Jack Trades posted:

I wish there were more Diablo-likes that were NOT made by Diablo 2 fans, the Grim Dawns and Titan Quests and the like have the most boring items and character building.
Shame that Diablo 3 has so little content.

Jack Trades posted:

I wish there were more Diablo-likes that were NOT made by Diablo 2 fans, the Grim Dawns and Titan Quests and the like have the most boring items and character building.
Shame that Diablo 3 has so little content.

Sab669 posted:

Last Epoch is really really good IMO. I've put ~100 hours into it so far and have made like 8 separate characters because they're all cool and awesome.

Fun Times! posted:

God of War runs great and is cool as hell so far. Really hopeful for Ghost of Tsushima and Spiderman ports of this quality in the future.

Sab669 posted:

MonHun Rise:



Fire the idiot who thought of that

Jack Trades posted:

I wish there were more Diablo-likes that were NOT made by Diablo 2 fans, the Grim Dawns and Titan Quests and the like have the most boring items and character building.
Shame that Diablo 3 has so little content.

Jack Trades posted:

Is it really? I just looked up what legendary and set gear looks like in that game and at a glance it all seems to be the same style of extremely unexciting stats as in something like Grim Dawn, where the best it can do is to make numbers go up slightly.

Jack Trades posted:

Is it really? I just looked up what legendary and set gear looks like in that game and at a glance it all seems to be the same style of extremely unexciting stats as in something like Grim Dawn, where the best it can do is to make numbers go up slightly.

Jack Trades posted:

Is it really? I just looked up what legendary and set gear looks like in that game and at a glance it all seems to be the same style of extremely unexciting stats as in something like Grim Dawn, where the best it can do is to make numbers go up slightly.

quote:

I played for 11 hours and spent virtually the entire time wondering why the game is designed the way it is. It's not that Last Epoch is a bad game - it's competently made, seems to have deep character customization and allegedly has a few neat ideas - but more that it blindly ignores all of the worst and most consistent problems with ARPGs while focusing the innovation on things that a solid ARPG really does not need, like crafting.

I'm told it gets interesting at higher levels with more hours sunk in, but it does not feel worth sinking hours into in order to get there. Here are some of the things that just made me groan until I finally decided to give up:

1) Absolutely nothing is done to make the leveling process fun or entertaining. Look, let's be blunt here - ARPGs are only fun at the mid/end-game when you're mowing through oceans of enemies praying for the sweet dopamine drip of a valuable drop. Every ARPG in existence has been a hollow, slow-paced experience until you get there. Last Epoch suffers from literally every single exacerbating problem I can think of:
The maps are sparsely populated
Most encounters consist of 1-2 enemies and the mob size doesn't start ramping up until quite a bit later
You're forced to use a bunch of incredibly boring, plain skills like "a melee hit that does extra damage" or "do small aoe damage to a small area" - Last Epoch actually makes this part worse by also making you grind up every spell you use in order to start unlocking the modifiers for it that make it actually good, so even once you unlock a good skill you have to grind until it becomes worth using.

2) The loot is an endless ocean of garbage and looking for islands within sucks
Blizzard's design philosophy is that you have to have a lot of garbage drops in order to make the good drops exciting, which is absurdly stupid and has been mirrored by just about every loot-based ARPG ever since. Last Epoch is another in a long line of heaping your screen with dozens of items you would never want to pick up and you will regret the time spent mousing over them just to check them out. You will end up using the same low level magic/rare items throughout most of the leveling process because all of the loot before end-game is so worthless that slowing down to sort through it only hurts you, because after spending 2 seconds looking at each item and sorting through 1,000 items to find one that actually has stats that are relevant to your character, you've wasted a full 33 minutes of your life to find an item that will be obsolete in less than an hour.

3) It has some kind of deep crafting system that lets players easily tailor items to their specific stats (once you hit late game). Okay, this is a personal negative that I wouldn't expect everyone to agree with. Growing up on Diablo 2 means that to me, the heart and soul of an ARPG is in the trading economy. Last Epoch currently has no multiplayer and therefore no trading, but it allows the strength of PoE's crafting without the attached gambling aspect. That eliminates any possibility of an interesting trading economy in the future.

4) The character development is largely just another episode of picking small passive bonuses from large passive skill trees. Similar to PoE there are a small handful of powerful nodes that do slightly more, but nearly every point you get to develop your character is going to be spent doing something like giving a spell +6 damage, or giving your pets +2 ice damage, or gaining 2% cast speed.

5) For once a game actually included a hotkey to move your pets around - cool! - except it uses this as an excuse to make your pets (1) Just as vulnerable to you are to all aoe/ground effects and (2) never move out of aoe or ground effects on their own. This is micromanagement hell and makes pet classes unplayable here for me.

Anyway, if you're not burned out on the same old ARPG being released ad nauseum for the last decade you'll probably enjoy Last Epoch as much as any of the others - but if you're waiting for an ARPG to do something interesting again, sit this one out.

Sab669 posted:

Much to my displeasure I bought a new Xbox controller this morning and will try out MonHun again 'the correct way' today. How is God of War on KBM? I can't decide which of the 2 games I actually want to purchase.

Cinara posted:

Outriders barely had any buttons though? I would never consider it as a game that would be better on gamepad.

Blattdorf posted:

Speaking of logic puzzles, you should all become familiar with Everett Kaser games.

lunar detritus posted:

I bought Vampire Survivors because of this thread, played it for 30 minutes kinda liking it but I know I'll never open it again.

Agent355 posted:

At this point I feel like every PC player is just obligated to keep a controller around for some games, unless you really only play 4x games and FPS or w/e. It's such a small investment for a controller and there are tons of games where I'd really rather have one.

Stux posted:

gonna cry?

Mordja posted:

God of War's a lot of fun, seems like there's a lot to its combat system and ability upgrades. Digging the level design too, surprisingly.

ChibiSoma posted:

If MHXX gets localized, I will myself. That is how confident I am in them loving over the fans who made the series big in the first place.

pentyne posted:

lol a while back, like maybe even 10 years there was someone raging on the forums that a game wasn't compatible with their controller, and it turned out they were using a PC controller that preceded the xbox

I even think the game dev offered to send them a modern controller to resolve the issue but the goon threw a tantrum because they insisted the game should be compatible with obsolete tech.

Kaddish posted:

In God of War, I’m seeing a lot of chests and areas I can’t access. Are these meant for ng+ or what? Some of them are in really out of the way places.

deep dish peat moss posted:

Context on this post: I'm a very jaded gamer and after playing 3 leagues of PoE in 2019 I feel like I am so burned out on ARPGs that I will never enjoy one again unless it does something actually new or innovative

I only played it for 11 hours but in my experience it does absolutely nothing that hasn't been done a million times before by every other ARPG, and on top of that it feels clunky to play - like you know how PoE feels clunkier than Diablo 3? Imagine that same step down in fluidity another time and that's Last Epoch. I was disappointed enough in it that I hid it from my steam library (which is not something I do often) and wrote a long negative review for it (which is something I try to only do when a game's design truly baffles me).

The 'customize your spells' gimmick seems neat in theory but in practice it was just "You start with really terrible, awful versions of all of your spells and you have to grind them out to make them powerful or fun - also if you ever respec you have to start the grind all over".

These were my main complaints:

It has loot filters now which I guess sidestep #2 by sweeping it under the rug, I don't know about any of the others but the way I felt is that it had such poor self-awareness and understanding of its genre that I didn't want to give it another shot in the future.

StrixNebulosa posted:

Casual gamer checking in: I've been playing these logic puzzles and now I'm wondering - are there any like, actual collections of these on steam? I love doing these kinds of puzzles and would enjoy a more gamified element to them.

Agent355 posted:

At this point I feel like every PC player is just obligated to keep a controller around for some games, unless you really only play 4x games and FPS or w/e. It's such a small investment for a controller and there are tons of games where I'd really rather have one.

Rinkles posted:

I agree but controllers aren't that cheap.

Kennel posted:

There's an old DOS game that's pretty fun and works in browser: https://dosgames.com/game/sherlock/

e. oh poo poo, that was one of those Everett Kaser games.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnRuE3ilO3k

(it might look a bit cryptic, but clicking the hint button explains moves nicely)

quote:

Friday November 20, 2009

OFFICIAL RELEASES: Inspector Lestrade, the 7th game in the Sherlock series has been released! If you've played Sherlock, Dinner With Moriarty, Honeycomb Hotel, Watson's Map, Baker Street or Scotland Yard, you know you're in for a treat (or, at least, a challenge!) Speaking of Sherlock, I'm also releasing a MAJOR update/rewrite of it (version 6.0), the first in almost seven years. Last time (version 5.0) I added different sizes of puzzles from 3x3 up to 8x8 (instead of just 6x6). This time (amongst many other small changes) the game now supports setting the width and height of the puzzles independently, anywhere from 3 to 8 (six different settings), resulting in THIRTY-SIX different sizes of puzzles!!!

quote:

Wednesday Oct 13, 2021

OFFICIAL RELEASE: A new game, Knarly Asteroids, is now available for both MS Windows and Mac OS X! This one's a bit different, being more of a CHALLENGE than a PUZZLE.

You're in a space ship, with an asteroid field between you and a space station. You must launch supply packets, which have no self-propulsion nor self-guidance, such that they will arrive at the station purely by means of their initial inertia and the gravity of the asteroids. There are thousands of solutions for each puzzle (around 15,000 'unique' solutions are known to exist for puzzle #1 of size 4, for example), but they can be quite challenging to find. How many ways can you reach the station in any given puzzle?

(This game is a re-visit of a game I originally wrote in June of 1980!)

Bofast posted:

Interestingly, reading that long quote you included I don't think you and I play ARPGs for the same reasons at all.

I like the early/mid campaign/leveling experience so if I don't enjoy the game from level 1 I just drop it entirely. On the other hand I find things like late game running of random maps or repeatedly running bosses for particular loot pieces without any story relevance terminally boring so I just restart with a new character once I get to that point. Whether it's ARPGs or the rare MMO I'm completely opposed to the whole "the game doesn't really start until X" way of thinking.

I don't think I get much of the dopamine drop from loot drops that you mention, either. Generally, I prefer just finding/buying one weapon that can last me 10 levels in something like Diablo 2 or Borderlands 1 (the Hellfire SMGs that would sometimes just show up in vending machines in Borderlands 1 come to mind) while I try skills/builds out to see what they do or try to stack enough skill procs on the same basic attack in Grim Dawn to make 4-5 things happen on striking, rather than constantly finding 5+ random upgrades over 15 levels in Diablo 3 or Borderlands 2.
I also don't really mind having a lot of loot dropping that I won't use myself as long as I can sell a decent amount of it in town to use for buying/upgrading stuff, like in Diablo 2. This is probably my main gripe with Path of Exile's overly complicated barter economy, since it makes most loot either something you use or something that's barely worth identifying in the first place with little in between.

I even kept throwing away higher level guns in Destiny 2 because I just thought it was more fun to stick with my Sunshot revolver that could occasionally cause a chain explosion in trash enemy groups. Then again, I was also the one guy in my group who kept triple jumping my Hunter right up in the face of regular enemies who were low on health and melee punching them to death because I thought it was amusing.

Some builds I played the most (Summonancer in Diablo 2, Prismatic Bolt Embermage in Torchlight 2, etc) largely don't care about the gear, depending on the skills used, so while I demand random loot in a good ARPG I want it to be more like 40% of the character build and the other 60% a mix of skill/stat trees and combat strategies, as opposed to how loot is probably more like 80% or more of the build in something like Diablo 3. I lean more towards the making choices side of things and less towards the purely RNG based loot gambling "high".

I do like bigger enemy mobs, though, but in at least some ARPGs I can just play with mods that increase enemy numbers to fill half the screen and then die hilariously to some 9+ champion group that spawned when I activated a totem/shrine in Grim Dawn or something

All that said, I have not played Last Epoch yet so I have no idea if it would appeal to me or not. I just thought it was interesting how we largely seem to be opposites in these matters. No wonder it's hard for devs to figure out what "it has no good loot" means from Internet comments.

pentyne posted:

lol a while back, like maybe even 10 years there was someone raging on the forums that a game wasn't compatible with their controller, and it turned out they were using a PC controller that preceded the xbox

I even think the game dev offered to send them a modern controller to resolve the issue but the goon threw a tantrum because they insisted the game should be compatible with obsolete tech.

I think it was chibisoma who ironically was banned after failing the following toxx clause

Kaddish posted:

In God of War, I’m seeing a lot of chests and areas I can’t access. Are these meant for ng+ or what? Some of them are in really out of the way places.

The United States posted:

Official controllers are not, and they've been going up and up each generation, though you can get older generations used for decent prices since everything from 360 on is forwards compatible.

But third party wired 360/Xbone controllers can still be found for $15-25, no problem.

Sloppy posted:

I've been using Xbox 360 controllers since forever. They show up at yard sales all the time for like nothing. Sometimes I'll get the whole Xbox for like $5, keep most of the controllers, and sell it off at a profit. Nerd hustle

secretly best girl posted:

That was Chibisoma(? God I hope I'm recalling my rear end in a top hat C-name poster correctly) and the game was Bastion of all titles, the Supergiant crew were like "we'll buy you a 360 pad man, you're using a 1990s controller"

Gay Rat Wedding posted: