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Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order is yet another video game where they ran out of ideas for enemies to put in a cave or a jungle setting and just said "we'll just put big spiders and call it a day BOY BEING CREATIVE IS HARD". "It's just a big spider and that's it" is the laziest enemy design you could possibly come up with not just because a hundred other developers have done exactly the same thing but because it's the cheapest possible way to make people go EEEEWWW ICKY. Want instant crawling skin? Just put a big spider in your game. Come up with something interesting and unique, you're making a video game that takes place in one of the allegedly most creative expanded universes in fiction. Have some fuckin dignity for gods sake. CJacobs has a new favorite as of 05:10 on Nov 28, 2019 |
# ? Nov 28, 2019 05:08 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 11:49 |
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CJacobs posted:Come up with something interesting and unique, you're making a video game that takes place in one of the allegedly most creative expanded universes in fiction. Have some fuckin dignity for gods sake. Well, they, *ahem* don't have a lot of source material, they don't have comic books or anything of the like.
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# ? Nov 28, 2019 05:17 |
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FTL loving rules. Some dude on twitch streamed a run where he played every single ship and ship variant in the game on Hard Mode in a row and beat the game every single time without dying or restarts. It's just like nethack, where the more knowledge you have of the game and the rules it operates, the easier the game becomes, which is pretty standard for any roguelike. For the final boss, you basically have to be able to survive steady missile salvos and be able to reliably penetrate lvl 4 shields, which overall is not a big ask, and there are dozens of ways to accomplish that. Like the first time you see the boss and get your rear end kicked, you know the next time to survive the missiles you need a defensive drone, or cloaking, or if you're playing on medium and below, a teleportation device for your crew, and you have an entire run to find one of those subsystems and install it. I personally have never seen a run yet that didn't have access to any of these. Why people bitch about that endlessly for years is beyond me. Olaf The Stout has a new favorite as of 05:30 on Nov 28, 2019 |
# ? Nov 28, 2019 05:25 |
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Inspector Gesicht posted:The Witcher 3 also has that one ally, who is a warm and unconditional friend, give Geralt a family-heirloom sword for his help. Because of the weapon's low stats it is immediately thrown in a bin. Still better than Breath of the Wilds heirloom weapons which will mostly be destroyed or thrown away minutes after you get them.
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# ? Nov 28, 2019 06:58 |
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MiddleOne posted:Still better than Breath of the Wilds heirloom weapons which will mostly be destroyed or thrown away minutes after you get them. All the weapons in Breath of the Wild are made to be disposable. The weapons in Witcher 3 are pretty much disposable too, just unintentionally.
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# ? Nov 28, 2019 07:08 |
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The Flagship hacking you weapons in FTL loving sucks.
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# ? Nov 28, 2019 07:27 |
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I enjoy assassin's Creed games for chill game time without much investment the controls can be a bit wonky but whatever. Two things about syndicate though: I don't understand why Jacob and Evie have separate upgrade trees. Given they have the exact same options until the late game, one becomes immediately objectively better than the other so it makes no sense to invest skill points in your shittier twin. Second is that the steam page for some reason references only playing as Jacob Frye taking over London and doesn't mention at all that there's a female character who you can play as for more than half the game.
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# ? Nov 28, 2019 07:44 |
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Doctor Spaceman posted:The Flagship hacking you weapons in FTL loving sucks. Use a defensive drone to shoot down the hack before it gets there, counterhack them, or if possible leave the fight and reenter and hope it lands on a less critical system.
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# ? Nov 28, 2019 10:56 |
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AC Syndicate also boasts a completely pointless perk-system that you'd have to grind to even make use of. You also have to grind through randomly generated fight-clubs and robberies if you want that fabled 100%. That game was the epitome of irrelevant filler. The point was that made by that Dubliner that MGSV takes place in an empty desert with cookie-cutter bases and missions, yet it's moment to moment gameplay is far more compelling that all the side-content poo poo Syndicate throws at you.
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# ? Nov 28, 2019 11:34 |
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Disco Elysium is amazing except I'd love a verbatim log of conversations with each character that I could scroll back through.
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# ? Nov 28, 2019 14:41 |
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Pathfinder Kingmaker. When you die the game hides all the UI other than the Load, Quit, etc buttons that pop up. I want to see the combat log to know why I died damnit. A spider just hit my 50 health protagonist for 11 damage and it's game over? I can only assume some sort of instant death attack but it was the bog standard giant spiders I've been fighting since the beginning of the game and I'm only level 5 so instant death attacks shouldn't really be a thing. So wtf game. I just want to be able to review the combat log after I die so I can learn from it. Also gently caress any game that has any sort of resurrection but it's game over if your protagonist dies. I had a scroll of resurrect right there waiting to be used.
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# ? Nov 28, 2019 15:17 |
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IIRC, on top of the FTL Flagship already being a massive pain in the rear end that tests whether you picked up 3-4 specific weapons or subsystems, it also has a bunch of bullshit gotchas. Oh, you think you're clever directly murdering or suffocating the crew? A valid strategy throughout the rest of the game? Nope, the Flagship has an AI and now the fight is actually harder because at least the crew had to actively react to things. Oh, you had the audacity to launch a boarding drone at one of its weapons? Well guess what idiot it's now spent for the rest of the fight because it has no way to leave the weapon pod or be recalled or destroyed to free up space for another drone.
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# ? Nov 28, 2019 16:07 |
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CJacobs posted:Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order is yet another video game where they ran out of ideas for enemies to put in a cave or a jungle setting and just said "we'll just put big spiders and call it a day BOY BEING CREATIVE IS HARD". "It's just a big spider and that's it" is the laziest enemy design you could possibly come up with not just because a hundred other developers have done exactly the same thing but because it's the cheapest possible way to make people go EEEEWWW ICKY. Want instant crawling skin? Just put a big spider in your game. I’m playing Resident Evil REmake and the spiders there had the exact opposite effect than intended. “Ooooh he looks like a big cuddly Chilean Rose Hair! What are you doing on the ceiling, buddy, you’re a new world terrestrial spider, you’re going to fall and hurt yourself!” In a game full of rotting monsters and evil dogs the spiders just look like regular tarantulas, and they used a notoriously docile species as the baseline.
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# ? Nov 28, 2019 16:37 |
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RE2make is the all-star example of taking something worthlessly uncreative (the poison spiders in the sewers in the original) and turning them into something interesting and new that fulfills the same gameplay purpose (the G-Adults that replace them).
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# ? Nov 28, 2019 16:39 |
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Spek posted:Also gently caress any game that has any sort of resurrection but it's game over if your protagonist dies. I had a scroll of resurrect right there waiting to be used. Reminds me of how good Original Sin 2 was regarding dying being cheap. Scrolls of Resurrection come by easily and you can craft an Idol of Resurrection(Revives however is holding it, once) any time, at no cost except for one scroll. This led to a situation where I had to find a way to travel to an isle surrounded by Deathfog, which instantly kills anything that touches it; I could've played around a find a safe way in, but an undead ferryman offered to try to take through it for a fee. Everyone dies as soon as they cross it because he did say he was just going to try and skeletons are assholes, but with someone having that equipped it was just a matter of using the scrolls on the other party members, and the killing the ferryman for being a dick.
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# ? Nov 28, 2019 16:53 |
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John Murdoch posted:IIRC, on top of the FTL Flagship already being a massive pain in the rear end that tests whether you picked up 3-4 specific weapons or subsystems, it also has a bunch of bullshit gotchas. Oh, you think you're clever directly murdering or suffocating the crew? A valid strategy throughout the rest of the game? Nope, the Flagship has an AI and now the fight is actually harder because at least the crew had to actively react to things. Oh, you had the audacity to launch a boarding drone at one of its weapons? Well guess what idiot it's now spent for the rest of the fight because it has no way to leave the weapon pod or be recalled or destroyed to free up space for another drone. I've definitely beaten FTL several times but it was always more the journey than the destination for me. The times I have won it was mostly just dumb luck and stumbling into getting the right weapons and equipment.
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# ? Nov 28, 2019 18:20 |
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FTL was a perfect game and then they ruined it with the Advanced mode/update. Just a ton of poo poo that is unfun to deal with and fight against
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# ? Nov 28, 2019 20:04 |
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Evilreaver posted:FTL was a perfect game and then they ruined it with the Advanced mode/update. Just a ton of poo poo that is unfun to deal with and fight against You can turn it off. I think some things remain but most of it just goes away.
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# ? Nov 29, 2019 02:09 |
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The flagship in FTL sucks because the game is secretly (well, at first) entirely about it and if you don't realize and plan for that from jump 1 you lose. There was a mod that replaced it with infinite sectors of increasingly difficult boss ships that was way more interesting and fun.
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# ? Nov 29, 2019 03:56 |
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If the game treated The Flagship as a Bonus Boss I think it would of eased the blow a lot. Like, huzzah you got the info to us we can win at great cost! But are you a bad enough dude to beat the boss yourself?!
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# ? Nov 29, 2019 04:52 |
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I never beat the loving flag ship.
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# ? Nov 29, 2019 04:53 |
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Finally beat Jedi Fallen Order. It was ok, at best, but man what it could have been. I was hoping for an updated KoToR: a fun Jedi action RPG with different skills, classes, gear and lightsabers with a bunch of fun companions. It was stripped down to a basic and functional action-platformer-metrodvania. Very few unique characters besides your 2 shipmates and your droid, who are themselves not terribly interesting and light on banter, since they stay with the ship so you don't really interact with them except between missions. Only one real lightsaber upgrade, the dual-saber (and kinda-sorta the split saber attack later). All the cool stuff you find in chests are completely cosmetic and hard to see while in-game. No armor except the completely cosmetic poncho colors, and that's about it. Skill tree is a basic bitch, and easily maxed out. Zero individualism, your maxed-out protagonist is exactly like everybody else, save their poncho color or lightsaber color. Stopped bothering with the regular chests after it became apparent they were pointless, which sucks a lot of the fun out of exploring. Lots of backtracking over vast maps, which was annoying if you didn't memorize the layouts as you played (the minimap was less than helpful due to the 3D nature and generally lack of pathfinding). Story was good, that's the nicest thing I can say. Protagonist wasn't the usual angsty whiny twat. KoToR was released over a decade ago, and was superior to Fallen Order in pretty much every single category other than graphics. What a waste of potential. Kaincypher has a new favorite as of 05:55 on Nov 29, 2019 |
# ? Nov 29, 2019 05:47 |
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FTL is the perfect game, ya'll just some weakass space captains for real.
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# ? Nov 29, 2019 05:55 |
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Kaincypher posted:Finally beat Jedi Fallen Order. It was ok, at best, but man what it could have been. I was hoping for an updated KoToR: a fun Jedi action RPG with different skills, classes, gear and lightsabers with a bunch of fun companions. It was stripped down to a basic and functional action-platformer-metrodvania. Very few unique characters besides your 2 shipmates and your droid, who are themselves not terribly interesting and light on banter, since they stay with the ship so you don't really interact with them except between missions. Only one real lightsaber upgrade, the dual-saber (and kinda-sorta the split saber attack later). All the cool stuff you find in chests are completely cosmetic and hard to see while in-game. No armor except the completely cosmetic poncho colors, and that's about it. Skill tree is a basic bitch, and easily maxed out. Zero individualism, your maxed-out protagonist is exactly like everybody else, save their poncho color or lightsaber color. Stopped bothering with the regular chests after it became apparent they were pointless, which sucks a lot of the fun out of exploring. Lots of backtracking over vast maps, which was annoying if you didn't memorize the layouts as you played (the minimap was less than helpful due to the 3D nature and generally lack of pathfinding). Story was good, that's the nicest thing I can say. Protagonist wasn't the usual angsty whiny twat. I mean it was never marketed as a successor to KOTOR or an RPG of any kind, so I'm not sure why that's really a bad thing about it.
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# ? Nov 29, 2019 08:19 |
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Shaking my fists in impotent rage because I couldn't spec Mario as a tanky Paladin in New Super Mario Bros
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# ? Nov 29, 2019 09:49 |
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Olaf The Stout posted:FTL is the perfect game, ya'll just some weakass space captains for real. Having started the FTL-chat by praising its difficulty, I should follow up by saying it's possibly the only game I've ever been good at.
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# ? Nov 29, 2019 10:00 |
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Croccers posted:If the game treated The Flagship as a Bonus Boss I think it would of eased the blow a lot. Like, huzzah you got the info to us we can win at great cost! But are you a bad enough dude to beat the boss yourself?! Doesn't the game itself treat the flagship as a bonus boss when it comes to unlocking more content? I thought most of the ships were "Reach X sector/Reach the final sector to unlock", and nothing required you to actually destroy the flagship to unlock. I considered it a win if I made it to the last system, because you're not guaranteed to find the ship systems "needed" to stop the mothership.
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# ? Nov 29, 2019 12:52 |
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Randalor posted:Doesn't the game itself treat the flagship as a bonus boss when it comes to unlocking more content? I thought most of the ships were "Reach X sector/Reach the final sector to unlock", and nothing required you to actually destroy the flagship to unlock. I considered it a win if I made it to the last system, because you're not guaranteed to find the ship systems "needed" to stop the mothership. In the advanced version you can unlock (most?) ships by beating the game with the previous ship in the chain in addition to the random unlock quests.
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# ? Nov 29, 2019 13:35 |
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Doctor Spaceman posted:In the advanced version you can unlock (most?) ships by beating the game with the previous ship in the chain in addition to the random unlock quests. Also the game keeps track of each victory over the final boss you have with each ship and at what difficulty you you got it on if thats your bag. Some ships are easy as gently caress even on hard, and some are a genuine struggle on hard advanced mode and are far outmatched. The easiest ship to win the game with is the Zoltans ship, they start every battle with 5 bonus shield points. This is enough to reliably keep you safe and investing your scrap into ship upgrades instead of bleeding scrap on repairs, and once you get far enough ahead on the weapon powercurve the rest of the game is a skate in the park. Olaf The Stout has a new favorite as of 14:20 on Nov 29, 2019 |
# ? Nov 29, 2019 14:15 |
John Murdoch posted:IIRC, on top of the FTL Flagship already being a massive pain in the rear end that tests whether you picked up 3-4 specific weapons or subsystems, it also has a bunch of bullshit gotchas. Oh, you think you're clever directly murdering or suffocating the crew? A valid strategy throughout the rest of the game? Nope, the Flagship has an AI and now the fight is actually harder because at least the crew had to actively react to things. Oh, you had the audacity to launch a boarding drone at one of its weapons? Well guess what idiot it's now spent for the rest of the fight because it has no way to leave the weapon pod or be recalled or destroyed to free up space for another drone. This is actually what made me give up on FTL straight up. I'd been doing really well with a raiding party strategy. Got to the final boss, sent my men in. They were wrecking shop. Then the giant ship goes invisible and that just instantly kills everyone of your units on board. Evilreaver posted:FTL was a perfect game and then they ruined it with the Advanced mode/update. Just a ton of poo poo that is unfun to deal with and fight against Ah, the Darkest Dungeon approach. It feels like a lot of early access/kickstarter titles fell into that sort of thing for a while. they'd reach a nice point then they'd just keep changing things or adding more to it instead of just letting it sit. Like Binding of Isaac.
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# ? Nov 29, 2019 14:51 |
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I always felt FTL was fine because its short. If you get trounced its not like you lost hours of effort. There's rooms of games of that nature even if I wouldnt want it on everything.
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# ? Nov 29, 2019 15:08 |
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The flagship puts me off because it is just a fixed point of failure that you know is coming. It is just a psychological thing I guess, the idea up the thread that it should give you a popup to either end the run "successfully" or gamble on taking it down for extra risk/reward would be absolutely fine imo - I'd probably try it every time, mad as that sounds, I'd just like to have the option
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# ? Nov 29, 2019 15:26 |
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Nuebot posted:This is actually what made me give up on FTL straight up. I'd been doing really well with a raiding party strategy. Got to the final boss, sent my men in. They were wrecking shop. Then the giant ship goes invisible and that just instantly kills everyone of your units on board. Sunless Sea got really bad about that. They would tune stuff for difficulty based on feedback, but all the feedback they were getting was from people who had been playing the game forever. They ended up making the early game a giant pain in the rear end for new players because it was so much harder to get easy fuel early on, before you were in a position to be able to really afford to buy it sustainably. Lunchmeat Larry posted:The flagship puts me off because it is just a fixed point of failure that you know is coming. It is just a psychological thing I guess, the idea up the thread that it should give you a popup to either end the run "successfully" or gamble on taking it down for extra risk/reward would be absolutely fine imo - I'd probably try it every time, mad as that sounds, I'd just like to have the option I’d like a version that’s kind of like Weird Worlds in Infinite Space- have some kind of time limit or sector limit, with boss events having a chance to spawn on a run that you can ignore, or actually take on for a score boost/better ending. Yes your av made me think of that.
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# ? Nov 29, 2019 15:50 |
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I'd totally play Cultist Simulator if it was a turn-based CYOA game and not a real-time Wizard-Needs-Food-Badly grind-athon, and if the developer Alexis Kennedy wasn't a piece of poo poo. I wish Hobocop Elysium let me rebind keys, so I could move and highlight objects on the mouse and play with one hand.
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# ? Nov 29, 2019 16:08 |
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Inspector Gesicht posted:I'd totally play Cultist Simulator if it was a turn-based CYOA game and not a real-time Wizard-Needs-Food-Badly grind-athon, and if the developer Alexis Kennedy wasn't a piece of poo poo.
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# ? Nov 29, 2019 16:43 |
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Man, the combat in Fallen Order kind of falls apart towards the end. They've built a fighting system that, to its credit, does rather well when you're fighting a few enemies at a time. Most (humanoid) enemies have a stamina bar they use up when blocking your attacks, or if you perfect parry them, and once it's depleted you can get a couple of real hits in. Alternatively you can use certain special attacks (or just time things right) to circumvent their blocks entirely and hit them directly. The stamina slowly recharges, so you're encouraged to be proactive and stay on the attack when you can. Regular stormtroopers only need a single hit to go past their defense to kill em, whereas more elite ones can withstand a few. Thing is, towards the end they just send whole groups of these elite fuckers at you, and the system doesn't really work well anymore. They're immune to just about all your special moves, have lots of health and (rapidly regenerating) stamina, and perhaps worst of all have long extended combo attacks that they use aggressively. So instead of skillfully singling out individual enemies and dismantling them in short order, you're stuck rolling around on the floor in circles constantly dodging attacks and occasionally getting in singular low-damage attacks. Fake edit: Now that I've finally gotten past this particular bit, here's another annoyance: If your cue for an unblockable attack is giving the enemy a red outline, maybe don't set a bossfight inside a room where everything is bathed in ominous red light.
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# ? Nov 29, 2019 17:34 |
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Nuebot posted:Ah, the Darkest Dungeon approach. It feels like a lot of early access/kickstarter titles fell into that sort of thing for a while. they'd reach a nice point then they'd just keep changing things or adding more to it instead of just letting it sit. Like Binding of Isaac. Ironically, I'm kinda obsessed with BoI at the moment. But I came to it from watching streamers play it as a complete package and I bought it as such. And I'm apparently pretty good at it too, unlike a lot of other roguelike-y stuff I've played. I wonder if I'm going to balk at Repentance or not. I already know it's got some "stop having fun, guys" type balance changes slated. Coincidentally, I started on Tomb Raider because I wanted something to switch out to instead of obsessively playing Isaac non-stop. So on that note, here's Rise of the Tomb Raider in 2019 part 1: I don't have all that much to say yet, since I'm only a few hours in, but I have been generally enjoying myself. Some of the complaints I had back when I first played still apply - the cutscene direction is vastly better than the first game, but facial animation is still a complete mess to the point where I have to assume its either an engine thing or Crystal Dynamics just did not have anyone on staff that knew how to make it look good. As I've said before, the story is told way better, but the actual plot is worse. Ana is just abruptly injected into existence and then not an hour in has gone from "weird character we didn't know existed" to "one of the antagonists". Also I think I was dimly aware of it but not paying all that much attention but it's flagrantly obvious now that the plot is pretty much unambiguously about Jesus, they just couldn't get away with calling him that. Which does add some thematic depth to Trinity as Ye Olde Modern Knights Templar Who Are Evil And Can Summon Gun-Toting Mercs Anywhere Anytime and Konstantin in specific as weirdo fanatic stigmata man. I think I'm starting to figure out the the reason why I hated the game the first time around and it was because I was in a very rigid collectathon completionist kind of mindset at the time. Rise actively fucks with you if you try to approach it on those terms, thanks to various roadblocks, some arbitrary. Plus, I don't think I realized that the game was more hub-focused so not being able to clean out the initial open area is as intended because you'll be back there 1-2 more times over the course of the story and with more unlocked abilities in hand. Said open area ends with the bizarre and out of place item shop that reads as once being microtransaction-based and then sticks you into a cutscene where Lara is captured pathetically easily in a way that would never happen if I was in control because it's literally nothing more than a guard blundering into her as she's eavesdropping (which then also leads into the Ana is evil reveal). I think that double-whammy of awkward elements, after maybe an hour spent doinking around the preceding open area being cockblocked constantly by stuff requiring later upgrades (plus getting the lockpicks from a sidequest after a sort of point of no return which had a locked door just prior) soured me on the game and my appreciation never quite recovered.
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# ? Nov 29, 2019 18:17 |
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John Murdoch posted:Ironically, I'm kinda obsessed with BoI at the moment. But I came to it from watching streamers play it as a complete package and I bought it as such. And I'm apparently pretty good at it too, unlike a lot of other roguelike-y stuff I've played. I wonder if I'm going to balk at Repentance or not. I already know it's got some "stop having fun, guys" type balance changes slated. I've recently jumped back on the BoI wagon too! My biggest complaint about it by far is the number of gotchas it has. Some items are just straight up traps and you'll never want them, and god knows there's no way to remove bad items from the item pool, so welp! !
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# ? Nov 29, 2019 18:25 |
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Poulpe posted:I've recently jumped back on the BoI wagon too! Admittedly I've internalized the majority of item functions (I've watched so, so many streams) and I'm running the very handy External Item Descriptions mod as well so I'm not liable to stumble into trap picks, but I'm also a weirdo who thinks the item pools are actually surprisingly good. A blind item turning out to be Soy Milk still sucks, but I at least appreciate that some of the seemingly worst items also have some of the most powerful synergies. I similarly feel most mediocre items are actually just underrated. Though even then I do think the lists of active items and trinkets are a bit bloated with niche crap. Some of it might also be that since I watch people streak Eden wins, I've seen some of the absolute worst the game can generate while also learning how to eke out each and every possible advantage. I am running mods to fix what I do think is terrible, which is the luck-based nature of the extended content. Speedrunning for Boss Rush (and to a lesser extent Hush) sucks, needing to rely on RNG for Mega Satan and the Void is dumb. John Murdoch has a new favorite as of 18:55 on Nov 29, 2019 |
# ? Nov 29, 2019 18:50 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 11:49 |
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John Murdoch posted:Admittedly I've internalized the majority of item functions (I've watched so, so many streams) and I'm running the very handy External Item Descriptions mod as well so I'm not liable to stumble into trap picks, but I'm also a weirdo who thinks the item pools are actually surprisingly good. A blind item turning out to be Soy Milk still sucks, but I at least appreciate that some of the seemingly worst items also have some of the most powerful synergies. I similarly feel most mediocre items are actually just underrated. Though even then I do think the lists of active items and trinkets are a bit bloated with niche crap. Soy Milk was one of the specific ones I was thinking of. Imagine my joy when I had brimstone and ludovico technique, and then accidentally stumbled into soy milk reducing my damage to nil without any of the benefit Cursed eye also comes to mind. As a matter of fact the entire cursed mechanic just kind of blows. Having to re-fight a 10% health gurdy from the beginning because you stopped paying attention for a fraction of a second is just beyond stupid. You mentioning the RNG angle reminded me of how I also hate how the game is stacked against you when it comes to the RNG weighting. It's stuff like- even if you go out of your way to unlock SMB-fan really early on, it's still in the "rare/actually good items" loot table, so you're only going to see it 1/50 games. Simultaneously, the game doesn't give two shits whether you've seen a tear/damage upgrade at all, but lord knows you needed those five consecutive active items you literally can't make use of. I get that the randomness is kind of the game's whole deal but a bunch of runs are just an irredeemable slog because of it. And while I'm already ranting- there is a certain subset of ordinary enemies that are just bizarrely bullet spongey, and the game isn't afraid to lock you into a 2x2 room with ten of them. The orthogonal dash worms in particular come to mind.
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# ? Nov 29, 2019 19:03 |