|
Philippe posted:They simplified the looting in Cyberpunk with the new update, but you still have to go around to the various corpses to find the stuff. The 'various containers get highlighted with an icon indicating what's in them, and the rarity' feels like it should be the standard going forwards. I loving loathe how cluttered Starfield is with irrelevant poo poo everywhere, and it's hard to spot things of note when you need them. They could stand to retire the 'most items are pickuppable' design, honestly. Otherwise you just spend so much time scanning over way too much of yet another base, just in case there's some quest related thing or whatever, somewhere. In skyrim it was less of an issue because there was just less stuff, and more of it was useful. In Starfield nearly everything is just vendor trash, if you can be bothered to haul it around.
|
#
?
Oct 6, 2023 14:23
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 31, 2024 00:59 |
|
|
They just need to reduce loot and loot containers. There's no need to make every barrel lootable. In Baldur's Gate 2 you might enter a warehouse and one crate and/or 1 barrel will be lootable with all the other crates and barrels being graphical only. If they want to make everything lootable for verisimilitude then yeah they should flag a subset of containers as being maybe worth searching when you hold down alt, or yeah actually display the contents of every container when you hold down alt (or whatever modifier/toggle). I don't like the solution of everyone just loots all the trash lying around (unless it's a lot system like fallout 4 where trash is central to the crafting system) because there is something to the act of looting a place yourself. It's just not something that scales to every goddamn container being lootable.
|
|
#
?
Oct 6, 2023 15:03
|
|
|
SubNat posted:They could stand to retire the 'most items are pickuppable' design, honestly. This, forever. It was impressive in Morrowind and maybe Oblivion that all the spoons had physics, but that was a long time ago. You can decorate your own space, but every time you come back the whole thing might explode in physics.
|
|
#
?
Oct 6, 2023 15:47
|
|
|
I have to say I disagree, it is a good idea to have lots of junk in all of the various barrels boxes and crates laying around in an immersive RPG. The real trouble is that you have to give something to do with all of that garbage. In fallout 3 the only reason to pick up garbage was to put it in your garbage gun which sucks as a reason In fallout 4 it was a better system, in that you had to pick up specific garbage in order to build the things you were looking for which helps you explore the environment for specific items In baldur's gate 3 it is the best system (of this list) where all of the random garbage could have some theoretical use even if it is just to throw a knife at somebody as an improvised weapon, or to pick up the boxes to stack them so you can climb an obstacle, or pick up the boxes to drop them in camp and lock pick them later It is my sworn and solemn belief that as long as you are not in a time-sensitive situation such as combat then you should get a list of loot in the room's obvious (ie, non-hidden/secret) containers with a highlight on each item/container considered when using 'loot goblin vision', while also highlighting interactables that are not loot containers (or at least are not obviously loot containers, like hollow logs or animal nests) to fend off pixel hunting and is good for accessibility in general. This visual state can be augmented with perception stats or similar skills/attributes. Furthermore, developers should do their best to make sure that there is least some hypothetical use to every item in the game besides being vendor trash. Even if all you can do with, say, a rotten carrot is throw it at somebody for some chip damage or to potentially knock them off a ledge or something.
|
|
#
?
Oct 6, 2023 17:37
|
|
|
Cyberpunk 2.0 fixed this, and made all the items you find usable. You don't find hundreds of healing inhalers in medboxes anymore, but you might find a better one than you're using, and there's gonna be some appropriate junk (forceps, bandages, etc) that you can break down into crafting components you can use to make your equipment better. Similarly, most guns people drop are gonna break into more components in your hands, and the colorcoded looting system (white, green, blue, etc) means you can easily skip looting if you don't care about components.
|
|
#
?
Oct 6, 2023 17:47
|
|
|
Philippe posted:This, forever. It was impressive in Morrowind and maybe Oblivion that all the spoons had physics, but that was a long time ago. You can decorate your own space, but every time you come back the whole thing might explode in physics. Morrowind absolutely had no physics engine of any kind, for the record. At best, it had a gravity engine, and a remarkably rough imitation at that. You could pick up a whole lot of things and, indeed, place them wherever you saw fit. Upon doing so, they would just exist where you placed them and/or fall to a surface. That surface could easily be a handful of pixels on another interactable "physics" object. So you could just stack pillows or limeware platters or whatnot theoretically to the sky and beyond with perfect stability because once they were placed, nothing could otherwise modify or move them except for direct player input. Oblivion, yes, that was a completely different game altogether in so many ways. Player-interactable objects having an approximation of real-world physics is definitely one of the major ones though.
|
|
#
?
Oct 6, 2023 17:48
|
|
|
Evilreaver posted:In baldur's gate 3 it is the best system (of this list) where all of the random garbage could have some theoretical use even if it is just to throw a knife at somebody as an improvised weapon, or to pick up the boxes to stack them so you can climb an obstacle, or pick up the boxes to drop them in camp and lock pick them later Stuff everything into a box and throw the resulting absurdly heavy box as a weapon itself. Or fill it with copious amounts of explosives and use it as a nuclear bomb.
|
|
#
?
Oct 6, 2023 19:10
|
|
|
Philippe posted:Cyberpunk 2.0 fixed this, and made all the items you find usable. I played a little bit of the 2.0 update and it was kind of weird to have enemies with no loot after you killed them.
|
|
#
?
Oct 6, 2023 20:07
|
|
|
Schubalts posted:Stuff everything into a box and throw the resulting absurdly heavy box as a weapon itself. Or fill it with copious amounts of explosives and use it as a nuclear bomb. kill your party member, shove their corpse in a box, set the box on fire, fling the box across the map, win the game (actual speedrun route)
|
|
#
?
Oct 6, 2023 20:38
|
|
|
Red Rox posted:If you clicked on a locked door the marine with the hacking skills would automatically be sent to hack it - no need to select dudes individually. So simple but such a big improvement. Something similar dragged down Star Wars: Republic Commando for me. You have a cool squad of interesting specialists including a hacker, a demo expert and Sev. The problem is, whenever you gave an order to hack a door or blow something up the game would just have the closest clone do the job. It makes sense all members of a commando squad would know how to do someone else’s job, but the experts didn’t even complete the task faster.
|
|
#
?
Oct 6, 2023 22:30
|
|
|
Tunicate posted:kill your party member, shove their corpse in a box, set the box on fire, fling the box across the map, win the game (actual speedrun route) If the NPCs were capable of recognizing you doing this, they'd actually approve if you did this to Astarion. I've been playing BG3: I'm not far in, but so far the worst part of the game is Astarion, the best part is that you can kick him out of the party for attempted assault and nobody else in the party objects to this. I can't think of another game that lets you treat the obvious lovely member of the party like an actual lovely person you're possibly better off without like that. ...well, the other thing dragging BG3 down is the absurd amounts of right-out-the-gate fantasy racism because I decided to play a drow. But apparently that's more a D&D problem, which means no related product will ever fix it.
|
|
#
?
Oct 6, 2023 23:05
|
|
|
Cleretic posted:but so far the worst part of the game is Astarion,  If you give him a chance, he has perhaps the most depth of any character, and you can help him get over it or make him actually so much worse. He also agrees with you on him being an obviously lovely bad person. "You trusted me when that was an objectively stupid thing to do."
|
|
#
?
Oct 6, 2023 23:24
|
|
|
Everyone's racist against Drow, Tieflings, Half-orcs, and sometimes Duergar. When the majority of Drow are horrible murderous spider worshippers, it poisons the well for the rest of them. Sometimes literally, because Lolth Drow society can get genocidal against everyone else.
|
|
#
?
Oct 6, 2023 23:33
|
|
|
why would I not want to pick up whatever the games' equivalent of money is just automatically pick it up god
|
|
#
?
Oct 6, 2023 23:39
|
|
|
marshmallow creep posted:
Ha, I just ran across the bold while doing a...side quest? in Norco. I'm referring to the weird "stage play" bit where you have to choose whether to help a gator kill a hunter, or vice versa. If you help the gator, it basically goes "lol idiot" and tortures you to death.
|
|
#
?
Oct 6, 2023 23:40
|
|
|
marshmallow creep posted:
Sorry, I didn't like this sort of character the last time I was forced to deal with them. I'm going to take the one objective improvement to the formula BG3 added, and punch the 'Eject' button. You can go ahead and have your terrible person and 'I can fix him' fantasy; I'm going to relish in the fact that I don't have to. (Granted, most of the party isn't exactly good; if I could get Gale to take the 'smug git' down about seventeen notches I would, and I'd still find him annoying.) Schubalts posted:Everyone's racist against Drow, Tieflings, Half-orcs, and sometimes Duergar. Yeeeeah, it's not exactly making it better to know that all the absurd racial stereotypes people throw at my character's face are just objectively in-universe true. I'm playing as a Selderine, but now that I think about it, adding a subrace that's literally 'I'm one of the good ones' isn't exactly helping the racism problem. Cleretic has a new favorite as of 00:05 on Oct 7, 2023 |
|
#
?
Oct 6, 2023 23:59
|
|
|
Pathfinder is a DnD-alike that used to be made with the same license so it had a lot of the same races. As part of their new license for the remaster they have opted to jettison the drow and their baggage entirely.
|
|
#
?
Oct 7, 2023 00:28
|
|
|
Complete genocide? That doesn't seem any better!
|
|
#
?
Oct 7, 2023 00:30
|
|
|
Captain Hygiene posted:Complete genocide? That doesn't seem any better! Makes me think about someone quoted in the tvtropes thread being so upset Disney removed the racist slave pony from Fantasia because it would hurt her feelings.
|
|
#
?
Oct 7, 2023 00:39
|
|
|
Oh man, I didn't even know there still was a TV Tropes thread, lol.
|
|
#
?
Oct 7, 2023 07:46
|
|
|
Philippe posted:There's no moment in Valhalla as good as Odyssey's Oedipus Rex quest linked above, and that's a pretty minor side quest without any relevance to the main story. I would argue that the One really, really bad day quest is even better.
|
|
#
?
Oct 7, 2023 08:45
|
|
|
Alhazred posted:I would argue that the One really, really bad day quest is even better. 
|
|
#
?
Oct 7, 2023 10:14
|
|
|
Alhazred posted:I would argue that the One really, really bad day quest is even better. Oh that one's incredible. I did that one after the Daughters of Lalaia (a Magnificent Seven riff), and they worked together really well. For people who don't know, it's a quest chain where you try to help out a town, but it all goes horribly wrong partly because of an imposter Eagle Bearer.
|
|
#
?
Oct 7, 2023 10:35
|
|
|
Cleretic posted:Yeeeeah, it's not exactly making it better to know that all the absurd racial stereotypes people throw at my character's face are just objectively in-universe true. A lot of that goes back to the whole alignment system. If your setting makes to concepts of "good" and "evil" into very literal and actually measurable forces things can get awkward in a hurry. When you then go a step further and declare certain places, types of beings, or even entire species as intrinsically good or evil that's just a clusterfuck waiting to happen.
|
|
#
?
Oct 7, 2023 10:40
|
|
|
moosecow333 posted:Something similar dragged down Star Wars: Republic Commando for me. You have a cool squad of interesting specialists including a hacker, a demo expert and Sev. It's the one bit of contentious streamlining in an otherwise pleasantly streamlined experience, but also realistically I feel like you'd have to redesign and expand on the game a LOT to make "tell the hacker to do the hacking" anything more than a "yeah no duh" empty choice.
|
|
#
?
Oct 7, 2023 13:13
|
|
|
Playing Prey(2017) after deciding years ago that i didn’t really like it. 2023 verdict: it’s a very good game but traversing and reaching different levels is a loving nightmare and traversing the G.U.T.S (a zero gravity gigantic shaft with stopoffs for different levels) brings the entire game to a screeching halt because the objective markers for getting to those places are also terrible. And the monsters suck,their design sucks.
|
|
#
?
Oct 7, 2023 13:20
|
|
|
Agreed on both counts. Prey also feels really jarring after playing Dishonored (a game series with discrete levels and objectives). It's a huge space station with all kinds of areas, but I never really felt as guided as I was in Dishonored, or even Deathloop!.
|
|
#
?
Oct 7, 2023 13:25
|
|
|
I might get laughed at for this but i think if the game left the combat out and focused more on just saving people and exploring the place and escaping it would have been better. Keep the mimic threat but make it a human mimic so you don't know who to trust,big stupid goo aliens and laser guns just ruin it all.
|
|
#
?
Oct 7, 2023 13:49
|
|
|
No, I see your point. An Alien Isolation-type game where you're harried through a place by an unkillable monster might be more suitable.
|
|
#
?
Oct 7, 2023 14:01
|
|
|
Brazilianpeanutwar posted:Playing Prey(2017) after deciding years ago that i didn’t really like it. I thought that traversing was terrible initially, then becomes really fun in the mid to late game once you've been through the key areas, unlocked the central lift and airlocks so you can zip around the outside or know how to quickly get to/from anywhere you want. Being able to just move around the entire exterior seamlessly was cool as hell. But the GUTS never stops sucking, extremely agree on that. It's a cool concept but I hated playing Descent back in the day, and navigating the GUTS now was just interminable, especially when I wanted to find something that I knew was in there but couldn't quite get to it.
|
|
#
?
Oct 7, 2023 14:31
|
|
|
Brazilianpeanutwar posted:I might get laughed at for this but i think if the game left the combat out and focused more on just saving people and exploring the place and escaping it would have been better. I've said Prey minus the combat would be a better game on these forums before so I definitely don't think it's a laughable idea!
|
|
#
?
Oct 7, 2023 14:55
|
|
|
Brazilianpeanutwar posted:I might get laughed at for this but i think if the game left the combat out and focused more on just saving people and exploring the place and escaping it would have been better. Yeah, big same on that. The writing and environment design of Prey is really good (though I never quite warmed up to the ending) but the combat has always been a weak spot for me as well. At it's worst it's annoying and tedious, and even at it's best it's only ever serviceable. At some point I ended up just activating a one-hit-kill cheat and the pace of the game got way better.
|
|
#
?
Oct 7, 2023 15:13
|
|
|
Danger - Octopus! posted:I thought that traversing was terrible initially, then becomes really fun in the mid to late game once you've been through the key areas, unlocked the central lift and airlocks so you can zip around the outside or know how to quickly get to/from anywhere you want. Being able to just move around the entire exterior seamlessly was cool as hell. This is where I landed on it as well. It took a while for it to click but once I figured out how comparatively easy it was to navigate Talos by going outside and using the station map it really opened things up. And then of course the game randomly starts locking down the airlocks to enforce story events. Oops. The worst spot in the GUTS/adjacent areas is that one weird cargo airlock that forces you to go into a vent which then spits you out onto a catwalk. It was subtly infuriating to me in ways I can't entirely articulate and I believe a lot of quest waypoints get tangled up with it. Perestroika posted:Yeah, big same on that. The writing and environment design of Prey is really good (though I never quite warmed up to the ending) but the combat has always been a weak spot for me as well. At it's worst it's annoying and tedious, and even at it's best it's only ever serviceable. At some point I ended up just activating a one-hit-kill cheat and the pace of the game got way better. By the end of the game I was rolling deep in literally every possible resource, including going for the excess of unlocking Every. Single. Neuromod. The game is infamous for having difficulty curve issues but a big disappointment for me was simply that the combat gets to be so dang boring. Playing "find the spider" with mimics is memorable and fun, running up to the fifth Nightmare in a row, using Psychoshock, and then applying Shotgun to the problem a couple of times is not. The only other time I remember the encounters getting interesting is after some plot happens the arboretum gets filled with multiple patrolling elemental phantoms and maybe some corrupted loaders in there too. That was the only time the combat felt like it had something going for it. But on the flipside, I'm torn because to me a lot of the fun of the early game at least was crawling around every last obscure corner of Talos looting useful poo poo. Removing the combat would reduce the satisfaction of, say, beelining to the security office and finding a way in so you can lay your hands on a shotgun. Granted, I know Alien: Isolation isn't exactly lacking in extrinsic rewards for poking about either despite the reduced focus on combat, but I worry it wouldn't land quite the same if you completely excised combat. I even kinda like the enemy designs in the abstract? It's just that they got lazy with what they do. Phantom but on fire this time is not enough of a meaningful shakeup to the combat, particularly when everything in the game dies to bullets no problem. Now, needing to extinguish the superhot plasma flames cloaking a phantom in order to deal damage to it? That sounds like some imsim poo poo. Though I guess this all comes with the usual caveat that I think Arkane's games (the modern ones, anyway) are universally overrated and problems I have with one game tend to exist across most if not all of the rest. John Murdoch has a new favorite as of 16:12 on Oct 7, 2023 |
|
#
?
Oct 7, 2023 16:07
|
|
|
John Murdoch posted:The worst spot in the GUTS/adjacent areas is that one weird cargo airlock that forces you to go into a vent which then spits you out onto a catwalk. It was subtly infuriating to me in ways I can't entirely articulate and I believe a lot of quest waypoints get tangled up with it. It's the classic videogame problem of "is this how people used this space before everything happened, and if so, why is it so complicated".
|
|
#
?
Oct 7, 2023 16:39
|
|
|
Using mimic powers to turn yourself into a cigar or an alien appendage to slip through tight spaces is so cool though. In the same way that i enjoyed Deus ex and Dishonoured,the best parts of those games was finding crawlspaces and hacking computers,breaking into peoples houses and finding keycards and passwords. Give me a Prey/Dishonoured/Deus ex game set on a council estate. Brazilianpeanutwar has a new favorite as of 17:03 on Oct 7, 2023 |
|
#
?
Oct 7, 2023 16:56
|
|
|
I was all nervous so I never got even a single alien power  Fortunately the shotgun was real good.
|
|
#
?
Oct 7, 2023 16:58
|
|
|
They can keep the Mimics in. They weren't awesome combat but they were pretty inoffensive in that regard and really added to the atmosphere. Just you, a wrench, a gloo gun, and a whole lot of mimics.
|
|
#
?
Oct 7, 2023 17:01
|
|
|
Brazilianpeanutwar posted:Using mimic powers to turn yourself into a cigar or an alien appendage to slip through tight spaces is so cool though. This was the best, I feel like letting you turn into/possess small everyday objects and roll around as them is a surprisingly underutilized concept in games.
|
|
#
?
Oct 7, 2023 17:03
|
|
|
It's funny, I found the station layout in Prey extremely memorable (apart from the guts), but Alien Isolation's layout felt absolutely shapeless to me.
|
|
#
?
Oct 7, 2023 17:05
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 31, 2024 00:59 |
|
|
Phigs posted:They can keep the Mimics in. They weren't awesome combat but they were pretty inoffensive in that regard and really added to the atmosphere. Just you, a wrench, a gloo gun, and a whole lot of mimics. Keeping the big ones would be fine if you could clear them out of an area and not have them respawn until you hit story checkpoints. Because as is it was just annoying to constantly have to deal with respawning enemies every time you returned to a place.
|
|
#
?
Oct 7, 2023 17:21
|
|