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mmkay posted:I played it because numbers go up. Yeah but for the first 10 hours number go up bigly. Then number go up slow.
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Oct 5, 2023 12:21
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Someone make a game where number go down. You have absorbed the Demon King's power and need to erode it away to prevent his resurrection. Your goal is to reduce your 'power' rating from 1000 down to 0. Various arbitrary objectives and quests will reduce it by a chunk, but that will leave you unable to handle the areas you have been adventuring in and need to explore and find new lower-level areas. Plus you can't lift your Grand Sword of Slaying +15 any more and need to find something lighter and shittier.
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Oct 5, 2023 12:49
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The Lone Badger posted:Someone make a game where number go down. Wasnt this the warcraft 3 campaign?
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Oct 5, 2023 13:14
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The Lone Badger posted:Someone make a game where number go down. golf
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Oct 5, 2023 13:15
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A special request: I'm working with a group of people that is trying to restore Steam to how it worked in the past at various points in time. Do any of you have anything (old installs, downloads) maybe in old backups etc related to Steam prior to the HL2 release?
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Oct 5, 2023 13:24
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Jack Trades posted:I liked Diablo 3 because it's the one of the few games in the genre that actually has your abilities interact with each other, instead of having you just stack numbers for ever like every other Diablo game.
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Oct 5, 2023 13:41
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Volte posted:Did they add that recently or something because Diablo 3's biggest failing on launch and for years after was that there were no synergies and everything was just a straight amount of damage based on your weapon DPS. For all the praise its combat feel gets, the thing that really made me quit playing was the fact that there's no natural power progression. You're at your most powerful around level 10 (in terms of enemies crumbling beneath your might) and you just get less and less powerful from there, trying to keep up with the power treadmill, until finally you hit max level and can slowly start to creep forward in power again so you can kill as effortlessly as you could at level 10. I don't have a clue about how Diablo 3 used to play on launch. I first played it after the expansion came out, but it's one of the few diablo-likes that actually has interactions between abilities. My favorite is that one item that makes your turrets copy your active ability when you use it. Then I spec into being able to use Multishot with as high fire rate as possible for maximum projectile saturation. You end up having more projectiles on the screen than air at any given time.
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Oct 5, 2023 13:46
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ARPGs are a strange genre for me. I loved Diablo 2 with an unholy passion and it is probably one of my most played games ever (right there with UT99 and Total Annihilation), but I bounced off hard from D3, Torchlights and Titan Quest. The last one I enjoyed enough to complete the story and remember fondly was, strangely enough, Van Helsing 2. I guess my inner mall goth wanted to see the pretty spookies or something. Didn't play the rest of the trilogy and when this conversation comes up I wonder to myself if I should. Also the D2 cinematics still own, own own, some of the best in all videogames. I wonder where the people who made them are now.
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Oct 5, 2023 13:49
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ZearothK posted:Also the D2 cinematics still own, own own, some of the best in all videogames. I wonder where the people who made them are now.
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Oct 5, 2023 13:51
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Yea, I have a huge fondness for the genre in my heart but I can't play them like I did D2 as a kid. I'm too aware of the loot treadmill, time is too precious, and around endgame the "rewards" slow to an absolute crawl and my brain just immediately shuts off. I like leveling and getting new skills and finding big upgrades and all that poo poo, but then it's like hours of gameplay to get 1 low value skill point and maybe you'll have found a marginally better item in that span of time and I just can't do it anymore.
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Oct 5, 2023 14:00
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The Lone Badger posted:Someone make a game where number go down. That’s basically Hero Must Die. Designed by the Oreshika guy, he’s got a thing for death I guess.
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Oct 5, 2023 14:01
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Any game that showers you in trash loot to the point where actually good items are a needle in a haystack is automatically a bad game. Any game that tries to solve this problem by simply letting you filter out the useless loot, auto-sell it in some way, or find other awkward design shortcuts around it rather than asking why you need to have so much goddamn useless poo poo dropping in huge piles in the first place is an especially bad game. Diablo 3 made the revolutionary choice to make drops more likely to be for the class you were currently playing, and you better believe it was controversial for some.
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Oct 5, 2023 14:31
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Lemme use trash gear as ammo, bg3 lets me toss the vanilla knifes if find like a mlb pitcher
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Oct 5, 2023 14:35
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John Murdoch posted:Any game that showers you in trash loot to the point where actually good items are a needle in a haystack is automatically a bad game. Any game that tries to solve this problem by simply letting you filter out the useless loot, auto-sell it in some way, or find other awkward design shortcuts around it rather than asking why you need to have so much goddamn useless poo poo dropping in huge piles in the first place is an especially bad game. a-loving-men arpgs are a garbage genre for numbers perverts. Grinding for number-go-up sake is terrible and i never want to see leveled randomized loot again i guess it shouldnt be a surprise that Diablo 3 is the only arpg i kinda like and I also enjoyed the campaign more than the endgame which instantly bored me and made me shelve the game
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Oct 5, 2023 14:48
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exquisite tea posted:The main problem with Grim Dawn is that it's butt ugly compared to the beautiful and vivid Titan Quest. Kind of baffling considering how good TQ still looks for a 16 year old game. It's just exhausting for me to look at visually. yep. never got that decision to go down the path of rear end looking env. after TQ. D3 was colorful and nice style but the theme was extremely boring so basically TQ is still the most interesting looking of that bunch.
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Oct 5, 2023 14:51
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John Murdoch posted:Diablo 3 made the revolutionary choice to make drops more likely to be for the class you were currently playing, and you better believe it was controversial for some. edit: I agree more and more about trash loot fountains being a mark of bad game design, but I think it's part and parcel with number inflation. I am much more likely to engage with loot when I do 10 damage and I might find an item that does 14 damage than I am when I have an item that does 975 damage and I might find one that does 1350 damage, even though it's roughly the same relative damage boost. The fact that there's so much meaningless granularity makes it hard to even think about the numbers beyond which one is higher or lower, and then you end up with incremental power creep that never ends up making a noticeable difference since it's in lock step with the enemy's power creep. The biggest criticism I have about the modern Diablos (particularly with the permanently level-matched content) is that your goal is actually to keep your power level the same while increasing the numbers. If you do a GR1 rift in 4:50, then later on you do a GR100 rift in 4:50, you've essentially not done anything differently except changed the multipliers on the spreadsheet. I give credit to D3 for at least making cool set bonuses that change your play style but it's a little bit pre-ordained for my liking. Volte fucked around with this message at 14:58 on Oct 5, 2023 |
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Oct 5, 2023 14:52
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Transmuting gear from another class into gear for your class just seems like extra busywork instead of only having gear drop that your class can use
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Oct 5, 2023 14:59
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showing players damage numbers was a mistake. turns gamers into freaks
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Oct 5, 2023 15:00
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kazil posted:Transmuting gear from another class into gear for your class just seems like extra busywork instead of only having gear drop that your class can use
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Oct 5, 2023 15:02
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I have something like 900 hours in Grim Dawn, and I still don't really know what the 'end game' is. I spent all that time leveling new characters since there are so many build options. Definitely had the experience of making characters that sucked and felt bad to play very quickly, like in 10-20 levels. But something about that game kept me coming back. I don't know what it is. It's the only game I've ever hidden from my library to stop myself from habitually booting up every time my brain got bored for 5 seconds. I don't think even WoW had that kind of addictive pull on me. Now I see it in my library (I unhid it,) and have mostly no desire to play it. Mostly it makes me feel a little shame.
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Oct 5, 2023 15:08
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Volte posted:You can make that argument about every system in any game and eventually it dumbs down into being an idle game, which you can then dumb down into just turning off your computer and going outside. Making decisions and acting on them is what games are all about. "Streamlining" is the death of interesting game design and the word "busywork" has been overloaded to mean "making the player do literally anything". Ok but on the other end of the spectrum is just pointless grinding. Dropping tons and tons of useless gear for the off chance it becomes somewhat usable gear. It's about balance and as someone that played D3 before and after the change, it was a good change.
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Oct 5, 2023 15:08
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Volte posted:You can make that argument about every system in any game and eventually it dumbs down into being an idle game, which you can then dumb down into just turning off your computer and going outside. Making decisions and acting on them is what games are all about. "Streamlining" is the death of interesting game design and the word "busywork" has been overloaded to mean "making the player do literally anything". I mostly agree but there are absolutely games that have actual busywork. If it doesn't require any active thought from me and could theoretically be done by a basic script, then it's "busywork" and not gameplay. An example of that would be something like, dismantling every non-set gear piece in Nioh after every single mission, because they aren't worth a gently caress, and at one point Nioh didn't have the QoL function to do that so you have to go through the list of items manually every time.
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Oct 5, 2023 15:11
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Volte posted:I never liked that system very much. They added it in the "Loot 2.0" update which was the "sorry, sorry, we're trying to delete it" update where they deleted the Auction House and it really just feels like a band-aid solution to a problem that was actually caused by awful balance and a lack of flexibility in the itemization system. I understand the frustration of finding an item you can't use but there are better, more interesting, ways to mitigate that than just putting a thumb on the scale. I always thought just allowing good items of one class type to be transmuted into a good item of another class, preserving the affixes that can be preserved, would be a good way to make finding another class's item still feel good while still allowing you to bank them for another character if you want. I mean I guess it's maybe not literally impossible to design a system where it wouldn't bother me, but I largely suspect it would just turn into another layer of unnecessary cruft and busywork. Even with your proposed version, what actual benefit is there in not just dropping the same exact item with the same exact affixes but attached to an item for my current class? Why make me jump through hoops to generate an item the game was already capable of generating? In fact, it's the exact kind of confoundingly backwards design I'm talking about. Why not have all drops match my class and then if I want to, I can optionally keep the affixes and convert them over to a different class' item later? That makes waaay more sense to me instead of needing to jump through hoops to fix the game's own bad loot while maintaining the flexibility you're talking about.
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Oct 5, 2023 15:20
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kazil posted:Ok but on the other end of the spectrum is just pointless grinding. Dropping tons and tons of useless gear for the off chance it becomes somewhat usable gear. Jack Trades posted:I mostly agree but there are absolutely games that have actual busywork. If it doesn't require any active thought from me and could theoretically be done by a basic script, then it's "busywork" and not gameplay. Generally speaking I think good game design has a rhythm and sometimes that rhythm involves doing preparation, planning, and other things that don't necessarily flood your brain with dopamine. But a good balance is keeping that dynamic range, not just throwing out everything that's not a full-tilt, essentially passive, game experience.
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Oct 5, 2023 15:21
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Volte posted:Yeah it's all about balance, but Diablo 3's solution leans heavily into the role of "glorified idle clicker dopamine game". That's fine, I don't mean that as an insult - I have enjoyed a bit of Diablo 3 since they changed it, like I've enjoyed my share of Cookie Clicker and friends, but Diablo 3 definitely shares more in common with Cookie Clicker than it does with Diablo 2. You don't build your character, you unlock it. You don't have to make meaningful decisions, you just try to make the number go up as quickly as possible and if the number goes up faster then it was the right decision. Every minute that you're not clicking enemies is a wasted minute in terms of the gameplay. It just doesn't scratch the same itch as ARPGs like D2 that still had some tabletop influence in terms of building for survival and optimizing for particular types of challenges, and feeling like the world contributes more than just a fighting-game-style backdrop to do your clicking in. Totally fair. I was never huge into either D2 or D3, but I preferred 3 myself. On an unrelated sidenote, the game Cocoon is fantastic. It's on Gamepass too
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Oct 5, 2023 15:24
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Volte posted:Yeah it's all about balance, but Diablo 3's solution leans heavily into the role of "glorified idle clicker dopamine game". That's fine, I don't mean that as an insult - I have enjoyed a bit of Diablo 3 since they changed it, like I've enjoyed my share of Cookie Clicker and friends, but Diablo 3 definitely shares more in common with Cookie Clicker than it does with Diablo 2. You don't build your character, you unlock it. You don't have to make meaningful decisions, you just try to make the number go up as quickly as possible and if the number goes up faster then it was the right decision. Every minute that you're not clicking enemies is a wasted minute in terms of the gameplay. It just doesn't scratch the same itch as ARPGs like D2 that still had some tabletop influence in terms of building for survival and optimizing for particular types of challenges, and feeling like the world contributes more than just a fighting-game-style backdrop to do your clicking in. If this were true then everybody in D3 could solo clear GR150s effortlessly within a week of a season start. The fact that most people don't and cannot indicates that there's still a lot of optimization and decisionmaking involved, even when following a cookie cutter build. Despite its apparent simplicity, D3 is full of unintuitive mechanics and skill choices that a casual player will completely miss. Just because the power curve is frontloaded doesn't mean that there's no strategy involved.
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Oct 5, 2023 15:42
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Volte posted:You can make that argument about every system in any game and eventually it dumbs down into being an idle game, which you can then dumb down into just turning off your computer and going outside. Making decisions and acting on them is what games are all about. "Streamlining" is the death of interesting game design and the word "busywork" has been overloaded to mean "making the player do literally anything". yeah man that is a totally reasonable slippery slope argument.
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Oct 5, 2023 15:43
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Volte posted:Yeah it's all about balance, but Diablo 3's solution leans heavily into the role of "glorified idle clicker dopamine game". That's fine, I don't mean that as an insult - I have enjoyed a bit of Diablo 3 since they changed it, like I've enjoyed my share of Cookie Clicker and friends, but Diablo 3 definitely shares more in common with Cookie Clicker than it does with Diablo 2. You don't build your character, you unlock it. You don't have to make meaningful decisions, you just try to make the number go up as quickly as possible and if the number goes up faster then it was the right decision. Every minute that you're not clicking enemies is a wasted minute in terms of the gameplay. It just doesn't scratch the same itch as ARPGs like D2 that still had some tabletop influence in terms of building for survival and optimizing for particular types of challenges, and feeling like the world contributes more than just a fighting-game-style backdrop to do your clicking in. i cant speak for others, but i played Diablo 3 to have fun smashing monsters and watching my characters learn new abilities at a brisk pace. Loot was the last thing i wanted to worry about and im glad that every character had basically endless free respecs by the way of the talent and skill system so that the moment i came up with an idea for a new "build", i could open a menu and move some skills around and see if it was fun or not pretty much immediately. In that way, Diablo 3 is the least number-go-up Diablo that ive played (no idea about Diablo 4 cause that looked terrible) im glad that they moved away from Diablo 2 cause i found that game to be dreadfully tedious. It was incredibly easy to lock your character into a terrible build if you were new to the game and the only solution would be to roll another one. Its definitely a matter of preference, but id much rather a game respect my time and let me have fun and experiment easily
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Oct 5, 2023 15:43
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It sounds like what some people want is another job Personally at the end of the day I just want to turn my brain off and watch number go up 
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Oct 5, 2023 15:52
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exquisite tea posted:If this were true then everybody in D3 could solo clear GR150s effortlessly within a week of a season start. The fact that most people don't and cannot indicates that there's still a lot of optimization and decisionmaking involved, even when following a cookie cutter build. Despite its apparent simplicity, D3 is full of unintuitive mechanics and skill choices that a casual player will completely miss. Just because the power curve is frontloaded doesn't mean that there's no strategy involved. sirtommygunn posted:yeah man that is a totally reasonable slippery slope argument. Macichne Leainig posted:Personally at the end of the day I just want to turn my brain off and watch number go up
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Oct 5, 2023 15:56
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Dunno, shifting the RNG lever from clicking on monsters for armor to the RNG lever of rerolling stats on unusable armor seems like busywork to me
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Oct 5, 2023 15:59
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kazil posted:Dunno, shifting the RNG lever from clicking on monsters for armor to the RNG lever of rerolling stats on unusable armor seems like busywork to me Yeah if the meaningful choice is what your equipment is and how it contributes to the build, how you got access to that equipment is much less important IMHO. Adding layers to make it more tedious to get the equipment that's even usable (not even good, just usable) is practically a textbook definition of busywork
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Oct 5, 2023 16:00
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kazil posted:Dunno, shifting the RNG lever from clicking on monsters for armor to the RNG lever of rerolling stats on unusable armor seems like busywork to me edit: and I say that as a person who finds Path of Exile extremely daunting and has never engaged with most of the endgame content because I don't have the time to invest to build for it - but at the same time a "streamlined" Path of Exile that let me build an endgame build relatively effortlessly and do all the content unthinkingly would bore me to tears. I appreciate being able to participate in the subset of the complexity that I choose to engage with while still feeling like it's there for me if I want it, as opposed to having that stuff cut out and done for me. Volte fucked around with this message at 16:06 on Oct 5, 2023 |
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Oct 5, 2023 16:03
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Volte posted:It takes time to get to GR150 but once you're there it's the same basic thing. How could it not be, you aren't unlocking anything new (the D3 set bonuses are a good thing, but you will eventually get them automatically by playing long enough), nothing about the enemies is changing, nothing about the world is changing. The numbers are the only things that are different. "If you do this thing then by the same logic that I invented in my head you have to do this extremely stupid thing" is the slippery slope argument. What you put in quotes is not the argument being made, it's what you imagined the argument is so that you could pretend that saying "well by that logic you might as well shut the computer off and go outside" was in any way an intelligent thing to say. Removing or changing an annoying subsystem in a video game does not logically conclude with deleting the entire video game and I am absolutely loving astonished I have to tell you this.
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Oct 5, 2023 16:05
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Speaking of Itemization. Baldur's Gate 3 really impressed me with it's itemization because it was constantly giving me unique gear pieces with interesting effects and it was of of the few RPG's where I was actively stashing gear pieces for later, in case I found something else that synergies with them. Almost every piece of gear you find has unique properties.
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Oct 5, 2023 16:07
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Yeah, of all the leaps Larian made as a studio between DOS2 and BG3, itemization is maybe the largest. Went from a significant downside of DOS2 to a real strength. I’m sure some of it is helped by the rule set putting up some guardrails, but still.
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Oct 5, 2023 16:09
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Volte posted:Yeah it's all about balance, but Diablo 3's solution leans heavily into the role of "glorified idle clicker dopamine game". That cat was already well out of the bag within Diablo 2's lifespan, if not immediately upon the shift from D1 to D2. I have never once heard someone talk about an ARPG's moment to moment tactical merits. It's either mindlessly blowing up skeletons en masse with screen-filling explosions or meticulously granular endgame theorycrafting about how swapping out this ring for that diadem will result in an approximately 0.29% increase in efficiency in mindlessly blowing up skeletons en masse. That's not to say I can't appreciate some of D2's nuances - it obviously has a different pace and scope that you clearly prefer - or that I think every single design decision D3 made was a winner, but I never found any appreciable depth in 2 that was critically missing in 3. I don't even strictly disagree that friction in a game can be a good thing! But frankly there's a lot of games in a lot genres out there that act like overly complicated systems are innately superior to the alternative. And a lot of players that also treat completely arbitrary inconveniences as some critical aspect of system mastery... The comparison to Cookie Clicker is a bit of an interesting one because I think there are much more obvious casual games that have captured what most people actually want from ARGPs. That being the entire Survivor genre where you can assemble a build from randomness and see it play out against endless hordes of squishy enemies over the course of about 30 minutes.
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Oct 5, 2023 16:10
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sirtommygunn posted:"If you do this thing then by the same logic that I invented in my head you have to do this extremely stupid thing" is the slippery slope argument. What you put in quotes is not the argument being made, it's what you imagined the argument is so that you could pretend that saying "well by that logic you might as well shut the computer off and go outside" was in any way an intelligent thing to say. Removing or changing an annoying subsystem in a video game does not logically conclude with deleting the entire video game and I am absolutely loving astonished I have to tell you this. John Murdoch posted:The comparison to Cookie Clicker is a bit of an interesting one because I think there are much more obvious casual games that have captured what most people actually want from ARGPs. That being the entire Survivor genre where you can assemble a build from randomness and see it play out against endless hordes of squishy enemies over the course of about 30 minutes. Volte fucked around with this message at 16:17 on Oct 5, 2023 |
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Oct 5, 2023 16:12
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Not all decision making is compelling gameplay. Having a skill tree where all the skills are "Take 1% less fire damage from goblin type enemies" gives the player decisions, but not meaningful ones
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Oct 5, 2023 16:17
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The hang-up is that nobody here understands where the decision making is in your "manually turn unusable drops into usable ones that could've just been usable ones to begin with" idea.Volte posted:Yeah honestly that's probably a better comparison than Cookie Clicker, although I actually think Vampire Survivors and its ilk captures a more classic ARPG-like experience (albeit in tiny bite-size chunks) in that you actually have to live with your choices and adapt to what you get. I don't think Diablo 3 would automatically be a good classic ARPG if it was the same but you were locked into your choices, but I think living with your choices is a big part of what makes not just ARPGs but RPGs in general fun to me. Wait, now I think I'm remembering, have we had this argument before and you're one of those people that vehemently hates respecs?
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Oct 5, 2023 16:20
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