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Suleman
Sep 4, 2011

Kazanski posted:

Something I've noticed lately that really annoys me across multiple games and genres: attacks or abilities missing. I don't understand why every attack needs to have a chance to have some crazy unpredictable variance. And when they do, I don't understand why the probability always seems to be set so high, especially in older games. It's really egregious in action RPGs where your attacks can naturally miss because you just didn't line it up right.

Oh, aye.
For a recent example, Baldur's Gate 3. Disabling abilities feel so pointless because even with specialized builds, the enemies that you actually want to disable have gigantic ability scores which allow them to roll their saves more often than not. Oh, you cast hold person? Congrats for crowd controlling yourself by skipping your turn. Bonus points if the ability requires concentration, meaning it can break quite easily even if you manage to hit it.
On the other hand, Air Myrmidons have a basic melee attack with a chance to stun for 2 rounds. Summoned Myrmidons are already pretty good, and a max-level druid shapeshifted to that form can use the attack three times per round, stunlocking even bosses with ease. Raphael, Orin, Gortash, the final final boss? All stunlocked to death.

I feel like some kind of middle ground could probably be achieved.

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Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters

Opopanax posted:

That's because it already existed and came out this decade

Imagining BioEnchanted trying to play something that came out on a modern system and getting a rash and a massive headache if he touches the controller.

This of course stops happening once the next gen of systems is released.

Suleman posted:

Oh, aye.
For a recent example, Baldur's Gate 3. Disabling abilities feel so pointless because even with specialized builds, the enemies that you actually want to disable have gigantic ability scores which allow them to roll their saves more often than not. Oh, you cast hold person? Congrats for crowd controlling yourself by skipping your turn. Bonus points if the ability requires concentration, meaning it can break quite easily even if you manage to hit it.
On the other hand, Air Myrmidons have a basic melee attack with a chance to stun for 2 rounds. Summoned Myrmidons are already pretty good, and a max-level druid shapeshifted to that form can use the attack three times per round, stunlocking even bosses with ease. Raphael, Orin, Gortash, the final final boss? All stunlocked to death.

I feel like some kind of middle ground could probably be achieved.

That's kinda how spells and abilities are balanced in D&D. Cantrips are free to cast but if you miss or they save, zero damage. Area of effect spells are good but a save does half damage and rogues can dodge them entirely. Crowd control spells that would otherwise be devastating, such as Hold spells or Tasha's Hideous Laughter, simply get ignored on a save.

This is often why buffing spells are better to use in many, but not all, cases.

Morpheus has a new favorite as of 21:48 on Sep 10, 2023

ZeusCannon
Nov 5, 2009

BLAAAAAARGH PLEASE KILL ME BLAAAAAAAARGH
Grimey Drawer
Starfield: In hindsight Outerworlds was an 8 out of 10"

Suleman
Sep 4, 2011

Morpheus posted:

That's kinda how spells and abilities are balanced in D&D. Cantrips are free to cast but if you miss or they save, zero damage. Area of effect spells are good but a save does half damage and rogues can dodge them entirely. Crowd control spells that would otherwise be devastating, such as Hold spells or Tasha's Hideous Laughter, simply get ignored on a save.

This is often why buffing spells are better to use in many, but not all, cases.

Yeah, it's been that way for longer than I've been alive.
The game already has weapons with "does damage on miss" so something like "stuns on hit, slows on miss" might be doable.
4e already made steps towards that direction. Several daily abilities had effects that either worked also on miss or had reduced effects on miss. 5e doesn't have many of those.

Arivia
Mar 17, 2011

Suleman posted:

Yeah, it's been that way for longer than I've been alive.
The game already has weapons with "does damage on miss" so something like "stuns on hit, slows on miss" might be doable.
4e already made steps towards that direction. Several daily abilities had effects that either worked also on miss or had reduced effects on miss. 5e doesn't have many of those.

you're younger than 23 years? you had an SA account when you were 11? i'm old now

RBA Starblade
Apr 28, 2008

Going Home.

Games Idiot Court Jester

Kazanski posted:


The NES Fire Emblem games would be completely unplayable without save states. How am I supposed to plan in a tactics game when simply attacking an enemy can have wildly different outcomes from "I crit, the enemy misses, I crit again" to "I miss, the enemy crits, I miss again"? These aren't small chances that keep you on your toes either, the variance is insanely high and the games don't seem to be balanced to allow for it. Fire Emblem Gaiden is really bad in this regard, I swear every other attack misses, and certain parts are just ridiculous without scumming save states. I've been playing with my own rules - save state before each battle, reload if there's any crit or miss by anybody - and it's so much more enjoyable.

The first NES Fire Emblem is rough on it because it expects your units to eat poo poo and for you to replace them, but in general with FE and games like XCOM, you're supposed to plan for the worst. What will happen if you miss twice and the enemy crits or crits twice? Can you afford it? Do you have a backup plan or a guarantee for if that happens? Will the unit live and can you heal them? And so on.

Most people generally play by reloading the mission when something goes south in FE though lol - later games have it built in

RBA Starblade has a new favorite as of 22:11 on Sep 10, 2023

Primetime
Jul 3, 2009

RareAcumen posted:

As someone who's not into the series, I've got one question. Is it ever annoying about enemy resistance as I imagine? I have this assumption that there're some situations like the graveyard in 1 where you wanna swap to crushing damage instead of slash or piercing. But since you need materials to upgrade weapons and the movesets between a mace a flail and a morningstar might all be different on top of them being like 7 hours away from being obtainable does it ever get annoying trying to keep multiple weapons at the same level?

This never really happens in any of the games, and even the graveyard in 1 is only annoying until you realize there are enemies you can permanently kill to stop the respawns.

Certainly, different enemies have different strengths and weaknesses, but never to a degree that a weapon is rendered useless. They also learned their lesson after ds2, and most upgrade materials are buy able or incredibly common, so if you feel compelled to swap it's not that big of a deal. Last time I played ds3, I had 99 of the first two upgrade materials without intending to

Pulsarcat
Feb 7, 2012

credburn posted:

It's also bananas how sometimes in the same dialogue tree, he'll speak as a narrator ("He says you'd better get going...") but other times he speaks as the NPC ("I think you should be going now.")

And sometimes he'll take a third option and simply says "Thinks you should be going now" it's really distracting.

credburn posted:

Also, is he supposed to be the grasshopper? Because sometimes the focus is on the grasshopper while the narrator is speaking. So is that the conceit? That actually everything I'm hearing is what the grasshopper is telling the protagonist?

No, I don't think so.
The game doesn't make it super clear, but the grasshopper is the one recording your adventure, and if I remember right the narrator at one point translates the beeps the grasshopper makes.

Suleman
Sep 4, 2011

Arivia posted:

you're younger than 23 years? you had an SA account when you were 11? i'm old now

Since we were talking about disables specifically, Hold Person, among other such spells, has worked the same way since at least 2e (probably longer), which was released months before I was born in 1989.

https://adnd2e.fandom.com/wiki/Hold_Person_(Priest_Spell)

very risky blowjob
Sep 27, 2015

exquisite tea posted:

In case you didn't already know this, all consumables will be used by the character you are presently controlling, regardless of whoever's inventory holds it.

it's why one character is my designated weed potion carrier and fights tend to go poorly when they get drop kicked out of bounds :(

Owl Inspector
Sep 14, 2011

RareAcumen posted:

As someone who's not into the series, I've got one question. Is it ever annoying about enemy resistance as I imagine? I have this assumption that there're some situations like the graveyard in 1 where you wanna swap to crushing damage instead of slash or piercing. But since you need materials to upgrade weapons and the movesets between a mace a flail and a morningstar might all be different on top of them being like 7 hours away from being obtainable does it ever get annoying trying to keep multiple weapons at the same level?

There's enough upgrade materials to keep more than one weapon upgraded to a usable level and for the most part each game only has one area where a particular damage type is off limits. it's not that bad. (One exception being dark souls 2's DLCs where being a spellcaster focused character is massively less efficient than in the rest of the game)

The DS1 graveyard is compounded by the game's weird nonlinear damage formula which makes damage type differences seem like they matter more than they actually do if you go in there at the appropriate level.

Doctor Spaceman
Jul 6, 2010

"Everyone's entitled to their point of view, but that's seriously a weird one."

Kazanski posted:

Even the board game Gloomhaven has that stupid yellow card where your attack is completely nullified. I put those and the 2x's straight into the dead card pile.

Can just use the variant where 2x and nulls become +2 and -2.

Nuebot
Feb 18, 2013

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

Snake Maze posted:

Baulder’s Gate 3 is a lot of fun, with great characters and gameplay and everything.

But it just did the thing where you have a dramatic confrontation with the bad guy in his lair, and start kicking his rear end in the boss battle, and then when he gets down to half health it triggers a cutscene where everyone in the party stands at a respectful distance and does nothing while he slowly escapes. :negative:

On the other hand, sometimes you kill something too hard and miss story content. There's a fight earlier in the game where you lower an NPC's health, they beg for their survival, then come back later. I blasted them so hard not only did they die, but their corpse went flying off a cliff and I couldn't even loot it. Whoops.

Byzantine posted:

There's no way to tell if you're getting wrecked because you are meant to go somewhere else, or if you're getting wrecked because it's Dark Souls.

See also, everybody who bashed their head against the graveyard.

Those people have always been dumb and they convinced themselves the game was just supposed to be ultra hard to justify their own stubborn idiocy. It's like entering into a room with two doorways, going left and walking face first into a closed door, looking around and spotting the open doorway opposite, then just continuing to walk into the door yelling loudly that this room is so tricky and hard to figure out.

John Murdoch
May 19, 2009

I can tune a fish.
The skeletons are really more of a basic stat/upgrade check than a hard "bring strike damage or else" roadblock. You can find a Morningstar five feet away if you explore thoroughly that will do a bit better against them, but ultimately there isn't a very compelling reason to do more than run through, grab the loot, and then forget about that entire route until many, many hours later at which point their resistances are meaningless. By comparison the basic Hollows in the Undead Burg will get chunked by just about anything a starting character can swing around.

Realistically, physical resistances barely ever matter. They might be noticeable sometimes, but elemental resistances/immunities and to a lesser extent status effect resistances/immunities cause way more strife. Mainly magic resistance because mages don't really get a lot of alternatives to blasting laser beams.

Weapon upgrades and the availability of materials noticeably shifted over time. In DS1 farming for mats is borderline required to really top everything up unless your loadout happens to line up nicely with what's naturally available or you're willing to wait an extra while for resources to get less bottlenecked. DS2 had things pretty balanced, with solidly enough of everything, but not necessarily an infinite supply without farming. And then for better or worse DS3 overcorrected and made like 40% of the loot upgrade materials and had plenty of enemies drop more. Elden Ring I'd say lands somewhere between DS2 and 3, with the added bonus that there's ways to get infinite supplies of every single upgrade material bar the final ultimate capstone ones.

The problem that Elden Ring still didn't even solve is that if you find a new weapon 85% of the way through the game, it'll be level 0 and so actually bringing it up to parity to what you're currently using will take some amount of effort and resources. Even if you have the resources readily available it's still dumb and adds nothing to the game(s) and ultimately disincentivizes trying new weapons.

John Murdoch has a new favorite as of 00:16 on Sep 11, 2023

Tall Tale Teller
May 20, 2003
Grave? Shovel! Let's go.

I really liked the Elden Ring and Demon's Souls gor a little while but gave up after 30 hours or so. That lore is cool as poo poo though.

Part of getting older is realizing I won't be getting gud in a reasonable time frame.

I'm fuckin 40, I got poo poo to do and a family and other games to play. I can't beat my head against a wall all day, that's what work is for.

My Lovely Horse
Aug 21, 2010

Doctor Spaceman posted:

Can just use the variant where 2x and nulls become +2 and -2.

Even in Gloomhaven it's just the damage that's nullified, any additional effects or conditions still go through.

grittyreboot
Oct 2, 2012

Cora Coe in Starfield looks and sounds like she's twelve but all her dialogue reads like stuff a six year old would say. I like Sam and I wanna keep him as my follower, but hearing her 10 or so lines every time I get in my ship is testing my patience.

Captain Hygiene
Sep 17, 2007

You mess with the crabbo...



I'm a few hours into Starfield now, and I'm not really loving the starmap interface for wqrping around the galaxy. For systems within range it's fine, it's basically just a 2D map to click on. But it feels like a pain the moment you have to plan out a multistep course to get somewhere beyond your basic range, and you suddenly realize it's a full 3D map but you can only see a limited view of it by wiggling it a little ball and forth. I took like five tries to get to an early game location because the 2D presentation completely obfuscates what systems are actually close to one another, and the limited 3D info made for some guesswork trying to figure out which systems would actually get me close enough to progress.

I also generally like the real-time toggling between allocating limited power between various ship systems, but not how you have to stop and manually allocate power to the gravity drive every time you want to jump if you don't just leave some power sitting there all the time. Seems like that would be smoother to just automate it and say you toggled it offscreen. Maybe it becomes more important tactically later on, I dunno.

The Lone Badger
Sep 24, 2007

The only purpose I know is if you're space-losing a space-fight you need to frantically shift power ftom your lasers to your grav drive so you can space-run-away.

RareAcumen
Dec 28, 2012




Primetime posted:

This never really happens in any of the games, and even the graveyard in 1 is only annoying until you realize there are enemies you can permanently kill to stop the respawns.

Certainly, different enemies have different strengths and weaknesses, but never to a degree that a weapon is rendered useless. They also learned their lesson after ds2, and most upgrade materials are buy able or incredibly common, so if you feel compelled to swap it's not that big of a deal. Last time I played ds3, I had 99 of the first two upgrade materials without intending to

Owl Inspector posted:

There's enough upgrade materials to keep more than one weapon upgraded to a usable level and for the most part each game only has one area where a particular damage type is off limits. it's not that bad. (One exception being dark souls 2's DLCs where being a spellcaster focused character is massively less efficient than in the rest of the game)

The DS1 graveyard is compounded by the game's weird nonlinear damage formula which makes damage type differences seem like they matter more than they actually do if you go in there at the appropriate level.

John Murdoch posted:

The skeletons are really more of a basic stat/upgrade check than a hard "bring strike damage or else" roadblock. You can find a Morningstar five feet away if you explore thoroughly that will do a bit better against them, but ultimately there isn't a very compelling reason to do more than run through, grab the loot, and then forget about that entire route until many, many hours later at which point their resistances are meaningless. By comparison the basic Hollows in the Undead Burg will get chunked by just about anything a starting character can swing around.

Realistically, physical resistances barely ever matter. They might be noticeable sometimes, but elemental resistances/immunities and to a lesser extent status effect resistances/immunities cause way more strife. Mainly magic resistance because mages don't really get a lot of alternatives to blasting laser beams.

So they're just strong because they're higher level enemies? Huh, I had no idea. I remember there being a few things that're annoying. Vaguely. Something like Blood Chunks being really rare and magic resistance being insane on bosses and some enemies as the series went onward. Or it might've just been an issue in Bloodborne and I extrapolated it to the entire franchise because I'm not paying attention.

Oxxidation
Jul 22, 2007
blood chunk farming was a problem in bloodborne because every weapon was highly unique and ran the gamut from "pretty cool" to "the sickest poo poo i've ever seen" so you needed way more upgrade mats than the game doled out to properly enjoy them all

Rockman Reserve
Oct 2, 2007

"Carbons? Purge? What are you talking about?!"

even in bloodborne the mats are super plentiful up until the last or second to last tier, *especially* if you don't totally ignore arcane. i don't see it talked about much but the item discovery% boost on arcane makes a huge difference in a game where you kill as much poo poo as bloodborne. i have an arcane focused build i'm doing to go all tentacle-y with later but even just as far as hemwick charnel lane i have enough upgrade mats to get like three or four weapons up to current par just from random enemy drops. even just dumping a point or five in it early on really helps you get ahead of the blood vial/bullet curve a lot faster

John Murdoch
May 19, 2009

I can tune a fish.

RareAcumen posted:

So they're just strong because they're higher level enemies? Huh, I had no idea.

Pretty much.

The other thing is that a lot of people think of skeletons as basic fodder enemies, so what better starting place? And then add on top that some significant changes mid-development altered the flow of the early game, leaving a less clear route to the intended path and welp.

Nuebot
Feb 18, 2013

The developer of Brigador is a secret chud, don't give him money
So here's a kind of frustrating thing about baldur's gate 3:

The game throws stat bonuses at you for Strength - half the feats give you options to put your points into strength, half the classes want strength. But it's the absolute dumbest idea to make use of any of them. The game feeds you a constant near infinite supply of potions that raise your strength to 21 for the early game and 27 in the late game - there are multiple items that set your strength to fixed variables of like 19 or 23, and even if you take every single permanent strength bonus you can and start with the highest strength you can the maximum you can get is 25. So no matter what, your build is going to be inferior to just drinking the strong juice, and that's doubly frustrating because most of those permanent stat boosts are one time only things you could have put into another stat instead since there's no way to respec those, unlike your main stat array because no other stat has a consumable item in the game that just makes any and all investment in it redundant.

Lobok
Jul 13, 2006

Say Watt?

Nuebot posted:

So here's a kind of frustrating thing about baldur's gate 3:

The game throws stat bonuses at you for Strength - half the feats give you options to put your points into strength, half the classes want strength. But it's the absolute dumbest idea to make use of any of them. The game feeds you a constant near infinite supply of potions that raise your strength to 21 for the early game and 27 in the late game - there are multiple items that set your strength to fixed variables of like 19 or 23, and even if you take every single permanent strength bonus you can and start with the highest strength you can the maximum you can get is 25. So no matter what, your build is going to be inferior to just drinking the strong juice, and that's doubly frustrating because most of those permanent stat boosts are one time only things you could have put into another stat instead since there's no way to respec those, unlike your main stat array because no other stat has a consumable item in the game that just makes any and all investment in it redundant.

Something to add to the "what should I know before playing" thread/wiki?

Nuebot
Feb 18, 2013

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

Lobok posted:

Something to add to the "what should I know before playing" thread/wiki?

Yeah, it'd probably be good to note because boy howdy do I feel like I wasted these one time use things that could have been used on other stats or characters since my key stat can just be juiced with an elixir that lasts until you long rest.

Snake Maze
Jul 13, 2016

3.85 Billion years ago
  • Having seen the explosion on the moon, the Devil comes to Venus

Lobok posted:

Something to add to the "what should I know before playing" thread/wiki?

Eh, dumping strength on a strength character and developing a crippling addiction to elixirs of hill giant's strength is a pretty minmax-y strat that doesn't really make sense from a roleplaying perspective, and playing like that on a blind run makes it easy to screw yourself by running dry at a point in the plot where you can't buy more.

Having good natural strength means you can use other powerful stuff like an elixir of bloodlust, or elixir of the colossus, instead of needing the strength boost just to function (You can only have one elixir active at a time, so relying on strength boosts locks you out of using anything else). I don't think new players need to be pushed into it or warned away from playing normally.

Nuebot
Feb 18, 2013

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

Snake Maze posted:

Eh, dumping strength on a strength character and developing a crippling addiction to elixirs of hill giant's strength is a pretty minmax-y strat that doesn't really make sense from a roleplaying perspective, and playing like that on a blind run makes it easy to screw yourself by running dry at a point in the plot where you can't buy more.

Having good natural strength means you can use other powerful stuff like an elixir of bloodlust, or elixir of the colossus, instead of needing the strength boost just to function (You can only have one elixir active at a time, so relying on strength boosts locks you out of using anything else). I don't think new players need to be pushed into it or warned away from playing normally.

With how freely the game lets you respec, being able to swap in and out your feat points is fine enough; but you can't respec the one time use stat improvements from various events in the game so the fact that you can't out-strength the strength juice kind of burns and makes me feel like I wasted every single one.

Splicer
Oct 16, 2006

from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸
I'm loving reading about all the non-ttRPG folks used to playing (reasonably) well designed cRPGs all slamming face first into everything wrong with the base systems of D&D :allears:

Zero_Grade
Mar 18, 2004

Darktider 🖤🌊

~Neck Angels~

It was both amusing and frustrating in the earlier Baldur's Gate games piloting a party based around a minmax stat dump PC. You had to rely on companions to carry the party until you either got the gear you needed (Gauntlets of Dexterity, the Girdles of ___ Giant Strength, etc) or got enough XP to make your dual/multiclass useful.

bawk
Mar 31, 2013

I kept thinking that it would be a situational tradeoff for those Strength potions, where having one would prevent you from doing other utility potions like Detect Thoughts or Speak with Animals, something like that. Nope. You can pop multiple potions like that, actually. So then you'd think that would preclude stuff Haste potions, or Invisibility, etc. and also nope! Giant's Strength only gets replaced by elixirs of resistance. You could solely rely on these elixirs for STR, but they're especially useful early on for spellcasters with Strength weapons, like Paladins and Clerics. You can pump your spellcasting and DEX for AC up pretty high and then just drink the giant potion to immediately boost yourself to God-tier stats. You can usually buy a new one every time the shops reroll after a long rest, which is coincidentally how long they last. Not counting any you happen to find out and about, of course.

E: but while you can use a Detect Thoughts potion mid conversation, you can't use a Speak with Animals potion when trying to interact with a neutral animal. Explain that one, Larian! :argh:

Snake Maze
Jul 13, 2016

3.85 Billion years ago
  • Having seen the explosion on the moon, the Devil comes to Venus

bawk posted:

I kept thinking that it would be a situational tradeoff for those Strength potions, where having one would prevent you from doing other utility potions like Detect Thoughts or Speak with Animals, something like that. Nope. You can pop multiple potions like that, actually. So then you'd think that would preclude stuff Haste potions, or Invisibility, etc. and also nope! Giant's Strength only gets replaced by elixirs of resistance.

It competes with other elixirs, so it gets replaced by stuff like elixir of bloodlust (get an extra action and temporary hit points on kill), elixir of the colossus (extra 1d4 damage on weapon attacks and advantage on strength checks), and elixir of viciousness (threshold to roll a crit is reduced by 1). So there's other very strong buffs for melee fighters the strength elixir is trading off against.

bawk
Mar 31, 2013

In Phoenotopia, there's a boss fight after a long climb up a tower where it helpfully gives you a campfire to cook up some food (for healing) beforehand, and they gave the boss fight a steal attack which knocks you over, takes some of your healing food, and brings the fight to a complete standstill while he heals.

It's not a "oh no, the boss has stolen your food, he's getting the upper hand, you gotta do some sick poo poo to try and stop him from eating it" type move. He just teleports behind you, slashes horizontally across a quarter of the stage three times, paralyzes you for fifteen infuriatingly slow seconds (in an otherwise fast and good boss fight), then eats your poo poo without any way to try and stop it. If you get lucky like me, he can sometimes immediately finish eating your food, then teleport behind you again before you have a chance to jump and dodge out of the way.

If you get hit by any of the explosion attacks, you will get pinballed around the room (no joke, three or four bounces on the ground) which is plenty of time for him to teleport and hit you. You can tech this by hitting the dodge button right as you hit the ground, but if you don't tech the very first bounce, you're liable to "recover" just in time to get hit by the teleport slash. Movement in this game feels absolutely loving terrible already, but most bosses have been generally easy so far. This is a huge difficulty spike compared to the rest.

You get four berries in the room immediately before this fight which can help pad out your inventory, but the RNG will end up giving him your good poo poo anyway. I lost my only good healing item 8 attempts in a row on the very first time I hosed up/got hit by this attack (not a 100% success rate overall, but suspiciously good success rate). My "solution" to the fight was to eat (and waste) my entire inventory and then fight aggressive with moves that can stun him at the risk of stunning me long enough to get nicked by the (again, paralyzes you for fifteen seconds) steal attack.

I'd rather teleport back to where I could buy some healing items/ingredients and stock up, but there is no teleport out and there is no teleport back, and all the puzzles between A and B are going to have to be solved again to get back here. AFAIK this is the only place I've been in so far where just going to restock up on healing items would take so much time/effort, and no warning ahead of time that this mechanic even exists.

Captain Hygiene
Sep 17, 2007

You mess with the crabbo...



I've been playing Gunbarich, a little Arkanoid-like from the arcades twenty years ago, and it's mostly a fun time. But the one thing that's bugging me about it is a gimmick where enemies can shoot orbs that eventually explode, with the explosions creating areas for a second or two that will freeze your paddle in place if you touch them. Fine early on, it's a fun little danger that has some tactical use as the orbs will destroy a block if you deflect them before they explode. But it really starts to drag in the late levels, where they become the main gimmick and the game starts rapid-firing 10 or 20 of them at a time, and half the screen fills up with disabling explosions. It just turns into a slog by the end, I have no idea how you're supposed to get through it without abusing continues.

bawk
Mar 31, 2013

Phoenotopia has racing challenges, one of them is to touch 10 flags in 21 seconds along a barnyard themed course. There's no margin for error, if you gently caress up your inputs on flag 9 of 10 you're going to miss the last flag by a wide margin.

In order to retry the race, you have to
  • Press X to advance dialogue that plays for when you lose the race
  • Press X to end the dialogue that plays for when you lose the race
  • Press X to initiate dialogue with the racing minigame NPC
  • Press X to advance dialogue
  • Dialogue Prompt: "Would you like me to set up the race?"
  • Default choice is "No".
  • Press down arrow once to highlight "Yes"
  • Press X to advance dialogue
  • (fade to black cutscene for a few seconds as he prepares the racing flags)
  • Press X to advance dialogue
  • Dialogue Prompt: "Before we start... Any questions?"
  • Default choice is "Explain the Rules of this minigame"
  • Second choice is "Let me see a quick fly-by of the course"
  • Press down arrow twice to select third option, "Let's Start!"
  • Press X to advance dialogue
  • Press X to advance dialogue
and then the race begins.

If you gently caress up a jump, you have to wait the whole 21 seconds for the race to end. Then start back at the top of the above steps in order to attempt the race again.

The first four flags require you to jump, graze the flag with your head, and do a cancel tech as you land so you can maintain your momentum. There are sheep (Called "Pooki" in the game) who wander around the course. If you land on one, you lose all momentum and do a short bounce straight up in the air. If you can manage to immediately sprint and continue afterward, your half-second window you have to touch all 10 flags in 21 seconds just became either a tenth of a second fast enough to finish, or a tenth of a second too late. You cannot tell until you're about to touch the last flag.

E: when you land after a sprint-jump, if you don't cancel-tech the landing, then you crouch for a half-second. The game interprets this "crouching" as pressing the down arrow on your keyboard. If you jump while in this half-second of "holding down" after a failed cancel-tech, you will jump down from the platform.

E2: thank god, complain on the internet about some hot bullshit and you'll clear it on one of the next 10 attempts

bawk has a new favorite as of 01:21 on Sep 14, 2023

Doctor Bishop
Oct 22, 2013

To understand what happened at the diner, we use Mr. Papaya. This is upsetting because he is the friendliest of fruits.
So in short, whenever a game has a task that's easy to gently caress up and makes starting over a chore in and of itself.

Which reminds me: in the Wii version of Okami, there's a very similar irritation towards the beginning of the game where you have to do what's basically a quasi-QTE sequence with the wiimote-controlled brush and if you gently caress it up, you have to sit thru a bunch of unskippable dialog, with the game adding even more dialog griping at you if you mess it up more than once, which is easy to do when you don't know exactly what shape the game wants you to draw, especially with that oh so reliable of inputs, the wiimote.

credburn
Jun 22, 2016
A tangled skein of bad opinions, the hottest takes, and the the world's most misinformed nonsense. Do not engage with me, it's useless, and better yet, put me on ignore.

Doctor Bishop posted:

So in short, whenever a game has a task that's easy to gently caress up and makes starting over a chore in and of itself.

Which reminds me: in the Wii version of Okami, there's a very similar irritation towards the beginning of the game where you have to do what's basically a quasi-QTE sequence with the wiimote-controlled brush and if you gently caress it up, you have to sit thru a bunch of unskippable dialog, with the game adding even more dialog griping at you if you mess it up more than once, which is easy to do when you don't know exactly what shape the game wants you to draw, especially with that oh so reliable of inputs, the wiimote.

90% of the difficulty in Wii Okami is just making a straight fuckin line istg

Owl Inspector
Sep 14, 2011

if you hold Z or whichever button it is, the game will make you draw in a straight line.

I literally could not get a single line to register without doing this.

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...
I was just about to post in the other thread that GTA4 on PC has amazing traffic if you have the hardware to bring the slider all the way to the max, like you get actual gridlock and jams and it's the closest a videogame has ever felt to actual city driving, but apparently this breaks every tailing mission in the game. I'm guessing here but I think it loads cars further than the traffic lights work so inevitably someone will get stuck at an eternal red light and everything will stop and the car you're supposed to tail can never move again.

That might explain why even GTA5 doesn't have traffic that dense.

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CzarChasm
Mar 14, 2009

I don't like it when you're watching me eat.
I'm sure this is a classic complaint at this point, but the cars in CP2077 are just anti-fun to do anything with. They look cool; Even the beaters have a 1980s retro futurism that I like. But it's like driving a brick on icy road. As far as I can tell there's only like 4-5 racing missions, and they're easy as hell, so it's not too bad, but drat, do I dread any occasion where I have to drive a car. Motorcycles are a bit better, but I am really used to the GTA/Saint's Row school of if you run into anything solid at more than 20 MPH, you're going over the handlebars. Here, you have to hit something bigger and heavier than an SUV at over 100 in order to dismount or take any damage. It's nice for crossing the big empty desert ASAP.

Related to the above, I don't like that buying cars is a "job" for the local fixers. If it was ever a thing like "I need you to disappear this hot car before the cops come looking for it", that would be something. But all of those missions are just "Hey, heard you were looking for a new set of wheels". No thanks.

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