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John Murdoch posted:Or maybe Bloodlines 2 will be out by then! Good punchline, way too much setup though. (just kidding, I read all the words about Bloodlines)
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Aug 9, 2023 14:00
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CitizenKain posted:Monstrum Nox felt like a pretty big step down from Lacrimosa of Dana in just about every way but the movement. I preferred the horde stuff in Nox, not entirely sure why, I think I just found the combat snappier or something. But yeah the games would be better by just removing it, or replacing it with something more interesting. And I would love it if the series didn't have a main cast that was larger than the party size. Having multiple characters with the same damage type is just so pointless. I think Ys 7 only had three characters to play as, and I liked that.
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Aug 9, 2023 14:39
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Nah, VII had like two characters for each attack type and Adol as the wild card option past the earlygame since he could equip rapiers for piercing damage and big heavy swords for impact damage along with the standard slashy swords. I don’t remember any one character being super dominant so I just constantly swapped around characters becuase VII had the whole “equip new weapons a while for new skills”, do the more recent ones not encourage that?
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Aug 9, 2023 14:50
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I will also say w/r/t a lot of the impressions about Bloodlines being first time and/or incomplete ones is that it makes me think of Shadowrun Returns. Which is a game that most people say is ultimately pretty mediocre, particularly compared to its follow-ups. But if you don't know anything about Shadowrun and want to get into it, it probably still does its job of giving you a taste of it and hooking you into the setting. Maybe it's the same with Bloodlines. It was almost certainly my first exposure to the World of Darkness and it did leave an impression on me. I mean, I was also like 14 so some of the stuff I cringe at now was part of the appeal back then, too.  I oughta give Redemption a shot at some point. Read the LP of it back in the day and the big plot twist is still  Edit: The circle is complete. Discovering Noah Gervais years and years ago and scoffing at his overwhelming negativity about Bloodlines and not understanding how he could be so harsh on the game. Then watching his video again a decade later to see that now our opinions match in an unnervingly consistent way. He just managed to condense it into a scant 20 minutes as part of double feature with Arcanum is all. John Murdoch has a new favorite as of 19:19 on Aug 9, 2023 |
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Aug 9, 2023 15:06
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Ah, just one last little gently caress you. Managed to do something to massively glitch out the final boss (probably transitioning to phase 2 with Celerity active) which rendered it borderline impossible to kill with melee. I eventually did with copious amounts of noclip abuse and even then it took concerted effort because it was so completely hosed. Working properly, it's supposed to take like 20 seconds and zero effort.
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Aug 9, 2023 23:22
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Sometimes stardew valley is unfair with its quest. There'll be a big quest board job asking like "Hey, can someone help me get some groceries?" and then you click it and only after you accept it does the list show you need a bunch of items you haven't even heard of yet. EDIT: Also while I'm at it; star dew's fishing gets more annoying than fun after a point because they had exactly one idea of making fish challenging or hard, and it's to make it dart near instantly from one end of your meter to the other and while you can go up really fast, you have no way to quickly go back down - and harder fish will have your whole gauge empty by the time you descend to meet it. I've seen people online say "you're not supposed to chase them when they do that" but after some testing, I can safely say that's bullshit because if you don't, the fish will literally just sit there and let time expire so you lose. Nuebot has a new favorite as of 09:48 on Aug 10, 2023 |
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Aug 9, 2023 23:44
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Survival games have this thing dragging them down where hunger is only really a fun mechanic (if you like that sort of thing) at the beginning. Once you secure your food supply it typically turns into a chore that interrupts the game to make you perform rote actions that provide no challenge or interest. I'm playing Raft with my brother and I put myself in charge of maintaining our food supply. What I do is fish (which doesn't have any sort of minigame really, you just click when the fishing rod jerks) using a rod that I make from essentially infinite resources, pulling fish from an infinite supply in the ocean, then I throw them on the grill and cook them using an infinite supply of fuel. We will only ever run out of fish if I just straight up decide to not supply us with infinite food. And it's now boring me. There needs to be some way for these games to just be like oh hey you've proven you can supply yourself with food so lets just assume you keep doing it and turn off the food mechanics. Or find a way to keep acquiring food interesting.
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Aug 10, 2023 11:28
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Now that I think about it, it happens to me a lot that I play a survival game like subnautica and go full immersion for a while and it's really fun to figure out a food supply and stuff. Then once that's settled it becomes a chore that gets in the way of what I actually want to do, so I get bored/annoyed and put the game down for a while. Then I get the hankering again a couple or months later and start all over again only to realize oh yeah, survival is fun for a bit at the start but sucks later, so I restart with those things turned off and actually finish the game.
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Aug 10, 2023 11:34
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gregtech new horizons - an insanely grindy minecraft modpack that has you start off filing individual screws from iron ingots and ends with you cracking open spacetime to harvest the resources therein - has a decent approach for this. the quest system's modular enough and modded items are powerful enough that you can do things like have quests to submit huge amounts of food and top-tier crafted meals in exchange for an item that removes hunger as a concern. i also think it's a decent example of building a game where new capabilities unlock ways to make previous chores much easier (e.g. new cheaper crafting recipes, autocrafting, ability to flat-out directly smelt items rather than going through a whole process, etc)
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Aug 10, 2023 11:38
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Phigs posted:Survival games have this thing dragging them down where hunger is only really a fun mechanic (if you like that sort of thing) at the beginning. Once you secure your food supply it typically turns into a chore that interrupts the game to make you perform rote actions that provide no challenge or interest. I'm playing Raft with my brother and I put myself in charge of maintaining our food supply. What I do is fish (which doesn't have any sort of minigame really, you just click when the fishing rod jerks) using a rod that I make from essentially infinite resources, pulling fish from an infinite supply in the ocean, then I throw them on the grill and cook them using an infinite supply of fuel. We will only ever run out of fish if I just straight up decide to not supply us with infinite food. And it's now boring me. I always find hunger mechanics in survival games to be pretty funny on a conceptual level. Eat twice your body weight in raw meat every 20 minutes or risk starvation.
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Aug 10, 2023 11:41
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Taeke posted:Now that I think about it, it happens to me a lot that I play a survival game like subnautica and go full immersion for a while and it's really fun to figure out a food supply and stuff. Then once that's settled it becomes a chore that gets in the way of what I actually want to do, so I get bored/annoyed and put the game down for a while. Then I get the hankering again a couple or months later and start all over again only to realize oh yeah, survival is fun for a bit at the start but sucks later, so I restart with those things turned off and actually finish the game. This is me right now - I really, really wished they had included the option to switch off the survival stuff without restarting the playthrough. 
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Aug 10, 2023 11:49
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Just have food give you stat bonuses or something to make it worth doing. (With better foods giving you better and longer ones)
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Aug 10, 2023 12:23
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exquisite tea posted:I always find hunger mechanics in survival games to be pretty funny on a conceptual level. Eat twice your body weight in raw meat every 20 minutes or risk starvation. This is exactly my issue with it. Eating as a gameplay mechanic doesn't really work when like, the days are ten minutes long or you starve so fast you have to eat ten meals a day to avoid dying of hunger, or eating a full course meal in like three seconds inexplicably causes your broken legs to mend because food is usually also a health recovery item. It's the pedantic nitpicky sort of complaint - but survival mechanics are always arbitrary if the game isn't going full on survival simulation and it rarely ever feels like they're actually adding on to the game when it's not built around them leading to them just feeling tacked on. Too many games have a hunger meter that basically just exists as a death timer, it's just drowning but on land.
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Aug 10, 2023 12:27
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Raft is pretty ornery about the food stuff yeah. Valheim does the "food as a buff" thing which I think is a great idea. There's the zen aspect to it too, which it's not about engagement but about tending to your little kingdom you started from nothing. Repetetive becomes soothing instead of boring. I play a ton of these games and have never finished one. Some friends bounce off hard when there's no direct objective for them to accomplish.
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Aug 10, 2023 12:39
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Vic posted:Raft is pretty ornery about the food stuff yeah. Valheim does the "food as a buff" thing which I think is a great idea. My friends and I enjoyed Raft so much precisely because there are objectives and a story to follow. Also Grounded.
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Aug 10, 2023 13:03
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Nuebot posted:This is exactly my issue with it. Eating as a gameplay mechanic doesn't really work when like, the days are ten minutes long or you starve so fast you have to eat ten meals a day to avoid dying of hunger, or eating a full course meal in like three seconds inexplicably causes your broken legs to mend because food is usually also a health recovery item. It's the pedantic nitpicky sort of complaint - but survival mechanics are always arbitrary if the game isn't going full on survival simulation and it rarely ever feels like they're actually adding on to the game when it's not built around them leading to them just feeling tacked on. Too many games have a hunger meter that basically just exists as a death timer, it's just drowning but on land. It's like how Sam Bridges can't find boots that won't break after four hours of wear.
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Aug 10, 2023 13:14
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Nuebot posted:This is exactly my issue with it. Eating as a gameplay mechanic doesn't really work when like, the days are ten minutes long or you starve so fast you have to eat ten meals a day to avoid dying of hunger, or eating a full course meal in like three seconds inexplicably causes your broken legs to mend because food is usually also a health recovery item. It's the pedantic nitpicky sort of complaint - but survival mechanics are always arbitrary if the game isn't going full on survival simulation and it rarely ever feels like they're actually adding on to the game when it's not built around them leading to them just feeling tacked on. Too many games have a hunger meter that basically just exists as a death timer, it's just drowning but on land. There was this fantastic article many years back laying out all the annoyances and bad design that survival games used for hunger mechanics and the like, with a big takeaway being that a lack of satiety made them extra anxiety inducing for many players and highlighted the lack of realism...in a system meant to add realism. It was so effective that the developers of Subnautica listened and changed how the survival mechanics worked thanks to that article.  Then as I understand it at some point they changed their minds and went back to the old system.  Drowning but on land is a really good turn of phrase for it.
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Aug 10, 2023 13:21
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Philippe posted:It's like how Sam Bridges can't find boots that won't break after four hours of wear. To be perfectly fair, that's like walking 3/4 the length of the US
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Aug 10, 2023 13:24
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also rainwater artificially ages whatever it touches, and it's always fuckin' raining
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Aug 10, 2023 13:27
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Inexplicable Humblebrag posted:also rainwater artificially ages whatever it touches, and it's always fuckin' raining Which is why the durability mechanic gets old fast
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Aug 10, 2023 13:43
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With things like food and whatnot, I don't understand why developers don't get that just because something is realistic, that doesn't make it fun in a gaming context. I understand that immersion is a thing but I play video games to do things I CAN'T do in real life, not to do chores. I want to quarterback an NFL team, slay a dragon, shoot zombies, be an undercover spy or run around kicking rear end as Batman. Don't particularly want to worry about starving to death or having to bathe in game.
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Aug 10, 2023 14:26
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Nuebot posted:This is exactly my issue with it. Eating as a gameplay mechanic doesn't really work when like, the days are ten minutes long or you starve so fast you have to eat ten meals a day to avoid dying of hunger, or eating a full course meal in like three seconds inexplicably causes your broken legs to mend because food is usually also a health recovery item. It's the pedantic nitpicky sort of complaint - but survival mechanics are always arbitrary if the game isn't going full on survival simulation and it rarely ever feels like they're actually adding on to the game when it's not built around them leading to them just feeling tacked on. Too many games have a hunger meter that basically just exists as a death timer, it's just drowning but on land. Also I cannot express how many loading bar style mechanics are vastly improved by having three different loading bars ticking down at different rates.
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Aug 10, 2023 14:32
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BiggerBoat posted:With things like food and whatnot, I don't understand why developers don't get that just because something is realistic, that doesn't make it fun in a gaming context. I understand that immersion is a thing but I play video games to do things I CAN'T do in real life, not to do chores. I want to quarterback an NFL team, slay a dragon, shoot zombies, be an undercover spy or run around kicking rear end as Batman. It can be good. Like, lifesims are hugely popular. Problem is that most of the survival mechanics are just boring. Meter goes down, open inventory and press button to refill meter. If hunger mechanics came with a really good cooking minigame, and it wasn't just to make a dozen cooked fish to eat later, it could be fun.
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Aug 10, 2023 14:36
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kazil posted:It can be good. Like, lifesims are hugely popular. Problem is that most of the survival mechanics are just boring. Meter goes down, open inventory and press button to refill meter. Yeah, exactly. Games can provide outlets for things other than pure power fantasies. Even as someone who thinks games often don't go nearly hard enough at delivering effective power fantasies, I don't have a problem with other types of experiences. The real issue seems to boil down to survival games being the new hotness for a while, leading to cargo culting of surface level elements without any deeper introspection on their design. Minecraft's gotta be patient zero for loads of tedious survival and crafting elements.
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Aug 10, 2023 14:43
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Metal gear solid was really let down by snake not reviewing every ration he ate in kojima esque detail.
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Aug 10, 2023 14:44
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If you're going to have a hunger mechanic the game should be focused around it, and around survival in general. The Long Dark is a perfect game for a hunger mechanic, Subnautica is not. If you want to have hunger but not starvation-survival, then having it be a buff that you can do without in a pinch is ideal. The litmus test should probably be something like if you can maintain a full well-fed bar for a few hours of gameplay than the mechanic should deprecate itself and fall off. I really liked how Pathologic 2 did this, because you are starving and thirsting to death, sure, but also almost-never have the material on hand to get a full bar, and oftentimes there's nothing you can do but hope you'll find some food later while you are doing more important things. This also ties into the death effect, which is a permanent reduction in your maximum food/water/etc bars; not really a bad thing here since you're never at max anyway. In most games a permanent reduction of maximums is about the worst thing you can do to a player.
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Aug 10, 2023 14:47
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I think the only food/water meter management I liked was in Metal Gear : Survive: once you maxed out one of the bars it slowed the rate of decay, hid the bar and treated it as full until it hit ~70%. So once you got out of the scraping by phase, you weren't constantly eating/drinking. Unless you were taking lots damage you were eating like once every 2-3 excursions. Also food and water for the PC became by-products of providing for the rest of the camp. So you build a water collector and it provides 1000 units of water for the base and 1 bottle for you per hour. Same with food a caged animal or a potato farm, they gave x units for the base and some meat/ potatoes for you, and if you didn't need them you could convert them into bonus stockpiles for the base.Philippe posted:It's like how Sam Bridges can't find boots that won't break after four hours of wear. Is this one of the things that were patched out? Because once I got the first shoe upgrade I never even got close to wearing them out before I got the next upgrade and threw them away anyway or lost them when fast travelling. So having an entire inventory slot for spare shoes was just worthless since there was no need for them after like 2-3 hours.
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Aug 10, 2023 14:50
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It really comes down to whether or not maintaining the hunger meter is creating interesting choices or tradeoffs. A lot of the more hardcore survival games get away with it because there's complexity and nuance beyond just "put fish in your mouth every 10 minutes or you die". Most of your bog standard survival games just make it a repetitive chore and rely on the barebones tension of "if this meter depletes you die" to carry the game. Turns out a lot of people get sick of that kind of tension very quickly.
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Aug 10, 2023 14:54
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John Murdoch posted:Minecraft's gotta be patient zero for loads of tedious survival and crafting elements. kazil posted:It can be good. Like, lifesims are hugely popular. Problem is that most of the survival mechanics are just boring. Meter goes down, open inventory and press button to refill meter. This is the key thing. It's really not about realism, we're all just talking about game mechanics that are tedious. Does your game have a Realistic Hunger Mechanic or can we call it what it is, Yet Another Reason to Have to Go Into a Menu Screen. On that note, something minor for all PS5 games is that the Start/Options button on the controller kinda sucks. It is not a satisfying button to press.
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Aug 10, 2023 14:59
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Lobok posted:On that note, something minor for all PS5 games is that the Start/Options button on the controller kinda sucks. It is not a satisfying button to press. The further we get from the Dual Shock 2 the worse controllers get.
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Aug 10, 2023 15:05
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Subnautica is a deeply tedious game in general. 10% exploring new environments and figuring out what to do now, 90% scouring the sea floor for more copper in the industrial quantities you need.
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Aug 10, 2023 15:08
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Hel posted:The further we get from the Dual Shock 2 the worse controllers get. Yeah, PS3 maintained the position of start and select but PS4 and 5 have made them just blurgh.
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Aug 10, 2023 15:12
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Evilreaver posted:If you're going to have a hunger mechanic the game should be focused around it, and around survival in general. This is a good point. Same with the person who mentioned the Sims, where that mechanic is the whole game.
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Aug 10, 2023 15:22
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Tunicate posted:Which is why the durability mechanic gets old fast 
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Aug 10, 2023 15:26
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Hel posted:The further we get from the Dual Shock 2 the worse controllers get. The 8bitdo bluetooth controller is the closest to a perfect controller I've seen (and i also used the dual shock 2 a ton). The dpad is leagues better than any Playstation controller, the triggers feel great, the bumpers are satisfying, the paddle buttons on the back are the best addition I've ever seen for remapping certain common actions in games, The biggest issues I have with it are the triggers having resistance but no driver/program I've found utilizes it, the button is either pressed or not pressed, no partial-presses. And it uses nintendo layout so steam likes to freak out about it. It does mean it's a great switch pro controller though I also wish a controller company would bring face buttons like the US SNES's back, where two of the buttons are concave while two are convex. B/A convex and X/Y concave would be 
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Aug 10, 2023 16:04
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This War Of Mine does food/hunger pretty well. It's an important game mechanic but there's both leeway and options. You don't have to feed your survivors every day, although they complain if you don't, and both cooking and eating involve investing time so you have to figure that into your limited daily routine. There's also multiple ways to get food but all of them involve tradeoffs. You can scavenge for it (might not find any, risky if the area is populated, limited slots to haul stuff back), grow it (not immediate, takes even more time out of your day, requires resource investment), or sometimes trade for it (unpredictable, consumes valuable trade goods).
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Aug 10, 2023 16:25
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Really love Rimworld but man sometimes it feels intentional how bad things cascade. Being raided, everybody line up, get ready for the big fight. We are strong and healthy and well equipped, we should be able to wipe them out easily. > moments before our two armies clash, all of my colonists suddenly get the plague! Now they're just throwing up, and throwing tantrums, and wandering off in a sad daze, and now a coyote is hunting my children, and gently caress now the enemy army is here, one of my colonists is binging on weed...
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Aug 10, 2023 16:47
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credburn posted:Really love Rimworld but man sometimes it feels intentional how bad things cascade. simulator game
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Aug 10, 2023 16:50
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Not too far into death stranding I got a set of gold boots as a quest reward that lasted me through the entire rest of the game. bit of a cruft mechanic
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Aug 10, 2023 16:55
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Owl Inspector posted:Not too far into death stranding I got a set of gold boots as a quest reward that lasted me through the entire rest of the game. bit of a cruft mechanic More games should be like Deadly Premonition and have sidequest rewards just be things that effectively turn off annoying parts of the game.
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Aug 10, 2023 17:02
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