|
One of the recent updates to Dyson Sphere Program seems to have added auditory feedback for clicking menu options and the game UI and it's harsh and grating to the point where I could feel an ear ache forming. No one else seems to be talking about this or thinks it's a problem.
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2021 16:09
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 31, 2024 22:03 |
|
|
I wouldn't say crafting is ever my favorite feature in a video game but I really don't connect with people who become mortally offended every time they have to smash two things together. You kill bad guys, you pick up stuff, occassionally you get enough stuff to make something new. Cool. Doesn't always belong in video games but never something I ever care all that much about.
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2021 16:51
|
|
|
The biggest 2 problems of crafting systems in RPGs are 1) it fills loot tables with a bunch of crap that's not particularly interesting in and of itself, and 2) it adds a bunch of inventory management and menu fiddling that otherwise doesn't need to be there. Basically just a whole bunch of tedium. And if the crafting system is not powerful then it's a whole bunch of useless tedium added into a game, and if it IS powerful it often means it overshadows loot drops and quest rewards and the like. Witcher 3 is a great example because only the crafted Witcher armor sets are worth a drat so every other piece of armor you pick up is rendered ultimately useless by the crafting system. And there's so much random poo poo everywhere that it strips all the fun out of looting in that game. Also I forgot one good "crafting system" in an RPG and that's Baldur's Gate 2. Each crafting component was unique. So the drops basically acted like a preview of what you might be able to make later and it built anticipation, and allowed items to be balanced powerfully around the fact that you migght have to go to 2+ difficult locations instead of just 1 to aquire it. For a couple items it even let you choose between a couple items so you could get the most useful one for your party. I think Neverwinter Nights had a similar system. Only problem with that system is you had a few inventory slots ties up in crafting components, but other than that it was pretty cool because it was just an extension on the normal way loot worked.
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2021 17:13
|
|
|
Some crafting would go over better with me if it wasn't so tied to specific locations. Like Dragon Age: Inquisition was just mentioned and I actually enjoyed the crafting in that game! What I didn't enjoy was the typical videogame workbench thing where you can only craft in a certain spot. Total opposite of that is Horizon Zero Dawn where you can make new arrows from the HUD right in the middle of combat. Not that DA:I should have had the freedom of HZD because HZD's system is just about ammo replen while DA:I obviously wants to keep the player from being able to whip up something in the moment for each specific situation but it didn't have to be quite so limiting either. Breath of the Wild nailed that balance with the cooking pots scattered around the world.
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2021 17:25
|
|
|
I loving love the crafting system in nu-Prey because it's super simple. Ya got four material types that everything can be 3D printed from, they take up negligible space in your inventory (1 slot each, so four slots total), and more materials can be made by throwing recycler grenades at things in the world, enemies and allies alike. (Recyclers, for people who haven't played Prey, create a mini-black hole AOE that compresses everything not bolted down in its radius into craftable material.) If I ever found myself short on a certain material, I would stack a bunch of furniture, garbage, and equipment in the middle of the room and toss a recycler. Immensely satisfying. I chuckled too when I accidentally recycled myself and the game gave me an achievement.
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2021 18:29
|
|
|
Primetime posted:On the topic of smithing in Skyrim, are there are RPGs/MMOs that actually have good smithing systems? Every one I've tried is either a boring slog of making 10,000 common items to be able to make equipment that's outclassed by the first gear you see in a dungeon, or tacks on a terrible minigame to extend the boring slog even longer (I'm looking at you FF14). Dragon Quest 11's crafting was a pretty simple mini game that never really got obnoxious IMO. You add items into the forge, hammer every piece to try and hit the mark to make it the best possible. And the boosts ramp up to make weapons and armor worth keeping for like two or three dungeons since you picked them up if you can make them +3. And then the Definitive Edition made it so you can just automatically buy materials for it as you're crafting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwKKSaknn8k&t=152s That and unrelated but I really enjoyed FFTactics 2 on the DS' idea of it. Playing the game and unlocking more materials to get weapons to show up in the shop was always fun for me personally. Money was never really a problem in that game as long as you weren't trying to buy 16 Excaliburs or something.
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2021 18:35
|
|
|
Crafting is fine if I can just pick up materials as I play and forget about them until I want to craft something, in which case I want to select things to craft from a list and the game to immediately convert materials into selected things in my inventory with no further interaction required or any sort of animation. (obviously this is for AAA games where the crafting is one aspect of many and not like Spiritfarer where interaction with the crafting process is the meat and potatoes of the gameplay)
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2021 18:35
|
|
|
^^^Wow^^^ I never played BOTW but that's the first time I've read someone say that said the crafting was fun. I remember enjoying crafting elements in a few RPG's but the only one I can recall OTTOMH is Vagrant Story and probably nobody here is old enough to remember that game. If I remember right, the Far Cry games I played were pretty good for crafting. Phigs and Lobok got it right though and nailed the problems. You're just constantly hoovering up junk in most of these games, wondering what to keep and then wind up missing some plant that's only found in some area you left on the other side of the map that's not worth going to look for anyway since you're already wearing black diamond armor and have an obsidian axe that you found in some dungeon anyway or whatever. I wouldn't mind travelling to a remote are or back tracking to grab something I missed if it really meant something. It might even make me pay more attention to my surroundings instead of wishing I had a "vacuum up junk" button that didn't effect my encumberence. Just make "rare item slots" instead of "overall weight carried". I like the concept behind mining resources in these games, just not the execution. The simplest way to fix it is to just make fewer items but have them be more meaningful. So when you find a rare plant, stone, gem, animal part or metal thingy, instead of having 34 goblin teeth, 7 vials of bat blood and 22 dandelions you have 1 or 2 of each but are missing the one of five basilisk tongues in the whole map that might let you create something truly special that drains blood or turns monsters to stone. Maybe the developers do this because in matter of days everyone will just go online and figure out how to get the black dragon fang, giant spider silk, ice troll heart and ruin the game but there are ways to still make that hard and what I described already happens anyway. But I don't want to spend all my time being a loving gardener and weeding the entire WItcher 3 map or being a scrap junk collector in Fallout. No one likes this and games keep doing it. Less would be more if a game would do this right. BiggerBoat has a new favorite as of 18:50 on Mar 6, 2021 |
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2021 18:42
|
|
|
Prey converting everything to 4 basic resources and going from there was nice. I'm imagining something like the crafting in W3 being improved by all the components being reduced to some basic units of crafting and then unique stuff maybe requiring some unique component or finding that recipe. gently caress "well you have 14 iron ingots but only 3 iron sheets so turns out you need to spend more time loving around converting ingots to sheets first" just reduce them all to "17 mundane metal" or something.
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2021 18:49
|
|
|
Ravenfood posted:Prey converting everything to 4 basic resources and going from there was nice. I'm imagining something like the crafting in W3 being improved by all the components being reduced to some basic units of crafting and then unique stuff maybe requiring some unique component or finding that recipe. gently caress "well you have 14 iron ingots but only 3 iron sheets so turns out you need to spend more time loving around converting ingots to sheets first" just reduce them all to "17 mundane metal" or something. Prey is a good example of it done right, yes. I seem to remember really wanting to gather up crap to throw in that recycler and, better yet, welcoming it when I was running low on poo poo. EDIT: Also, always online gameplay has got to loving go, period. Any little thing can hiccup my connection but, even worse, I live in Florida and during storms the first thing to go is not my power, but my internet. I got through riding out and handling the aftermath of a few hurricanes playing video games precisely because my cable/Apple TV was down and all I had to do was watch DVD's, read or play video games. BiggerBoat has a new favorite as of 19:03 on Mar 6, 2021 |
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2021 18:53
|
|
|
I actually disliked the exact implementation in Prey. It ended up taking away a lot of the fun from exploring and finding loot. In the early game neuromods would be a sweet find and feel really good. After you can fabricate them, finding a neuromod had no real joy in it. For one I had already gorged on crafted neuromods to the point of them being devalued, but also because I could just make them. Nothing really different between a neuromod and some alien samples. If they had kept a few choice items from being fabricated to keep them as exciting loot It would have been alright though. The fact that it was a very stripped down system helped it a lot. I will say that if you can ignore a crafting system as per My Lovely Horse's post, you might as well just sell items instead. I mean gold already acts as a fungible "crafting" resource if you view shopkeepers as crafters. It's part of why a lot of crafting systems are rear end: we already have a system for allowing players to turn generic loot into the things they actually want via buying poo poo with a currency, and it's far more convenient and clean. Phigs has a new favorite as of 19:07 on Mar 6, 2021 |
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2021 19:05
|
|
|
Sally posted:I chuckled too when I accidentally recycled myself and the game gave me an achievement. You can even get a chipset that protects you from being accidentally recycled, and you should never use it (like the chipset that helps you spot mimicked objects).
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2021 19:37
|
|
|
Gun crafting in fallout 4 is basically the only thing that that game did well: incrementally improving weapons you have and not having those weapons become obsolete by drops you find in the wild This also meant that there were no good guns to find in the wild that were any good if you were crafting
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2021 20:08
|
|
|
The crafting in DQ XI I did like a lot, yeah. There's just enough game there that you're not just picking items, but it's also not something that's hugely difficult or even that important to get right. It helps that failing still leaves you with an item, it's just that you could have gotten a better item (and you can retry by spending a resource.)
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2021 20:18
|
|
|
bony tony posted:(like the chipset that helps you spot mimicked objects). what the gently caress i never found that chipset. that would've been so helpful! though mimicked objects weren't too hard to spot once you figured out the trick of it. i thought it was funny that Mimics that were mimicking items, like medkits or ammo boxes, would literally sometimes throw themselves at me. BiggerBoat posted:Prey is a good example of it done right, yes. I seem to remember really wanting to gather up crap to throw in that recycler and, better yet, welcoming it when I was running low on poo poo. yeah. honestly, it was the addition of the recycler to the gameplay loop that did it for me. without it, Prey's crafting would be... well, whatever. but trying to corner groups of Mimics and Phantoms in a bathroom so I can turn them all into precious materials was gratifying. Phigs posted:I actually disliked the exact implementation in Prey. It ended up taking away a lot of the fun from exploring and finding loot. In the early game neuromods would be a sweet find and feel really good. After you can fabricate them, finding a neuromod had no real joy in it. For one I had already gorged on crafted neuromods to the point of them being devalued, but also because I could just make them. Nothing really different between a neuromod and some alien samples. ha, i never had this luxury until late in the game when Dahl showed up. partly this was because I wasn't using any offensive Typhon abilities. I had Mimic so I could sneak through tiny openings and Mindjack so save brainwashed NPCs, but otherwise kept to human abilities. unfortunately, every bit of human ammo and grenade takes a lot of minerals, so i could almost never afford to craft neuromods if i wanted to keep rounds in my shotgun and emps charges at my side. i was scrounging for everything not bolted down constantly. by the time of the spoilered part, i had scrounged up enough neuromods to unlock Mindshock and Kinetic Blast and it was a real resource gamechanger. it was a nice sense of progression because i felt like i had advanced to a stage where i could adequately take on the constantly spawning new enemy types. if they'd shown up earlier, it'd've been much harder.
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2021 20:50
|
|
|
Phigs posted:I actually disliked the exact implementation in Prey. I dunno, man. Maybe I just sucked at Prey (I did) but I needed every loving banana peel and tin can I could find and was grateful to have each and every one of them. Plus, the game never made me micro manage my garbage and dive into 13 sub menus to sort it all out. I just tossed what I had into the magic machine thingy and it and it showed me what was on the menu based on what I could afford. I never went back tracking to go look for a paper cup or some poo poo and, unlike a lot of games, everything I could build was useful. Prey never had me build some crap that I didn't need. But, again, that could just be because I was sucking at playing it. I was actually poking around a lot hoping to find a lot MORE trash most of the time and making sure I didn't miss stuff, which is the way it should work I think.
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2021 20:53
|
|
|
BiggerBoat posted:Prey is a good example of it done right, yes. I seem to remember really wanting to gather up crap to throw in that recycler and, better yet, welcoming it when I was running low on poo poo. Lol I just started replaying that last night and had forgotten how much I get into the Morgan Yu: Trash Collector experience
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2021 21:09
|
|
|
So, after finishing the Last of Us Part Deux and Plague Tale: Innocence I thought I should play a nice upbeat game like Spider-Man for a change. Then Dr. Octavius detonates a biological bomb and everyone in New York starts to wear masks
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2021 22:21
|
|
|
Ravenfood posted:Prey converting everything to 4 basic resources and going from there was nice. I'm imagining something like the crafting in W3 being improved by all the components being reduced to some basic units of crafting and then unique stuff maybe requiring some unique component or finding that recipe. gently caress "well you have 14 iron ingots but only 3 iron sheets so turns out you need to spend more time loving around converting ingots to sheets first" just reduce them all to "17 mundane metal" or something. Yeah when it comes to crafting systems that 3:1 ratio poo poo is the absolute single worst thing. It's not at all a coincidence that lovely F2P games will use that as a way to slow your progression down to a loving crawl. I think the core problem with a lot of crafting systems is that they're at the intersection of just about every other individual part of the game in some way or another, but rarely get the care and attention that would imply. Also inevitably some poor writer will hastily scribble out a nice-sounding summary of how the system works, interpreted from the programmer who designed it, and in all likelihood it will parse like complete white noise until a fan posts an explanation on Youtube that summarizes the whole thing in a single sentence. Phigs posted:I will say that if you can ignore a crafting system as per My Lovely Horse's post, you might as well just sell items instead. I mean gold already acts as a fungible "crafting" resource if you view shopkeepers as crafters. It's part of why a lot of crafting systems are rear end: we already have a system for allowing players to turn generic loot into the things they actually want via buying poo poo with a currency, and it's far more convenient and clean. And this too. There is almost always a concrete answer to the question "should I break my gear down into components or just sell it?" but it will never, ever be an intuitive choice the player makes on their own. John Murdoch has a new favorite as of 00:04 on Mar 7, 2021 |
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2021 00:02
|
|
|
One gripe I'm having with Prey is the map interface. It's often pretty vague about exactly how you're supposed to get where you're going through a convoluted layout full of locked doors and environmental puzzles. A minimap would be very handy, but at the very least it's aggravating that there isn't a dedicated button to pull up the map. It's always gonna be a second screen swap away because you have to load your inventory first, then switch to the map. That adds up fast when I'm having to look at the map so often.
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2021 02:19
|
|
|
You on console? It's a single keystroke on PC. Press M...
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2021 02:22
|
|
|
Sally posted:You on console? It's a single keystroke on PC. Press M... Playstation, as far as I can tell no button makes it come up.
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2021 02:23
|
|
|
Captain Hygiene posted:Playstation, as far as I can tell no button makes it come up. It definitely should be a tab in the main inventory/character screen you bring up with the touchpad. Edit: oh you have to first use any terminal that has a map to download it in the utilities section.
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2021 02:33
|
|
|
Less Fat Luke posted:It definitely should be a tab in the main inventory/character screen you bring up with the touchpad. Yeah, that map shows up fine. It's just clunky to constantly swap menus to get there and I can't find a way to show a minimap.
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2021 02:35
|
|
|
BiggerBoat posted:I never played BOTW but that's the first time I've read someone say that said the crafting was fun. BotW didn't nail crafting overall, but they did get that balance between not having to go back to one homebase spot to do it and also not being able to do it whenever or wherever so that you do need to prepare and anticipate a bit. The cooking is fun when you're experimenting but it is sorely lacking this: My Lovely Horse posted:Crafting is fine if I can just pick up materials as I play and forget about them until I want to craft something, in which case I want to select things to craft from a list and the game to immediately convert materials into selected things in my inventory with no further interaction required or any sort of animation. Because BotW not having a recipe book really stands out. Remembering what does what is a pain and in general I'm against players spending a second longer in menus then they really have to. If I've created a cool lightning resistance potion before why can't I just select it from a list of recipes?
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2021 02:38
|
|
|
Lobok posted:BotW didn't nail crafting overall, but they did get that balance between not having to go back to one homebase spot to do it and also not being able to do it whenever or wherever so that you do need to prepare and anticipate a bit. Or just a loving option to repeat the last cook if materials available.
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2021 02:46
|
|
|
RareAcumen posted:Dragon Quest 11's crafting was a pretty simple mini game that never really got obnoxious IMO. You add items into the forge, hammer every piece to try and hit the mark to make it the best possible. And the boosts ramp up to make weapons and armor worth keeping for like two or three dungeons since you picked them up if you can make them +3. And then the Definitive Edition made it so you can just automatically buy materials for it as you're crafting. I actually was about to post this myself. The Fun-Sized Forge is one of the greatest crafting systems in any game ever, and I have legitimately loaded up my end game save file just to pull out the forge and craft some garbage that I don't even need.
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2021 02:47
|
|
|
I unironically love the stupid-as-gently caress Atelier series, which tends to make every character including grown men have the personality of a 14-year-old anime girl, and the part dragging it down is everything that's not the crafting system. I am keenly aware that this is a very bad opinion but I love a smugly complex crafting system that I can actually make sense of without spreadsheets
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2021 07:25
|
|
|
Ambaire posted:Or just a loving option to repeat the last cook if materials available. Or a way to better sort your ingredients in the cook menu
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2021 21:22
|
|
|
dev: this game has crafting me: cool dev: and inventory management me: i will kill you
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2021 23:41
|
|
|
Stexils posted:dev: this game has crafting Sounds about right for me as well.
|
|
#
?
Mar 8, 2021 00:28
|
|
|
One more little thing that's bugging me about Prey is that your quick-access items & weapons are just set on the d-pad, and the flashlight permanently takes up one slot so you can only set three yourself. Not enough. At the very least the flashlight should be equippable, but a full weapon wheel would be much nicer.
|
|
#
?
Mar 8, 2021 00:47
|
|
|
Captain Hygiene posted:but a full weapon wheel would be much nicer.  
|
|
#
?
Mar 8, 2021 00:51
|
|
|
Oh lol, I even remember finding that a while back now and then inexplicably forgetting it. Holding that button down didn't stick in my mind somehow. 
|
|
#
?
Mar 8, 2021 01:06
|
|
|
Captain Hygiene posted:Oh lol, I even remember finding that a while back now and then inexplicably forgetting it. Holding that button down didn't stick in my mind somehow. It’s one of the best weapon wheels in games, too, it turns into a spiral when you have a ton of stuff. Makes it way easier than having everything turn tiny.
|
|
#
?
Mar 8, 2021 01:07
|
|
|
I played raft with some buddies this weekend and while the game is chill and fun as hell, I wish i had the ability to break stuff down (like grills and whatnot)- it's either there and I can't figure it out or it's not there but either way taking obsolete stuff and tossing it overboard shouldn't be my only way of getting rid of things
|
|
#
?
Mar 8, 2021 02:56
|
|
Ugly In The Morning posted:It’s one of the best weapon wheels in games, too, it turns into a spiral when you have a ton of stuff. Makes it way easier than having everything turn tiny. A friend of mine played through prey for the first time recently and this blew my mind, he kept just getting lost playing with the spiral. Also it took a while for him to learn that you didn't always need the most obvious solutions to puzzles, like you could usually bypass hacking with other tools like using the nerf gun to shoot locks or computer buttons but once he got it into his head he kept actively looking for ways to like, spider climb everywhere or use that nerf gun. It was great and reminded me so much of why I loved Prey, it's a game that's really conductive to letting you approach it in a bunch of different ways, except the few times it doesn't and then it feels bad. Like the mind controlled people who die if you don't already know how to take care of the problem.
|
|
|
#
?
Mar 8, 2021 02:59
|
|
|
The GLOO gun basically making any flat-ish wall traversable is maybe my favorite non-obvious but incredibly valuable secondary use for a weapon ever.
|
|
#
?
Mar 8, 2021 03:02
|
|
|
any action game where an enemy normally gets staggered by your attacks, but will occasionally grow totally uncommunicated hyperarmor and ignore you so you get hit for expecting the game to be consistent. sekiro, bloodborne, nioh, and others all do this and it's the absolute worst. because nothing tells you that the same attack that just staggered someone 15 times in a row now suddenly won't, there is no way to learn how to play around this except to just eat poo poo until you learn every single magical gotcha hiding in every enemy. hyperarmor can be a good mechanic to include for the player since it helps balance slower attacks and prevents frustration if you get hit at the last millisecond of a long windup, and just generally makes a game feel better in a way most players probably won't notice; it is not something that should then be blindly copy-pasted onto enemies too without communicating it somehow. please stop doing this, devs
|
|
#
?
Mar 8, 2021 07:01
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 31, 2024 22:03 |
|
|
So Frost Punk is a really cool looking city builder game but as far as I can tell, it was developed by people who think the coolest way to play a game is to follow a wiki guide or fail over and over again for the most asinine reasons. The idea is that you have to manage all your resources to keep people alive; coal, to keep your town warm, wood and steel to build things, and food to feed your people. If they get cold they get sick, if they get sick they can't work and the biggest challenge is that it just keeps getting colder forever. But also sometimes people just get sick, because gently caress you. Also food, as a resource, costs way, way more than anything else, accrues slower and the most effective way to get it also has a higher, and nearly impossible to mitigate, chance of making people sick. If you get a random event that impacts your food production, it's basically game over because people will go hungry, which also makes them sick, which just leads to a spiral until you lose. Everything has enormous resource costs for minimal gain too. Like, the basic setup is that your town has a generator that keeps everyone warm and alive that consumes coal constantly. Every single upgrade for it increases its consumption by 100%, if you don't get these upgrades then any expansions you make will freeze, get sick, and gently caress you over the instant it gets cold. But don't worry; there are upgrades that decrease how much coal it consumes! By 10%. About a third through the upgrade tree. Basically it feels like a cool idea spoiled by being developed under the design idea that if you don't do everything perfectly at all times, you're just never going to make it past the first speedbump because the instant it gets cold everyone's just going to get sick and die anyway, even if you have all of your temperatures maxed out because all it takes to get your entire population to get sick and die is to walk outside when it's cold. And it's always cold.
|
|
|
#
?
Mar 8, 2021 10:41
|
|