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I enjoyed the mocking difficulty modes of FPSes past. They were funny.
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Oct 9, 2023 16:17
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CJacobs posted:Max Payne 1 and 2 are buck wild about this. You start off with only Fugitive (Normal, according to the game files) and then after beating it unlock Hard-Boiled (Nightmare) and Dead On Arrival (Hell). There is no hard mode. It just jumps right from you and enemies both having 1.0x health, to enemies having 1.5x and you having 0.4x, meaning you die in one deagle shot. They were also dynamic and if you quick saved/quick loaded, the game would get progressively more difficult.
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Oct 9, 2023 16:35
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Cleretic posted:Okay, but what if we flip the convention and name the harder difficulty modes in ways that make fun of people for it? *i run into the room so fast that my heel skids on the floor and i topple over into some chairs and yell from beneath the pile of them* skill issue
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Oct 9, 2023 16:53
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Philippe posted:The chickenhat in MGSV is really bad, though, still. Yeah, it sucked, especially from a series that was pretty good about different difficulty settings until then, with the span going from Very Easy to European Extreme.
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Oct 9, 2023 17:02
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CJacobs posted:edit: Alan Wake would do the exact same thing years later to a slightly more frustrating effect because it also gave enemies more shielding! And locked manuscript pages behind the highest difficulty.  And renamed the difficulties in the (original) PC port, tricking me into playing through on Hard.
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Oct 9, 2023 17:10
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Oct 9, 2023 17:16
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That was the poo poo that sucked the worst. I remember being 8 or so and renting the Batman Returns game from Blockbuster. I wasn't great at games so I put the difficulty to Easy. Get past the second level and then get the "Good job. Too bad you're too much of a wuss to see the rest of the game. Try again on a higher difficulty." message. gently caress that. That's a lovely way to build your game. If you're going to do that, then don't have an easy mode.
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Oct 9, 2023 18:13
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CzarChasm posted:That was the poo poo that sucked the worst. I remember being 8 or so and renting the Batman Returns game from Blockbuster. I wasn't great at games so I put the difficulty to Easy. Get past the second level and then get the "Good job. Too bad you're too much of a wuss to see the rest of the game. Try again on a higher difficulty." message. I was thinking back and trying to remember what games did that back in that era, I remember getting annoyed by it a few times. Tetris Attack was the first one that came to mind, its story mode also just ended sometime before the final boss if you played it on easy.
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Oct 9, 2023 18:18
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I wonder what proportion of games that pull that poo poo either A) end on a dogshit overtuned boss fight that sends the game out on a sour note or B) have an ending that amounts to maybe a still image and the word "Congratulations". Or I guess possibly even C) both, because gently caress you, kid.
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Oct 9, 2023 18:20
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Beating the game on the easiest or hardest difficulty should unlock the same achievement.
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Oct 9, 2023 18:28
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CzarChasm posted:That was the poo poo that sucked the worst. I remember being 8 or so and renting the Batman Returns game from Blockbuster. I wasn't great at games so I put the difficulty to Easy. Get past the second level and then get the "Good job. Too bad you're too much of a wuss to see the rest of the game. Try again on a higher difficulty." message. If I remember right, this was particularly lovely with ported games. You'd have a Japanese game, usually a Brawler/Shooter/Fighting game, that would have something like easy, normal and hard modes, plus an unlockable very hard mode for people who finished the game. And you could finish it in any difficulty. When it got ported, the company doing the porting would remove easy mode, and rename the remaining normal, hard and very hard modes as easy, normal and hard, and then stop you from finishing the game on anything but hard. Working Designs was infamous for this crap.
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Oct 9, 2023 18:28
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i liked the Shadows of the Empire take on it. you can play the whole game on easy but if you do then Dash Rendar dies at the end. higher difficulties mean he lives. so dash exists in a state of death and nondeath simultaneously
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Oct 9, 2023 18:55
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I'm just remembering that Onimusha didn't have any sort of difficulty option... unless you died 5 times. Then the game would quietly unlock easy mode. There was no hard mode.
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Oct 9, 2023 18:58
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RandolphCarter posted:Solasta, a d&d game, has a group that loots for you. Just tell them where you did your murder-hoboing and a few days later they sell everything you left behind, pay you, and take a cut. I think a cleanup game in the vein of houseflipper/viscera clean up/headspace shipbreaker where you play as that loot crew could be neat Like the adventurers have taken all the enchanted swords and whatnot, you're there to pile up all the lovely goblin swords and rip out the adamantine doors. Watch out, some of the traps are still active, (make sure to dismantle those too) or you get requests to collect all the pillows and cheesewheels Mazerunner has a new favorite as of 19:09 on Oct 9, 2023 |
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Oct 9, 2023 18:59
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CzarChasm posted:That's a lovely way to build your game. one might argue that every other element of mortal kombat mythologies: sub-zero is also, in fact, a lovely way to build a game
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Oct 9, 2023 18:59
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Phigs posted:The other experience is you max out the human combat tree and just cast timestop and murder everything before any of them get a turn. This is how I played through Prey. I knew the alien powerups weren't going to give me a "Bad Ending" or anything ahead of time, but not many of them were interesting from what I first looked at. I grabbed Mimic ASAP, used it to get into all the neat little hidey-holes, upgraded the Time Stop ability, put all my upgrade kits into the pistol/shotgun and boosted Strength so I could lift the poo poo that I couldn't sneak around with the mimic power. I also really loved using the Huntress Boltcaster, even though the mimic powerup made some of its use-cases irrelevant. I could just slip into this security room through the little gap in the glass, or... I could spent five minutes trying to nail the computer monitor with a nerf dart. 
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Oct 9, 2023 19:19
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Mazerunner posted:I think a cleanup game in the vein of houseflipper/viscera clean up/headspace shipbreaker where you play as that loot crew could be neat I would play that game
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Oct 9, 2023 19:27
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Sally posted:i liked the Shadows of the Empire take on it. you can play the whole game on easy but if you do then Dash Rendar dies at the end. higher difficulties mean he lives. so dash exists in a state of death and nondeath simultaneously Lol, I thought he canonically died there, but it turns out it was my own weakness all along 
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Oct 9, 2023 19:28
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CzarChasm posted:That was the poo poo that sucked the worst. I remember being 8 or so and renting the Batman Returns game from Blockbuster. I wasn't great at games so I put the difficulty to Easy. Get past the second level and then get the "Good job. Too bad you're too much of a wuss to see the rest of the game. Try again on a higher difficulty." message. The Easy difficulty in The Lion King for Game Boy would have the game end before the levels featuring adult Simba. These days it is known that devs for (other versions of) the game were told by Disney to make the game more difficult, so it couldn't be beat during a rental period. Apparently to increase the chances people would buy a copy.
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Oct 9, 2023 19:29
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A thing I didn't realise until after a couple of Prey playthroughs, is that the typhon power Mindjack works on the typhon as well as on humans. Getting into a huge messy firefight and mindjacking the biggest typhon causes absolute havoc and can be very entertaining.
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Oct 9, 2023 20:05
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Philippe posted:The chickenhat in MGSV is really bad, though, still. I wore the chicken hat for every mission in my second playthrough because it makes the cutscenes funny 
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Oct 9, 2023 20:22
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Nostradingus posted:I wore the chicken hat for every mission in my second playthrough because it makes the cutscenes funny It's true.  Feeling down over a dubious contract involving imprisoned child soldiers? Bring along a chicken hat to cheer em up 
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Oct 9, 2023 20:39
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what's dragging down both viscera cleanup detail and house flipper for me is that they're two different games so I can't flip goofy rear end sci-fi bases to supervillains after painstakingly cleaning and renovating them
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Oct 9, 2023 20:41
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Baldur’s gate 3: Apply a Blinded status to an enemy that says they can’t attack from farther than 3m. enemy immediately does ranged attacks from the other side of the room. Apply a Webbed status effect that says “can’t move.” Enemy moves immediately. Apply a frenzy status effect that says the enemy must attack the nearest creature to it. When that creature is one of us, it moves to us and attacks. When that creature is another enemy, it moves to it and ends its turn without using its action. Hit an enemy with a move that says it disables the enemy’s reactions. Enemy performs a reaction to that move. Hit an enemy directly with a web attack. The entire move is completely ignored, without even a saving throw to resist the web, it’s like it just never happened. Successfully-applied status effects that are supposed to last 2 turns instead wear off as soon as the enemy’s next turn starts, with no saving throw occurring. stuff like this happens every fight. we’ve dug through the enemy resistances and the combat log to find reasons for any of this and come up blank. A shocking amount of status effects in this game seem to be entirely broken or just have tooltips that lie about how they work?
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Oct 9, 2023 21:35
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Max Payne 2 also did the highest difficulty alternate ending, except it's just one panel change implying that Mona Sax survives the events of the story. But Sam Lake declared on Twitter that on Valentine's day only, it's canon.
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Oct 9, 2023 21:38
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Owl Inspector posted:Baldur’s gate 3: Have they fixed the lucky feat yet? I was really bummed because it just didn't work properly in combat, and it didn't change the outcome of things like enemy crits.
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Oct 9, 2023 21:42
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exquisite tea posted:I enjoyed the mocking difficulty modes of FPSes past. They were funny. I disagree,
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Oct 9, 2023 21:43
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Owl Inspector posted:Baldur’s gate 3: Aw man the mission into the underwater base, were you only have like 6 turns to get in and out, and the only enemy there can throw loving nets which make you lose a turn. Just complete bullshit. Also some of those enemies could attack me from under the floor? Maybe they were swimming, maybe it was a bug, I don't know but I couldn't attack them back.
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Oct 9, 2023 21:56
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A difficulty complaint of my own, I just got to Steamworld Dig 2's final boss, and it's the kind of weird difficulty spike that makes me not want to bother pushing through. Pretty much every fight in the game has been a simple enough challenge, with some occasional enemies having small bursts of targeted lasers being the toughest things. Then you're at the final boss, and suddenly you're facing a big flying machine with a (missable) chance to temporarily knock out its shields, which only appears between waves of screen-filling bullet hell that can last over a minute long each. All while it's creating terrain to hamper your movement, and destroying the ground below you keeping you out of an acid pit. It takes so long to get a chance to damage it, and it feels like you're barely chipping away even when you're successful. I dunno, it just seems like an order of magnitude jump in difficulty from anything the game has asked you to do before, and it feels like an absurd amount of stuff to go through even having focused directly on health and damage upgrades through the game. I tried a few times and barely got a quarter of the way through its health bar, I think that's enough for me.
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Oct 9, 2023 22:03
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Lobok posted:It was a very simple sentence that I screwed up somehow but I meant to say "make the hardest-sounding difficulties actually be the easiest ones." As a kid that always confused me. If I am playing as a "veteran" soldier I should have a lot easier time fighting cyborgs and demons than if I'm playing as some "rookie". Alpha protocol is the only game that got that right.
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Oct 9, 2023 23:38
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Requisite mention of Blood, which had a bug that made the difficulties swap around on loading a save game, creating that effect. And the original X-Com where a bug would make all difficulties default back down to the easiest level.
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Oct 10, 2023 01:33
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John Murdoch posted:Requisite mention of Blood, which had a bug that made the difficulties swap around on loading a save game, creating that effect. Which then lead to them over-correcting in Terror from the deep making the game incredibly difficult
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Oct 10, 2023 01:35
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I remember renting a 3D Castlvania game for the N64 that ended after a boss fight a quarter of the way through on easy mode. I'm glad nobody tries to pull that crap anymore
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Oct 10, 2023 01:39
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 What about this bullshit where you get the "bad ending" for not having any loving friends 
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Oct 10, 2023 01:44
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Okay, new plan: on top of naming harder difficulty modes insultingly in the way we used to name easier difficulty modes, let's also make it so that the True Final Boss and ending only appears on the easier ones.
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Oct 10, 2023 02:02
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credburn posted:
The wonderful secret was the friends we made along the way
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Oct 10, 2023 02:03
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credburn posted:
"Well, the good news is, we've found out how to make sure this never happens to anybody else." 
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Oct 10, 2023 02:24
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Tunicate posted:As a kid that always confused me. If I am playing as a "veteran" soldier I should have a lot easier time fighting cyborgs and demons than if I'm playing as some "rookie". Especially when every movie, book, TV show, or play cites amazing people based on their skills and knowledge of a subject. Like, John Wick is a scary dude because he was an amazing assassin with maybe hundreds of kills accrued over his time working, it's not like he was just a random everyman working at a Captain D's before the story started
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Oct 10, 2023 02:45
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Tunicate posted:As a kid that always confused me. If I am playing as a "veteran" soldier I should have a lot easier time fighting cyborgs and demons than if I'm playing as some "rookie". Your character isn't the 'Veteran' or 'Newbie', you, the player, are at playing that genre/type of game. DrBouvenstein has a new favorite as of 19:24 on Oct 10, 2023 |
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Oct 10, 2023 03:10
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Lobok posted:It was a very simple sentence that I screwed up somehow but I meant to say "make the hardest-sounding difficulties actually be the easiest ones." In Deus Ex 2 what was intended to be the hardest difficulty was actually the easiest, because all damage got multiplied and since the player character was primarily an ambush predator this made it easier to take enemies out before they could hurt you, reducing attrition.
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Oct 10, 2023 08:47
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