still playing it, if you want a co-op partner.
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Mar 8, 2016 02:39
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The optimization issue is why I think non-randomized ARPGs like Titan Quest lack longevity. Which is totally a thing dragging down Titan Quest. It's still a shallow game, but when the map also is static the game becomes a solved problem pretty quickly.
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Mar 8, 2016 02:45
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Horrible Smutbeast posted:XCOM: Enemy Unknown: It's a loving XCOM game. ARGH! Specifically I hate how none of my crew is psionic and apparently that's a requirement to finish the game. C'mon you shits, get it together. This is why XCOMUTIL exists. gently caress you, I'm already buying soldiers in bulk and winnowing out the all but the Best of The Best, I'm going to peek at their Psi defense stat and factoring that in.  is only true if you're lazy.
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Mar 8, 2016 03:38
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MisterBibs posted:This is why XCOMUTIL exists. gently caress you, I'm already buying soldiers in bulk and winnowing out the all but the Best of The Best, I'm going to peek at their Psi defense stat and factoring that in. Scratch that, XCOM fans are even worse than the game because you apparently can't read which version of the game I'm playing (hint it's not one that's compatible with xcomutil you stupid illiterate gently caress) before kneejerking into the sun while wheezing out "git gud hurrrrrr"? For someone who's apparently such a fan of the series you sure as poo poo can't even tell the difference between the '12 XCOM: Enemy Unknown and the '94 XCOM: UFO defense games. Horrible Smutbeast has a new favorite as of 04:08 on Mar 8, 2016 |
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Mar 8, 2016 04:03
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PYF is grumpy today. Anyway, more digimon. So to evolve your digimon you have to meet arbitrary stat requirements. Like, 100 attack and be level 50 or whatever. Usually it's not hard to make them. But sometimes, for god knows what reason, they give some dudes evolutions that are literally impossible to meet the requirements of without severe micromanaging of the personality and farm training system. Training on the farm takes at minimum half an hour every time you do it and some guys require you to manipulate their stats perfectly if you want to evolve them. It's stupid and the whole system is genuinely inferior to the DS games that came before Cyber Sleuth. It's made all the worse by the fact that every digimon has a hard stat limit in this game, so you can't even use the digimon you like if you want to do the harder content in the game, because there are characters that are flat out better than others in every way and if you don't like them then gently caress you. There's even one notable evolution that seems like he'd be super strong since he has a starring role in the plot even, but he's straight up inferior to the digimon that evolve into him because one of the guys that turn into him has an attack that ignores the opponent's defense and he doesn't get an attack half as good as that.
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Mar 8, 2016 04:38
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FactsAreUseless posted:This is compounded - and partially fixed but only by accident - by the fact that damage calculations and the way skills interact with weapons are insane. In Borderlands 2 it's completely possible to solo super-hard raid bosses with lovely equipment because something about your skill setup means that its damage stat doesn't actually matter. But only with certain characters and builds. Unless something about that interaction is bugged. Or it interacts weirdly with another piece of equipment. Or the skill description just lies to you. Or When i first got to the final boss of borderlands one, i managed to solo it without my weapon at all by using some melee skill to boost crit rate or something, standing next to one of its tentacles wrapped around the rock, and just mashing melee while it could do gently caress all to hit me or anything. (also for some reason when i did this, the crit skill got louder and louder with each strike) my borderlands 2 run was even more hilariously broken, with me somehow finding a dupe glitch by pure luck while playing co op with a friend. eventually we just farmed an enemy using a quest exploit to reach the level cap so nothing scaling would get obsolete.
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Mar 8, 2016 05:06
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Horrible Smutbeast posted:Scratch that, XCOM fans are even worse than the game because you apparently can't read which version of the game I'm playing (hint it's not one that's compatible with xcomutil you stupid illiterate gently caress) before kneejerking into the sun while wheezing out "git gud hurrrrrr"? git gud
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Mar 8, 2016 05:13
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Nuebot posted:PYF is grumpy today. play pokemon instead
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Mar 8, 2016 05:48
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Nostradingus posted:play pokemon instead Didn't pokemon have a pokemon you had to hold the DS upside down to evolve?
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Mar 8, 2016 06:16
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Horrible Smutbeast posted:Scratch that, XCOM fans are even worse than the game because you apparently can't read which version of the game I'm playing (hint it's not one that's compatible with xcomutil you stupid illiterate gently caress) before kneejerking into the sun while wheezing out "git gud hurrrrrr"? Dude, my bad. The old game is named X-COM: UFO Defense (it was called UFO: Enemy Unknown in the UK, and even XCOM had executables defining it as Unknown), and I completely blanked on the '12 XCOM having a subtitle. For edification, XCOMUTIL is a XCOM: UFO Defense program; I thought you were discussing the old X-COM game. It let you load all your soldiers into a rudimentary excel file, and you could tell it to do all the who-is-the-best stuff for you. No having to worry about your otherwise-awesome soldiers had PSI abilities of tissue paper, you find that poo poo out long before you have Psi Labs. (Really, though, me being a 'get good' guy? gently caress that, I'm a bend-the-game-over-until-its-the-difficulty-I-want player. Always Be Reloading.) MisterBibs has a new favorite as of 07:37 on Mar 8, 2016 |
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Mar 8, 2016 07:25
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Horrible Smutbeast posted:Scratch that, XCOM fans are even worse than the game because you apparently can't read which version of the game I'm playing (hint it's not one that's compatible with xcomutil you stupid illiterate gently caress) before kneejerking into the sun while wheezing out "git gud hurrrrrr"? Ahahahaha you ridiculous raging nerd. Stop getting mad at someone making a very reasonable mistake! In plenty of places the original was known as Enemy Unknown, it's an easy mistake to make so stop raging. As for him telling you to 'git gud' you're way overreacting, probably because you're really bad at XCOM and are mad about it. git gud
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Mar 8, 2016 11:25
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MisterBibs posted:Dude, my bad. The old game is named X-COM: UFO Defense (it was called UFO: Enemy Unknown in the UK, and even XCOM had executables defining it as Unknown), and I completely blanked on the '12 XCOM having a subtitle. Game 1: X-COM: UFO Defense (or, for the UK, Enemy Unknown, so the Firaxis once still confuses me when I see it mentioned) Game 2: X-COM: Terror from the Deep Game 3: X-COM: Apocalypse Game 4: XCOM: Enemy Unknown (okay, sure, it’s a reboot harkening back to the original, that’s fine even if hyphens are apparently no longer cool) Game 5: XCOM 2
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Mar 8, 2016 11:31
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Lunchmeat Larry posted:XCOM/X-COM has a series naming convention that would make Star Wars: Dark Forces 4: Jedi Knight 3: Jedi Outcast 2: Jedi Academy blush. You forgot about the bureau, interceptor and enforcer.
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Mar 8, 2016 12:46
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Morglon posted:You forgot about the bureau, interceptor and enforcer.
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Mar 8, 2016 12:51
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XCOM looks better than X-COM.
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Mar 8, 2016 17:35
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RyokoTK posted:The optimization issue is why I think non-randomized ARPGs like Titan Quest lack longevity. Which is totally a thing dragging down Titan Quest. It's still a shallow game, but when the map also is static the game becomes a solved problem pretty quickly. Titan Quest's longevity wasn't quite as short as "non random Diablo 2" due to the variety of builds available, at least. But yeah - it always struck me as odd that since they were basically making Diablo 2.5 that they didn't adopt a random map + setpieces approach like D2 did.
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Mar 8, 2016 18:41
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Maybe ARPGs just shouldn't be played for 1000 hours. That kind of thinking is why Diablo 3 was so bad at launch.
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Mar 8, 2016 18:53
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kazil posted:Maybe ARPGs just shouldn't be played Agreed
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Mar 8, 2016 19:05
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gently caress, I even forgot the difference between XCOM and X-COM. Content: I remember being really annoyed with Titan Quest at the time I played it, because it was one of the first games I played that had health potions be a heal-over-time thing instead of a big burst of instant healing. Given that I'm more used to that thanks to Diablo 3, I think I need to replay TQ and see if its still annoying or not.
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Mar 8, 2016 19:14
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MisterBibs posted:gently caress, I even forgot the difference between XCOM and X-COM. Try grim dawn, where potions heal you 50% all at once and 50% over time
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Mar 8, 2016 19:46
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