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LIVE AMMO COSPLAY
Feb 3, 2006

New Leaf posted:

Except for her weird unmoving plastic face..

It's funny in big budget story games that faces aren't properly animated outside of cutscenes.

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Perfect Potato
Mar 4, 2009

Karma Tornado posted:

I played like fifteen hours of Deadfire twice, and I think I stopped both times because the A plot ("a giant has exploded from under your house and is striding across the ocean to do things that are probably bad") was getting sidetracked by people coming up to you and saying like "that giant that made the enormous footprint in which we currently stand was really something, but could you settle this trade dispute, [lore word meaning 'honored stranger']" like it was the beginning of Phantom Menace
Comparing the Pillars games to the prequel trilogy is a cursedly accurate comparison. I gave up when I did all of Neketaka and the only character I could relate to and feel empathy for as a human was the ocd goldpact knight

Doesn't help that the combat is bogged down with horrible minutia like oh you buffed yourself with a spell and gain +.45 attack speed for 3.2 seconds

Perfect Potato has a new favorite as of 02:10 on Aug 10, 2019

spit on my clit
Jul 19, 2015

by Cyrano4747

Nuebot posted:

Yakuza Kiwami 2 makes battles more open-air so I've taken to starting a fight then just running away, since you run much faster in combat mode and can run infinitely. So I'll just zoom off to my destination and leave the street thugs behind, then wait a few seconds until combat ends and talk to whatever NPC I need to talk to for my side quest.

Also bosses in Kiwami 2 just kind of have too much HP? Like the actual fights are fun for the most part, but they all feel about twice as long as they should be. It doesn't help that the first boss you're put up against has three health bars, doesn't hit hard at all and slowly just becomes you chipping away at this guy because you have no upgrades - but the excitement and cool impact kind of wears thin after you've seen all of their attacks and learned to avoid them and now it's just you still trying to burn through two or three health bars because they have so god drat much HP.

Trust me, once you get enough money to eat the good stuff and chug appstims, you'll find that the game is too easy. I beat all the bosses too fast, it was a real shame.

Nuebot
Feb 18, 2013

The developer of Brigador is a secret chud, don't give him money

spit on my clit posted:

Trust me, once you get enough money to eat the good stuff and chug appstims, you'll find that the game is too easy. I beat all the bosses too fast, it was a real shame.

See, that's the thing, I'd rather it be too easy than too long and tedious. Because I can always pull my punches and not spam tiger drop or whatever. There's nothing I can do right now that makes these guys with what feels like a billion HP, have less HP, beyond just punch them until they die. In fact I had a fight with Majima just last night and because he was kicking my low HP rear end I switched to a weapon and from there it just became a game of smacking him like twice and them using my heat attack. It wasn't really hard from then on, but it took like ten heat actions to beat him. :psyduck: I've been keeping current with sidequests too, so unless I just did an absurd amount of grinding there's not really much I could do to make myself stronger.

MiddleOne
Feb 17, 2011

Nuebot posted:

Yakuza Kiwami 2 makes battles more open-air so I've taken to starting a fight then just running away, since you run much faster in combat mode and can run infinitely. So I'll just zoom off to my destination and leave the street thugs behind, then wait a few seconds until combat ends and talk to whatever NPC I need to talk to for my side quest.

Also bosses in Kiwami 2 just kind of have too much HP? Like the actual fights are fun for the most part, but they all feel about twice as long as they should be. It doesn't help that the first boss you're put up against has three health bars, doesn't hit hard at all and slowly just becomes you chipping away at this guy because you have no upgrades - but the excitement and cool impact kind of wears thin after you've seen all of their attacks and learned to avoid them and now it's just you still trying to burn through two or three health bars because they have so god drat much HP.

Don't worry. If you over-level (which is incredibly easy to do if you're doing any side-content) then bosses will start going down in 10-30 seconds.

The new combat system is very wonky.

RareAcumen
Dec 28, 2012




Nuebot posted:

See, that's the thing, I'd rather it be too easy than too long and tedious. Because I can always pull my punches and not spam tiger drop or whatever. There's nothing I can do right now that makes these guys with what feels like a billion HP, have less HP, beyond just punch them until they die. In fact I had a fight with Majima just last night and because he was kicking my low HP rear end I switched to a weapon and from there it just became a game of smacking him like twice and them using my heat attack. It wasn't really hard from then on, but it took like ten heat actions to beat him. :psyduck: I've been keeping current with sidequests too, so unless I just did an absurd amount of grinding there's not really much I could do to make myself stronger.

The dumb thing about the games is that Heat Actions get weaker as you do more of them.

Strom Cuzewon
Jul 1, 2010

Perfect Potato posted:

Comparing the Pillars games to the prequel trilogy is a cursedly accurate comparison. I gave up when I did all of Neketaka and the only character I could relate to and feel empathy for as a human was the ocd goldpact knight

Doesn't help that the combat is bogged down with horrible minutia like oh you buffed yourself with a spell and gain +.45 attack speed for 3.2 seconds

Which also completely robs the combat of any weight, or feeling of advancement. Its all just a load of flashy sparkly lights that change a bunch of back end numbers. Doubly frustrating on turn based mode where you have a bunch of turns between targeting the spell and the anemic particle effects

Compare to Original Sin 2,where you start with hurling rocks or little flaming daggers, and quickly escalate to giant death lasers, earthquakes and hammer strikes that clear the screen.

My Lovely Horse
Aug 21, 2010

Perfect Potato posted:

Doesn't help that the combat is bogged down with horrible minutia like oh you buffed yourself with a spell and gain +.45 attack speed for 3.2 seconds
Oof, yeah. People say D&D has horrible minutia and fiddly modifiers and it does but I laughed and uninstalled Pillars pretty much as soon as I saw decimal points. Life's too short, y'know.

kazil
Jul 24, 2005

Derpmph trial star reporter!

Nuebot posted:

Also bosses in Kiwami 2 just kind of have too much HP? Like the actual fights are fun for the most part, but they all feel about twice as long as they should be. It doesn't help that the first boss you're put up against has three health bars, doesn't hit hard at all and slowly just becomes you chipping away at this guy because you have no upgrades - but the excitement and cool impact kind of wears thin after you've seen all of their attacks and learned to avoid them and now it's just you still trying to burn through two or three health bars because they have so god drat much HP.

Did you play Kiwami 1??!? Bosses in 2 are way more fun to fight than Kiwami 1 bosses.

Lead Psychiatry
Dec 22, 2004

I wonder if a soldier ever does mend a bullet hole in his coat?
I should've bothered to look into what the actual good fan missions for The Dark Mod were, instead of just trying to do the list in order. I ended up with a bunch of stinkers and now just don't care to get in my Thief fix anymore.

And this after putting off trying out TDM for years.

RyokoTK
Feb 12, 2012

I am cool.

kazil posted:

Did you play Kiwami 1??!? Bosses in 2 are way more fun to fight than Kiwami 1 bosses.

Boss fights in Yakuza games are pretty broadly terrible regardless.

Leave
Feb 7, 2012

Taking the term "Koopaling" to a whole new level since 2016.
You know what's dragging down Skies of Arcadia?

It's not on modern consoles.

pentyne
Nov 7, 2012

Leavemywife posted:

You know what's dragging down Skies of Arcadia?

It's not on modern consoles.

Played it recently? It could stand for quite a few QoL improvements, thankfully on PC you can increase game speed to 150% in battles and that solves most of them.

Still one of the best games to ever give a sense of discovery and adventure.

Captain Hygiene
Sep 17, 2007

You mess with the crabbo...



I picked up Prey on sale after the recommendation of some game thread or other, and it starts off on a confused note - you're in your apartment getting ready for work, and there's an enormous amount of stuff to pick up and fiddle around with. But none of it interacts in any meaningful way, like, you're 99% of the way there, but why give me a flushable toilet if nothing happens when I put my shoe or a roll of TP in it first? Why make the stove burner turn on but not do anything if I toss a pillow on top of it? Just let my shenanigans mean something, even if I game over before I get to work :sigh:

eta: lol, you can die by jumping into your commuter helicopter's blades before you get to the office, game partially saved

Captain Hygiene has a new favorite as of 18:19 on Aug 10, 2019

Strom Cuzewon
Jul 1, 2010

Oh and another dragging down every RPG of the last twenty years - stop loving telling me to gather my party before venturing forth. I get it, Baldurs Gate was a big deal, but there's a million forced references in every game even remotely inspired by it. Mass Effect 2: Tali has a drone, Tikcheta vas Paws, who she regurlarly tells to "go for the optics" which is defeinitly a low point.

MisterBibs
Jul 17, 2010

dolla dolla
bill y'all
Fun Shoe
Prey had itself dragged down by a lot of the (passive) marketing for it: stop telling me its a new System Shock 2. We solved the equation of what makes a fun and enjoyable *shock game, and you're 80% of the way there when you excise practically everything about System Shock 2. Even the developers figured it out after a disasterous friends-and-family test run early in Bioshock's development. It'd be like saying that one should totally play New RPG because it's a new Planescape "Wait Why Are You Playing Diablo Come Back We Didn't Ask You What Can Change The Nature Of A Man Another Dozen Times Yet" Torment.

Anyways, a bit of an esoteric one:

I decided to load a game I haven't played in ages on my phone called My Singing Monsters, because why not, I was curious what was up with it and haven't touched it in the aforementioned age. Simple but charming game, really: buy basic monsters (who each sing part of a song), breed those monsters into new monsters and new instruments/monsters, eventually building up a fuller and richer song. I think I stopped playing because I had it on my tablet, and that tablet is really old now.

The thing that drags the game down, though? There's no easy way to look at a glance how many different types of monsters you've unlocked or yet to acquire. You can be shown all of the possible permuations, but that includes higher-end rare and epic monsters that I'll worry about after I unlock all the other basic ones. I decided (partially out of clarification, partially out of spergy curiosity) to take a screenshot of the collection list for one land (there's a ton of different lands, each with a different song)



All the ones in red are rare or epic versions of existing monsters. Like, I understand the catch-em-all thing, I get that phone game developers like to lean into that by offering rare/epic stuff for IAP or straight cash, but let me filter those out at first. I swear, I'll come back and throw my Google Rewards cash on you spend money on your game down the line,

spit on my clit
Jul 19, 2015

by Cyrano4747

Captain Hygiene posted:

eta: lol, you can die by jumping into your commuter helicopter's blades before you get to the office, game partially saved

at least you got an achievement!

Kruller
Feb 20, 2004

It's time to restore dignity to the Farnsworth name!

Strom Cuzewon posted:

Oh and another dragging down every RPG of the last twenty years - stop loving telling me to gather my party before venturing forth. I get it, Baldurs Gate was a big deal, but there's a million forced references in every game even remotely inspired by it. Mass Effect 2: Tali has a drone, Tikcheta vas Paws, who she regurlarly tells to "go for the optics" which is defeinitly a low point.

You know that the same company made both games right?

Tiler Kiwi
Feb 26, 2011

Perfect Potato posted:

Doesn't help that the combat is bogged down with horrible minutia like oh you buffed yourself with a spell and gain +.45 attack speed for 3.2 seconds

these are the worst in any game. I always think of Rome 2 when I see poo poo like that since in that game you level up your generals and pick from an assortment of skills which are all like... +1% armor, +4% ammo capacity, +3% morale...

I think the new XCOM games did a good job with leveling. You get stats as a bonus, sure, but the fun is in getting skills that actually let you do something or require you to engage with the mechanics in a different way for a substantial bonus (like a big bonus to aim from being on high ground), and the number of stats you had to care about was pretty drat low anyways so it was a lot more focused. The other bonus of those kinds of things is that you get a lot less optimal choices; reliable bonuses are still a bit overpowered but a lot of strong things are strong because they open the door to new things. Its not perfect at all but its a good direction.

Worst game I saw in terms of a whole array of fiddly bullshit was Mordheim: City of the Damned. Like twelve stats and a whole bunch of skill checks and the vast majority of your skills are just based around improving a number. The difference between weapons is just some boring rear end poo poo like different damage ranges or "+12% accuracy versus dodge stance" or "-11% critical hit damage", like gently caress, if you're going to put a number to a thing to influence player choice you may as well go nuts with it so its a huge impactful choice instead of a boring rear end tweak for marginal benefit. Best part was the devs didn't even understand that their entire game was just based around damage minmax; some dudes in beta managed to break the whole thing over its knee by just doing a little bit of optimizing, by not picking dumb rear end poo poo like "only use 1 ap instead of 2 on "scratch arse" checks!" in favor of "do bigger numbers on hit", "hit more often" and "hit more reliably, all the time", and the development team could not figure out how to replicate it, lmao.

e: also ive complained about it before im sure but I really hate games that try to bill their games as grizzly hardcore and realistic by having perma death and big damage ranges but then making a unit decent requires loving eighty battles of grinding or some poo poo and punishes you for trying to just use units as expendable fodder, so the only approach is "be super cautious and minmax the gently caress out of everything"

i miss old xcom rookie dynamite squads

Tiler Kiwi has a new favorite as of 08:57 on Aug 11, 2019

exquisite tea
Apr 21, 2007

Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."


Strom Cuzewon posted:

Which also completely robs the combat of any weight, or feeling of advancement. Its all just a load of flashy sparkly lights that change a bunch of back end numbers. Doubly frustrating on turn based mode where you have a bunch of turns between targeting the spell and the anemic particle effects

Compare to Original Sin 2,where you start with hurling rocks or little flaming daggers, and quickly escalate to giant death lasers, earthquakes and hammer strikes that clear the screen.

One thing I love about D:OS2 is that your party starts out as this ragtag group of magically uncontrolled assholes, and that's exactly how you begin the game by accidentally setting everybody and yourself on fire, freezing someone when you meant to heal them, mistakenly electrifying the entire floor, etc. But as you level up and come to understand all the various environmental interactions, your party becomes more disciplined, synergistic, and you learn to make them work together. It's just a very cool way to show progression in gameplay that doesn't make a level 1 fireball some toothless-looking spell.

Strom Cuzewon
Jul 1, 2010

Kruller posted:

You know that the same company made both games right?

Yeah, if anything that makes it more annoying. PoE and D:OS can pay tribute to their idols, but when BioWare do it it just sounds smug and self congratulatory

BioEnchanted
Aug 9, 2011

He plays for the dreamers that forgot how to dream, and the lovers that forgot how to love.
I've got quite far in Eternal Ring now, but it's getting exhausting as I'm in the middle of a huge chain of endless dungeons with no breaks to buy more items, so the large stock that I went in with has started to dwindle as I'm pushed to go through the Limestone Caves, then the Mines, then the Iron Mill, now the Magic Research Lab. They are cool areas with neat enemies but come on give me a town or something to stock up on items and heal...

The concept of the story is neat though, all the monsters are former humans who were either the inhabitants of the island or an invading force. The inhabitants were strong in magic, and when the Invading force got close to the titular object the inhabitants cast a nuclear option spell that turned almost everyone on the island into monsters, and now any newcomers turn into monsters gradually too. Some of them are still aware of who they are and are reasonable, others are losing their minds and being consumed by their new forms.

Perestroika
Apr 8, 2010

Tiler Kiwi posted:

Worst game I saw in terms of a whole array of fiddly bullshit was Mordheim: City of the Damned. Like twelve stats and a whole bunch of skill checks and the vast majority of your skills are just based around improving a number. The difference between weapons is just some boring rear end poo poo like different damage ranges or "+12% accuracy versus dodge stance" or "-11% critical hit damage", like gently caress, if you're going to put a number to a thing to influence player choice you may as well go nuts with it so its a huge impactful choice instead of a boring rear end tweak for marginal benefit. Best part was the devs didn't even understand that their entire game was just based around damage minmax; some dudes in beta managed to break the whole thing over its knee by just doing a little bit of optimizing, by not picking dumb rear end poo poo like "only use 1 ap instead of 2 on "scratch arse" checks!" in favor of "do bigger numbers on hit", "hit more often" and "hit more reliably, all the time", and the development team could not figure out how to replicate it, lmao.

e: also ive complained about it before im sure but I really hate games that try to bill their games as grizzly hardcore and realistic by having perma death and big damage ranges but then making a unit decent requires loving eighty battles of grinding or some poo poo and punishes you for trying to just use units as expendable fodder, so the only approach is "be super cautious and minmax the gently caress out of everything"

i miss old xcom rookie dynamite squads

Yeah, that's basically what killed the whole game for me, even though I had high hopes for a while. The most annoying part is that the tabletop game it's based on was great in part because all character upgrades where chunky and meaningful. Back there, if you gave one of your guys a huge loving greatsword, he'd be about 30% more likely to kill an average enemy in one blow. If he leveled up and got improved Wounds, he'd be able to literally take twice as many hits as before. That might have been more or less an accident because the rules were based on a much larger-scale, coarse war game, but it absolutely worked in the game's favour. Each of your guys can feel unique from the word go just based on their equipment, and even a single level-up (which is partially random) will give them a distinct niche they're good at.

Then I load up the videogame, and it's basically the exact opposite. Just tiny individually inconsequential mini-bonuses everywhere. All your dudes end up as largely interchangeable statblocks. Similarly, ingame tactics switch over from trying to exploit your characters' unique strengths to basically just mobbing the enemy in group fights wherever possible. Not even the various factions feel all that unique, really.

abigserve
Sep 13, 2009

this is a better avatar than what I had before
For Honor is the only fighting game I've ever enjoyed and perfects the feeling of hittin a dude with a big sword or spear or whatever. It got an incredibly bad release (ubisoft continuing their tradition of making good games then loving them up in some subtle, but extremely critical way) but it's seriously a lot of fun not to mention very unique.

The issue; there are effectively two games modes left due to low population: 1v1 duels, and dominion, an objective based mode. If you get four friends all playing at once, you can literally queue into each other endlessly during prime time in 2v2.

This is an issue because the game was very obviously designed around 1v1 fighting - all of the movesets are based around locking onto a single enemy, there's no quick switch between enemies and there are garbage catchup mechanics to make 2v1 fights fair. Naturally, you would think this would mean the game is balanced around 1v1 duels. You would be dead wrong. The object-based mode forms the grounds for all balance testing and patches, so you can often end up with characters that are totally broken in the other modes but balanced in dominion so it all checks out!

exquisite tea
Apr 21, 2007

Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."


For Honor seems like it couldn't decide if it wanted to be a technical 1v1 fighting game (where it's good) or a total clusterfuck 4v4 (which everybody actually plays). Unfortunately clusterfuck 4v4 games tend to sell a lot better and that's where their focus went.

Riatsala
Nov 20, 2013

All Princesses are Tyrants

Tiler Kiwi posted:

I think the new XCOM games did a good job with leveling.

Strongly agree with this entire post.

XCOM 2012 did so much right that it effectively highlights other games that get these mechanics wrong.

Glukeose
Jun 6, 2014

For Honor took a really satisfying-feeling combat system and took a massive poo poo on it by including lootbox gear that actually modified stats. If it was pure aesthetics I would still be playing the game but it was insanely frustrating to have a situation where me and a friend have a guy cornered, he blocks two hits, activates some super meter due to his armor being epic tier and then wastes us both with some unblockable hits that do +100% damage.

Bot matches were fun for a bit but the game was full of little irritations like that.

Photux
Sep 3, 2012

Funny then, that such darkness gives me hope

Glukeose posted:

For Honor took a really satisfying-feeling combat system and took a massive poo poo on it by including lootbox gear that actually modified stats. If it was pure aesthetics I would still be playing the game but it was insanely frustrating to have a situation where me and a friend have a guy cornered, he blocks two hits, activates some super meter due to his armor being epic tier and then wastes us both with some unblockable hits that do +100% damage.

Bot matches were fun for a bit but the game was full of little irritations like that.

That was very true, but at some point they did a gear overhaul that significantly improved this. Now, gear determines how many perks you can have, and the perks are much weaker than the old gear bonuses. It's still stupid lootbox bullshit, but it's toned down enough that I didn't mind it. I quickly found some gear that had the one perk I cared about, and then felt free to just play dress up because the other perks weren't impactful.

It still has big problems though. The reason I stopped playing was because once you got moderately good (nowhere near expert, just a little bit better than average), reactive defensive play became much stronger than attacking, as it was not that difficult to counter 90% of moves. So if a character has one or two moves that are difficult to counter, they get played a bunch and just spammed those moves, and characters without any safe moves never got played. I think they added characters with more interesting and varied offensive options, but you're still left with a roster where 80% of characters are either very weak or very boring to play well.

But man, when I first started playing and nobody was good and you could just throw out all sorts of crazy stuff and have it work, it was so much fun.

exquisite tea
Apr 21, 2007

Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."


Glukeose posted:

For Honor took a really satisfying-feeling combat system and took a massive poo poo on it by including lootbox gear that actually modified stats. If it was pure aesthetics I would still be playing the game but it was insanely frustrating to have a situation where me and a friend have a guy cornered, he blocks two hits, activates some super meter due to his armor being epic tier and then wastes us both with some unblockable hits that do +100% damage.

Bot matches were fun for a bit but the game was full of little irritations like that.

Stats are disabled for 1v1, it's only the aforementioned clusterfuck multi modes that include them.

Perestroika
Apr 8, 2010

Photux posted:

That was very true, but at some point they did a gear overhaul that significantly improved this. Now, gear determines how many perks you can have, and the perks are much weaker than the old gear bonuses. It's still stupid lootbox bullshit, but it's toned down enough that I didn't mind it. I quickly found some gear that had the one perk I cared about, and then felt free to just play dress up because the other perks weren't impactful.

It still has big problems though. The reason I stopped playing was because once you got moderately good (nowhere near expert, just a little bit better than average), reactive defensive play became much stronger than attacking, as it was not that difficult to counter 90% of moves. So if a character has one or two moves that are difficult to counter, they get played a bunch and just spammed those moves, and characters without any safe moves never got played. I think they added characters with more interesting and varied offensive options, but you're still left with a roster where 80% of characters are either very weak or very boring to play well.

But man, when I first started playing and nobody was good and you could just throw out all sorts of crazy stuff and have it work, it was so much fun.

Yeah, that's kinda what I'm running into as well. For example, one of the more recent characters has a straightforward mixup after landing an attack: She can either do a strike that cannot be dodged, or a shield bash that can only be dodged. So in that situation the opponent more or less has to guess ahead of time what she's gonna do, or react during a super very short window. That, in itself, is perfectly fine, such 50/50s are pretty commonplace in fighting games. The issue is that a fair number of the old characters don't have any such mixups at all. The best they can do is manually "feint" attacks, but that's usually slower than the dedicated mixups and only really works well if the opponent overextends instead of playing it safe. It's still quite possible to win, but if you're playing one of those old characters one round and then a new one the other, it does feel pretty frustrating to see the difference in necessary effort required to do some damage.

Now, they have been regularly updating and reworking these old characters in an attempt to bring them up to speed, but that's been going super slowly. And there seems to be a bit of a bias towards first updating the more popular characters, which are often also those not quite as troubled by these issues, so that's creating a bit of a feedback loop of the characters most in need of a real overhaul being way at the back of the line.

John Murdoch
May 19, 2009

I can tune a fish.
Tangentially related, I have pretty much never once made it out the other side of that frustrating skill valley where I'm no longer a total newb but nowhere near super 1337 skillz pro either and I don't think there's a single multiplayer game that's ever really solved the problem to where I don't just quit outright after a certain point. (Ranked modes don't count because time and time again they've been proven to break down completely the second they're not operating under optimal conditions and more often than not they just amplify all of the shittiest impulses that players already display.)

For a particular bad example I was always leery about Chivalry but could generally hold my own and pull off some neat stuff. However the second I ranked out of being able to play on newbie servers all fun evaporated because everyone else was vastly more experienced (and tapping into the incredibly dumb borderline-exploit moves that basically sank Chivalry in general).

And yet, here I am, constantly questioning whether I should pick up Mordhau or not. :sigh:

exquisite tea posted:

One thing I love about D:OS2 is that your party starts out as this ragtag group of magically uncontrolled assholes, and that's exactly how you begin the game by accidentally setting everybody and yourself on fire, freezing someone when you meant to heal them, mistakenly electrifying the entire floor, etc. But as you level up and come to understand all the various environmental interactions, your party becomes more disciplined, synergistic, and you learn to make them work together. It's just a very cool way to show progression in gameplay that doesn't make a level 1 fireball some toothless-looking spell.

Wait are you describing D:OS2 or Magicka.

abigserve
Sep 13, 2009

this is a better avatar than what I had before
Basically any multiplayer game where the players aren't on even ground will always have overpowered or exploitable meta's/characters/maps/weapons/whatever

the difference between a well balanced multiplayer game and a poorly balanced one is whether or not the meta can be overcome by playing better or learning strategies for dealing with it. Zerg rushes were the bane of every new starcraft player but became an easy win once you are fast enough with your opener.

Other games like League/Dota realise that they are always going to have totally broken champions and let players ban x number of them before the game starts (in league it's 10. You can take out ten characters.).

For honor is bad from a balance perspective because the exploitable mechanics generally have no counter. As mentioned already, the best champions in the meta all have 50/50 abilities and above a certain level making a single mistake can be the end of the match. When that mistake is "I flipped a coin and got it wrong" it's preeetty lame.

The thing is though, there are a lot of ways they could fix those mechanics with just slight tweaks to timings/punishes, but they don't because for whatever reason they are focused on the 4v4 clusterfuck mode

Glukeose
Jun 6, 2014

I liked the 4v4 clusterfuck mode because I love objective based games. The promo stuff for FH was all "look at this team of shitkickers wading into a frenetic warzone, mulching their way through peasants until they clash with an equally epic team of rivals."

Then at release it was "look at the enemy spear ninja poke you with his unblockable spear. You idiot. Why are you fighting the minions? You utter moron. Look the berserker is here to kill you now."

I'm not really a fighting game kind of guy so that being the good mode of the game was just added to my disappointment.

I was robbed :negative:

Olaf The Stout
Oct 16, 2009

FORUMS NO.1 SLEEPY DAWGS MEMESTER
They gave For Honor a free alpha weekend before it launched. All my friends and I got it and had an amazing weekend playing the hell out of it, and when the alpha was over no one even suggested buying it, we pretty much had all the fun we were going to have with it.

Lunchmeat Larry
Nov 3, 2012

I seem to have acquired For Honor Starter Edition at some point. I don't know what that is. Is the story mode any fun?

Roblo
Dec 10, 2007

I posted my food for USPOL Thanksgiving!

Olaf The Stout posted:

They gave For Honor a free alpha weekend before it launched. All my friends and I got it and had an amazing weekend playing the hell out of it, and when the alpha was over no one even suggested buying it, we pretty much had all the fun we were going to have with it.
Me and my friends did similar, we had a lot of fun on the alpha and stupidly all thought "yes let's all get it". Played it a bit and...ehh. Nope.

Waste of money. I just got fed up of coming up against fighting game superstars who could just take me apart without me getting a hit in.

bewilderment
Nov 22, 2007
man what



Lunchmeat Larry posted:

I seem to have acquired For Honor Starter Edition at some point. I don't know what that is. Is the story mode any fun?

I gave it a shot free on PS Plus and the answer is... no, not really. You can see where they're trying some interesting things but it really is a desperate attempt to rationalise there being these wacky nations contemporary with each other into a coherent story.

I think the part where I really realised it wasn't working was when you first get control of an 'assassin-type' character and you play a 'stealth' mission when the game engine is absolutely not suited for it. There's a part where I barred some doors to 'prevent reinforcements' except it doesn't actually pause anything so two guys spawned out of the doorway as I was barring it.

Lunchmeat Larry
Nov 3, 2012

bewilderment posted:

I gave it a shot free on PS Plus and the answer is... no, not really. You can see where they're trying some interesting things but it really is a desperate attempt to rationalise there being these wacky nations contemporary with each other into a coherent story.

I think the part where I really realised it wasn't working was when you first get control of an 'assassin-type' character and you play a 'stealth' mission when the game engine is absolutely not suited for it. There's a part where I barred some doors to 'prevent reinforcements' except it doesn't actually pause anything so two guys spawned out of the doorway as I was barring it.
lmao I just wanted to get a few hours' fun out of the melee system without getting owned by the four sword saints still playing online, but I guess UbiSoft just does it thing

marshmallow creep
Dec 10, 2008

I've been sitting here for 5 mins trying to think of a joke to make but I just realised the animators of Mass Effect already did it for me

Lunchmeat Larry posted:

lmao I just wanted to get a few hours' fun out of the melee system without getting owned by the four sword saints still playing online, but I guess UbiSoft just does it thing

You can play every mode with bots.

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Glukeose
Jun 6, 2014

bewilderment posted:

I think the part where I really realised it wasn't working was when you first get control of an 'assassin-type' character and you play a 'stealth' mission when the game engine is absolutely not suited for it.

That mission was loving atrocious.

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