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souls aesthetics are like a 30/70 mix of "oppressive shithole" and "faded glory" and the lousier imitators tend to forget that second part
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Oct 21, 2023 22:22
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Oxxidation posted:souls aesthetics are like a 30/70 mix of "oppressive shithole" and "faded glory" and the lousier imitators tend to forget that second part Also some level of clownshoes silly nonsense. Anyone that tries to describe Souls games tonally as 'dark and depressing' without anything extra has failed to understand it. If it's all grimdark and depressing, there doesn't feel like a point to the whole venture.
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Oct 21, 2023 22:27
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Hot take: Even From fell into a bit of a rut with BB and DS3. Not that those don't have their highlights, but boy did they really love murky color palettes and greeblies galore in those.
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Oct 21, 2023 22:49
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There's also a bit of selective memory going on with Bloodborne environments. It wasn't spooky baroque churches 100% of the time, sometimes it was a generic forest or some caves.
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Oct 21, 2023 22:55
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generic forest was improved by being mostly snakes
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Oct 21, 2023 23:00
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Bloodborne 2 will be exclusively poison swamps
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Oct 21, 2023 23:01
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Dark Souls 3 only had three levels: Citadel, Swamp, and Citadel with a Swamp. I sure was pissed when the last dlc, the Ringed City, pulled another swamp halfway through the titular city, when the previous level was also a loving swamp. Edit: Sacrilege, but the Surge 2 was better than Sekiro, eurojank be damned. It had nowhere the obnoxious level of recycling. Inspector Gesicht has a new favorite as of 23:11 on Oct 21, 2023 |
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Oct 21, 2023 23:04
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Inspector Gesicht posted:Dark Souls 3 only had three levels: Citadel, Swamp, and Citadel with a Swamp. But how else are they going to poison you if there isn't any swamps?
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Oct 21, 2023 23:11
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I've almost played through the new Spider-Man and jesus gently caress, yes it is an open world action game but it has way too much fighting and minor spoilers being in someone's mind scenes. The beginning is great but it turns into an absolute slog at the third act.
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Oct 21, 2023 23:16
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My Spideymans 2 complaint, you get a bit into the game and they go straight back to an extended sequence where you're moseying around as Peter Parker and doing mild stealth stuff with extremely limited use of your superpowers. At least it's a kinda funny scenario (reliving memories of an after-hours infiltration into your old high school with your best bud Harry), but overall I wish they'd just knock that poo poo off. All I want is to zip zoop around with my full Spidey powers, and every time they take that away from me is wasted gameplay 
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Oct 22, 2023 03:20
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In Lies of P in the Grand Exhibition area there's a part where you're walking around on girders and there's an enemy who's entire thing is that it has two spike shields that it rushes you with. You'd think with it being on a narrow walkway you could bait it to running off but no, apparently they have sticky feet as it can lunge towards you while never leaving the path.
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Oct 22, 2023 04:37
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Captain Hygiene posted:That's how 2D Mario's always been, and that's how it's always gonna be! Gol dern kids these days, always wanting more buttons and whatnot No joke, since posting that I set up my 8-Bitdo bluetooth controller with the Switch so I could change the extra paddle buttons to have Y on the left hand. It is so much better. I don't feel like my hand is going to cramp up during every Special World level now. I cannot imagine anybody playing this on joycons, jesus christ
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Oct 22, 2023 04:49
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I couldn't switch now, my muscle memory requires me to hold Y and jump with my knuckle, that's like 30 years of ingrained stuff
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Oct 22, 2023 05:35
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Enter the gungeon is a real cool level but I wish there was more to it
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Oct 22, 2023 05:49
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credburn posted:Well I beat Assassin's Creed: Origins and here are the things I hated about it: The thing I hate the most about the title Origins is that the very next game is set before this one.
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Oct 22, 2023 23:13
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Every once in a while I go back to Titanfall 2 and try for the Gauntlet achievement, and man gently caress that thing
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Oct 23, 2023 00:02
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Opopanax posted:Every once in a while I go back to Titanfall 2 and try for the Gauntlet achievement, and man gently caress that thing Oh man, that was the last schievement I needed for it. Took me two hours of trying + practicing a route I saw online, and then an hour the next day. Only to find out that I'd succeeded the first time, but the notification didn't pop so I didn't notice. Most of it was just getting good at sliding + walljumps, but there's one part near the end where I had to turn and boost sideways to bounce off a wall that's behind you when you enter the space.
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Oct 23, 2023 03:16
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AC3 would have been "fine" if it didnt have loving "oops you cant kill this person yet your not skilled enough" gated enemies. I hated that poo poo. Rest was eh and fine. Black flag made up for it tho
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Oct 23, 2023 03:39
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The things I'll give AC3 besides naval combat is that if you get good you can become an absolute killing machine in a way you kind of couldn't in the 2 trilogy. You can take out forts of dudes easily with counters and using muskets right. The tomahawk animations are all pretty good and never got reused and the rope dart is sick as hell.
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Oct 23, 2023 04:13
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The fact that there's literally a "2 Trilogy" is pretty lol. You can certainly see why they dropped the numbering
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Oct 23, 2023 04:20
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Opopanax posted:The fact that there's literally a "2 Trilogy" is pretty lol. They also made a game called Origins and then immediately made a prequel to it.
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Oct 23, 2023 04:53
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Doctor Spaceman posted:They also made a game called Origins and then immediately made a prequel to it. Which the prequel doesn't delegitimize, because Origins is the beginning of the Assassins as an organization, and Odyssey is the story of an important ancestor who was a (small-a) assassin.
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Oct 23, 2023 09:05
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I was pretty invested in the big and bananas modern times AC plot, until AC3 hosed up the finale in so many ways. Then I made the mistake of again getting on board with it, only to discover that this time they just didn't bother with any finale. Series spends four games building up to ancient aliens causing the singularity, and then just...drops it in a comic that nobody read. If Ubisoft can't pretend to be invested in their own story, then why bother?
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Oct 23, 2023 12:41
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Railgrade just released on Steam. It's a fun train logistics game, but it does have one very weird decision that keeps annoying me. Basically, to (un)load cargo with your plains, you can build rows of stations on railways adjacent to buildings. Each station can (un)load one train car per interval, so e.g. if you have a train with four cars and four stations you can load it in one go, but if you only got 3 stations it'll first load 3 cars, then wait for the next interval, and then load the remaining one car. So, you're fairly strongly incentivized to either have exactly as many stations on a stop as your trains have cars, or an exact fraction (e.g. 4 stations for trains with 4 or 8 cars). But here's the fucky thing: For whatever reason you can only build a maximum of six stations on one stop. But at the same time, all the buildings you're delivering to and from only ever produce or take resources in multiples of 4. That alone kind of demands that your trains will have either 4 or 8 cars about 90% of the time. There's almost never a reason to build 5 or 6 stations, but it sure would be very handy if you could build 8, which you're not allowed to. I guess it could make sense specifically for trains with 12 cars, but at least so far those are plain too drat long and not worth it. 
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Oct 24, 2023 16:24
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i bought a copy of immortals fenyx rising essentially for a buck bc there was a 2 for 25 bin out the front of an eb games and i saw the surge 2 for 24 bucks, which ive been meaning to play for a while. anyway this game isnt really bad i guess. its just so aggressively uninspired im having trouble giving a poo poo about it. the art style is like a weird mix of pixar ripoff and the console/phone port of civ 5. its essentially a botw rip off but with a honking big ubisoft radar at the top of the screen. the world somehow feels more empty and static than botw (which was my only real issue with it) i regret buying it instead of a copy of titanfall 2
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Oct 24, 2023 23:29
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Whoever designed that Ibuki-Douji fight in the Heian-kyo chapter of Fate Grand Order can go gently caress themselves. I have no idea how they expected you to beat her, but I assume "slowly chip away with Extra attacks (the only thing she wasn't giving herself invincibility to every turn) was not it. It took me at least an hour to finally win 
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Oct 25, 2023 00:27
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U.T. Raptor posted:Whoever designed that Ibuki-Douji fight in the Heian-kyo chapter of Fate Grand Order can go gently caress themselves. I have no idea how they expected you to beat her, but I assume "slowly chip away with Extra attacks (the only thing she wasn't giving herself invincibility to every turn) was not it. Your other option would be to blast her down with a Servant that has invincibility pierce... except, by doing so, you could trigger the harder version of the fight where she gets even stronger buffs and debilitates your party even more. The Ibuki fight is a prime example of how the FGO devs don't really design puzzles to be solved, they design brick walls that you have to bash your face against over and over.
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Oct 25, 2023 01:49
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So I finally bit the bullet and am completing my journey through the Elder Scrolls games with Morrowind. So expect a lot of on-brand pontificating and  . Most of my observations are pretty easily categorized so I'm going to try to be a bit more tidy about it, but well, hopefully by now y'all know how I do.  Biggest complaint by far has been the quest design. I can deal with things being more simplistic or otherwise more archaic, but my number one irritation is how often it feels like I have to decode what the quest designer was going for. You can tell that the designers hadn't really settled on a shared language for how to direct or guide the player and the result is some infuriating stuck spots that necessitate a wiki dive. It makes later games' use of the omniscient radar/arrow/whatever and more overt guidance make a lot more sense. To be clear, I don't think that solution is the objectively correct one, but of the two extremes of being completely lost in a boring, unfun way or knowing exactly where to go at all times, gently caress it, I'll take the latter. People have retroactively painted it as a charming idiosyncrasy, and the game does have some of those, but I simply can't agree on this one specific point. To be clear, this isn't a complaint about friction. Morrowind is a game with lots of fun friction! In fact, a lot of other aspects of the game have actually landed pretty well for me, which I'll be getting to later. A brief summary of ways I have been hopelessly befuddled by Morrowind quests: - Quest directions were accurate, but the destination was tucked away enough that approaching from the wrong angle obscured it from sight enough for me to miss it. - Quest directions were technically accurate, but bizarrely described and seemed to assume a specific travel route, in a game where you're better off using travel services 99% of the time. - Quest directions were technically accurate, but the (literal) intended path was disconnected from the main road such that it wasn't readily visible, even on the local map. - Quest directions were so vague as to be loving useless; a single compass direction. The destination was also consistently referred to with a single word place name, implying a tangible location rather than a non-descript cave. - Quest directions were actually, factually outright wrong. - I correctly intuited exactly what I needed to do, but the item I needed to retrieve was inexplicably placed on top of a chest in an easily overlooked way instead of, y'know, being inside the chest. Or on a table. Or literally anywhere else. - Multiple quests that require you to find a needle in a haystack. - The game has a surprising amount of variety to what it can and will do for quests, but it tends to reveal this by having quests hinge on one specific new type of solution that you need to puzzle out, rather than being able to rely on logic from other quests. IE, sometimes you can just persuade someone to do what needs to be done, sometimes you need to go gossip with other people to find a way forward, sometimes you need to steal something from a chest, sometimes you need to pickpocket it directly off of them, sometimes you just have to kill them, etc. Some quests DO offer multiple approaches and given how immersive the game can be (almost, dare I say, immersive sim like) it's frustrating to run into instances where I just get stonewalled because the designer didn't feel like including a persuasion option or whatever. The archaic and unhelpful map doesn't help. You get a super zoomed out mode that marks major locations but each raw block of map space is like 10x10 pixels, and you get a super zoomed in mode where fog of war applies and your reveal radius is pretty small but every revealed door is marked. Neither view ever manages to feel right. Also the game likes to snap the local map off and go back to the world map if you cross an invisible grid boundary. At least, I think that's what's happening. There's also a lack of consistency felt where NPCs can actually mark things on your map for you, but map marks only exist on the zoomed out mode, so it only applies to major locations. Smaller locations then inevitably get you the farmer on the side of the road "take a left at the fence, then go about half a mile down that dirt road, then take a right at the cow, don't worry you can't miss 'er" bullshit. It'd be one thing if getting lost led to some grand adventure or a shaggy dog story, because hey, that's exactly the kind of poo poo I love in open world games. But Morrowind's world scale and pacing just don't work that way, so the majority of the time getting lost just means you get hassled by yet more Cliff Racers as you backtrack over the same area a dozen times looking for a tucked away location. Visual navigation also suffers because the game's stock maximum draw distance can be described as "just good enough" and you can also get weather conditions that severely reduce your visibility. Plus Vvardenfell is a volcanic island made of mountains, mountains you probably can't climb, so god forbid you're destination is on one side on you're on the other. One quick bit of praise: Presumably thanks to smaller quests hinging on such basic variables and the game not having the same kind of aggressive scripting/respawning as later games, I've frequently received new quests only to be able to turn them in immediately because I just happened to clear out that bandit hideout of my own volition already.
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Oct 25, 2023 03:41
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Morrowind combat and RPG mechanics stuff dumping ground: I'm using a mod that retains vanilla leveling behavior, but makes it so that inefficient leveling basically earmarks the "missing" attribute gains for later, as you keep leveling your skills up to where they would've needed to be to gain the attribute points in the first place. It's a neat idea. Efficient leveling is still useful in that you can get more stats that you want now, but there's no pressure to meticulously plan everything out. It even redistributes attribute gains if you've hit the cap on something. There is one weird bit of unintended consequence (though actually maybe this is just vanilla behavior) but you can't raise skills past a certain cap determined by the governing attribute. This has created a little bit of a snarl where I need to level Sneak in order to gain more Agility, but I can't actually raise Sneak higher (by paying for training anyway) without more Agility. Because of how leveling works it's not a hard block or anything, but sometimes I have to do some Sneak training, stop to rest and level up to manually bump Agility up, then keep training. Technically I can also just train other Agility skills, but none of those get any use in my build so it's purely paying for the abstract attribute gains, which feels janky. But also hey, to throw in some more praise, unlike in later games where paying for training feels like a crapshoot and feels like a bad value, in Morrowind everything is so stat driven and training anything lower than like, maybe the last bit from 85-100, is fairly priced (with good trainer disposition, natch) that turning money into stats feels like a perfectly cromulent course of action. The economy is also just well paced so often when I'm dumping money into training it's less "I finally managed to cobble together a thousand bucks to nudge Armorer from 73 to 74, oh boy" and more "haha time to go use this windfall to bump Athletics from 45 to 52, Nerevarine go brrrr". I'm also using various Morrowind Code Patch fixes that make large swaths of the non-combat side of the game less garbo. To be honest I don't even fully remember what they all do offhand, but I think one consequence is that leveling Security by lockpicking stuff is actually perfectly doable. Self made Enchanting is supposed to be actually doable. Alchemy is less opaque. That kinda thing. I was worried that the combat would really put me off, because Morrowind's not-actually-action-based stats and dice rolls driven combat is one of its infamous bits of culture shock. But I've actually taken to it really well. Early game I still couldn't hit poo poo reliably, sure, but my damage was high enough that it compensated for that against most basic threats. And once I was over that hump, I've been riding the usual power curve of just getting better and better. I think it also helps that my signature weapon type, warhammers, actually feel really good in Morrowind. Their "best attack" (aka the only thing worth using to the point where they added an option in the menu to ignore the entire variable swing system) is a big overhead smash and while I'm not 100% clear on the exact details I can actually stagger enemies. They can flinch or even keel over entirely as they continue to be pummeled. That let me punch a bit above my weight class in some early game encounters and continues to make the combat feel more responsive and reactive despite all the invisible numbers being crunched behind the scenes. Fatigue is a weird one. My build is apparently such that it's basically not possible for me to ever run out of stamina in combat. Probably because warhammers swing so slow and I'm using single big charged hits. But I also just have an embarrassment of raw fatigue points. So in a combat context it's never been a problem, even in the early game. Everywhere else...oof. So, a big thing to keep in mind is that in Morrowind, FREAM. Fatigue rules everything around me. Almost literally every single action you can take checks against how full your fatigue meter is. Even casting spells. So you're incentivized to keep yourself topped up if you want to get anything done. Sometimes this creates tense situations where you need to quickly quaff a restore fatigue potion in the thick of combat to get off the back foot. Other times you just have to use the Wait/Rest command to tediously refresh your green bar just so that you're not hobbling your ability to pick a lock or whatever. The biggest issue is that even with my boundless stamina, movement still leaves me gasping for breath on a regular basis. It's gotten better with leveling, but it's not solved by any stretch of the imagination. Now, thank christ, running low/out of fatigue doesn't shut off sprinting entirely but well, look, Morrowind can be real fuckin' slow. Default walk speed is a crawl at the best of times, necessitating sprinting everywhere. Your movement speed is further derived from your Speed attribute and Athletics skill. And then add on a penalty for carry weight on top of that. I realize I'm partly choosing my own fate by being a big tanky gal in heavy armor, but still. Where I find it all silly and pointless is thanks to the world design, traveling on foot leads to me bottoming out on fatigue super fast, then I reach my intended destination, take an hour break to instantly regain it, then I can move on with what I'm actually there to do. There is ostensibly a non-zero risk to running around on empty in case combat breaks out, but then, that's what potions, spells, or just being strong enough to not give a poo poo about Cliff Racers is for. It's an interesting point of comparison with later games because I can now see that Oblivion's implementation of fatigue was a direct iteration on how Morrowind did it. And they didn't actually just dumb it down! Oblivion seemed to be moving towards refactoring fatigue into a more modern stamina meter, alongside changing combat to be action-focused, and also stripping away 95% of those fatigue checks. But kind of like what I was saying about the quest design, it's more a problem of good intentions but bad execution. In Oblivion it was too easy to run out of juice both while running around and while in combat, it felt like you were more in control of the combat but well, we all know how hosed combat gets in Oblivion because of bad scaling, and then the one thing they kept fatigue affecting was...weapon damage. Which made the already spongy combat problem even worse. But that doesn't make me turn around and go "well obviously then Morrowind's approach is correct, because game design is binary". This actually hooks in with my feelings on the world design and game pacing, so time to start cooking up that post...
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Oct 25, 2023 05:11
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A much more subjective point of friction with Morrowind that I've been dealing with is its world design and overall pacing. See, my way of enjoying the other games is a bit unorthodox. I would eschew easy fast travel on a first time trip. I loved walking the roads in Oblivion and Skyrim and getting lost in the woods and stumbling upon weird and interesting things. Towns were pitstops to pick up or turn in quests inbetween stretches of just mindless adventuring around in the general direction of some objective, enjoying the scenery and atmosphere. I cherished the freedom to hop and off quest lines as I felt like. Morrowind heavily resists that entire dynamic, at least in its earlier stretches, thanks to things like the slow movement speed and more dangerous combat. And also things like the world scale and how things are spaced out relative to your capabilities. Quests are very focused and town-oriented earlier on. Sure, you might be told to go deal with something just outside of town, but for the most part civilization is where it's at. And it does make sense from a realism perspective - people aren't interested in random shitholes far away from their purview. And even with a decently optimized build a level 1 character is still level 1, there's safety in doing basic bitch work around town when even half-naked bandits can gently caress you up. Quest rewards are also often utilitarian - take this money to buy yourself something nice, here have some potions to keep your dumb rear end alive, that kind of thing. To be clear, none of this is Bad, it's just very different from what I'm used to. Oblivion still had a whiff of this, granted, but there it was more "get your bearings in the Capital, get some basic gear, and then go nuts running around doing whatever". Whereas in Morrowind nobody likes going from town to town on foot if they can help it, and so instead the correct choice is to just take the bus line. So the ironic fate is that in the later games where I could plainly ignore fast travel as I wished and wander around at my own pace, Morrowind is actively hostile in a way where employing fast travel is actually the preferable way to handle things. D'oh. Edit: There's no mounts, which I think is the critical missing component. Imagine Elden Ring, but with no Torrent. You either have to travel everywhere on foot or abuse fast travel for all its worth. Bonus, if Morrowind did have mounts I'd probably get to ride around on a cute guar which I think was literally what I did in ESO. The real long and short of it is that the strict movement speed limits and limited stamina feel perfectly fine and sane in interior spaces and during dungeon crawls, but feel miserable outdoors. The travel lines are also their own topic to discuss. I do like the idea of them. In the past I've scoffed at how much people cling to them as being a core and important part of Morrowind, and my takeaway now is...well, yet again it's a question of intent vs. execution. A lot of the pain points I thought would detract from the idea still exist exactly as expected. Sure, I've internalized and learned the various travel routes, and that's rewarding to me because my brain is wired that way, but I'm still not convinced it's a perfect system. My problems revolve around how opaque everything is. Any given stop connects to a number of other locations and that's all the information you get. There's no way to intuit what connects to what without going there and mapping everything out yourself. For a feature that people insist is important for immersion and realism, I've never found it all that realistic that nobody has ever bothered to map out these transit connections. The best you get is the occasional dialogue option where NPCs will explicitly tell you a given town is accessible by silt strider or w/e. But okay, fine, I'm largely over that hump...only to be feet first in a new annoyance. Each transit node isn't aware of the full network. So for example I'm pretty sure you can daisy chain boat rides around the entire island of Vvardenfell and circumnavigate the whole thing at any time with no restriction. But actually doing so will involve going a quarter~ of the way around the island each time, I can't just charter a complete trip from point A to point Z, I have to make tedious connections inbetween. This isn't like I'm jumping between different modes of travel, or anything like that, I'm just going through a loading screen, turning right back around to talk to the boat captain, and going through yet another loading screen. It's pointless. Even teleporting around via the Mages Guild gets to be slightly maddening, because while it is hands down the most convenient means of getting around the areas they cover and there's a static number of locations to warp between, you end up doing a lot of fussing around popping in and out of the guild halls, none of which are alike and eat up some travel time on their own. The real clusterfuck though is Vivec City. Goddamn what a shitshow it is. In a game world where reasonably large settlements, towns, villages, whatever, will maybe occupy 2 squares on the world map, Vivec takes up like 12. And that space is both horizontal AND vertical. See, the city is split up into different mega structures. And it's the peak of inconvenience for all manner of reasons. First you have the foreign quarter, which has an extra floor none of the others do, so you spend extra time climbing up and down that one. Then you have four all in a row, three of which are for each of the Great Houses, and then the fourth is the arena. Which is almost entirely a waste of space because unlike in Oblivion this arena is only used for the rare public duel to the death and also the HQ of one of the factions is hidden in the basement. Then you have two more that are named after saints; there's no intuitive purpose to each one from the outside. It turns out that they're where all the minor guilds/labor concerns are stationed, but that's barely even a thing you need to concern yourself with so instead stuff is just randomly placed in either of the two when they felt like it. Those two buildings are also the only ones to have extra apartments dotted around the north and south exterior of the lower level. Then there's the hall of wisdom, the hall of justice, and the main temple which have their own style of structure. And then finally you have Vivec palace, but granted you'll never be spending much time worrying about that. It is downright exhausting to have to interact with Vivec City. And you bet your rear end once you get entangled up in quests there, they will have you going back and forth between each of the buildings. The central six have bridges that connect the upper levels which shaves off a tiny bit of hassle. The foreign quarter doesn't get one because gently caress you. There are taxi boats you can take to stop off at exactly the building you need, but what's the point when so much of the distance is vertical? And even beyond the immediately accessible main level and 1-2 upper levels, there are additional lower levels that can only be reached by going through the main one, which itself is entered halfway up the buildings. In some of the buildings, the lower floor is a single uninterrupted level with two entrances. In others, you have to take the correct connecting door from one side of the main level or other to reach two separate lower areas. Whyyyyy??? Vivec also even resists the travel networks. The mages guild, main boat dock, and silt strider stop are all at the north end of the city. It's cute that even the NPCs who live there will outright ask if you need help getting around because even they get lost, but it's also mildly infuriating that the developers were clearly aware of the problem. As an added fun bonus, these buildings have an infamous issue where for some reason they have a funny relationship with the laws of physics, so sometimes while you're trying to find your way around you just up and fall straight through the floor and into the void before being warped back to a safe spot. As someone who finds this jarring and unnerving, it's like a little jump scare that randomly pops up. One last bit of interesting utility are the traversal spells. Morrowind has some powerful and convenient teleport spells you can cast. Mark and Recall let you pick a location and then freely teleport back to it at will. Very, very handy though comes with some obvious limitations - only one mark at a time and obviously due to how it works it can only cut down on a return trip. Then there's the Intervention spells, which either teleport you to the nearest Tribunal temple or Imperial temple. These are great, with one giant gaping issue. What is the nearest temple? Whoooo knoooows. You don't get a heads up, a confirmation box, nothin'. You cast those spells, you get yoinked to wherever the game has decided the nearest one is - and thanks to quirks in the game it isn't absolutely obvious which one that is. They're great if you're about to die and just want any form of safety, terrible if you're trying to efficiently navigate around the game world and don't know where it's going to take you. Something that does soften the blow is an asset the game shares with New Vegas: Quest overlap. Unlike in later Bethesda games, quests frequently overlap with each other such that if you're keeping up with multiple different factions they're likely to send you off the same geographic region at the same time, so you can knock them all out at once. This is, however, something of a double-edged sword. Because if you don't happen to pick up those various quests at the same time, then you're stuck going back and forth multiple times. It's less bad in MW than in NV though - thanks to the town-centric design the overlap is more of a broad strokes thing, you're rarely if ever being sent back to the exact same location over and over. But on the flipside, quest givers in MW are a cantankerous bunch and you can trek all the way back to the head of a guild only to be told to gently caress off because you need to reach a higher rank first, or wait a few days for a new assignment, or maybe they just don't like you today. So now suddenly instead of continuing the quest chain, you need to go bum around a different location to see if they have something for you to do. It does get used in some appreciable ways - the Fighter's Guild has some intrigue going on such that mindlessly trying to complete every task isn't strictly the best move for instance - but also other times quest chains just dry up. Having every quest be predictably doled out to you from a centralized location wouldn't be strictly superior, but I do wish the game had some ways to more easily gauge if it was worth trekking all the way back to goddamn Vivec again or just look elsewhere. I think that's really my overall thesis statement: People are quick to paint things as a hard dichotomy between the Real Thinking Man's Morrowind vs. Dumb Idiot Oblivion For Drooling Babies, but my ideal game would probably be somewhere in the middle between the two or otherwise more carefully improve aspects to take away MW's roughest edges without sanding it totally flat. Part of the reason I'm even playing MW right now is because I randomly got turned on to Outward, which feels like a modern take on this particular flavor of RPG and sure enough incorporates a lot of modern concepts without outright sacrificing friction. Though I'm sure someday I'm gonna be back ITT talking about some of the silly poo poo in that game. Edit: I've often equated Elder Scrolls with D&D in the past, and it really does line up well with the edition warring and general crunch vs. storytelling conflict in tabletop games. I'm not allergic to interesting mechanics, but if you pull out some grognard poo poo about how D&D lives or dies on the back on players needing to keep meticulous track of the weight of their coinage or whatever, that's just bullshit. The game also gives me a real big old school MMO vibe. Which is maybe ironic for how often people describe post-MW RPGs as offline MMOs. John Murdoch has a new favorite as of 09:32 on Oct 25, 2023 |
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Oct 25, 2023 07:34
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I might have more to say on magic down the line, but the short of it is that I'm just not really there yet, so I forgot to bring it up until now. Unsurprisingly, all of my choices have been in service of being an unstoppable warrior first. Aside from making sure my weapon can hit ghosts with a basic damage enchantment, the wizard poo poo can come later. I do think there's an interesting texture to how you get a choice of how to express your magic. You can pop one-use scrolls, which tend to be lightweight and powerful. You can drink potions, which aside from also being one-use tend to be a bit heavier and their effects are basically restricted to self-buffs/heals/etc. and if you want to make your own you need to source the ingredients. You can enchant items in all sorts of incredibly useful ways, beyond just permanent buffs you can have them be a source of active spells. There's a nuance between armor which tends to have middling enchantment potential at best and clothing (ie, wizard gear) which tends to have really good enchanting potential. (Though you can also just wear both, so maybe that nuance is a bit muddled...) In all three cases, these spells cast instantly, with no fail chance, don't require a stat check, and expend no magicka. And then obviously you have the most direct option, just learning the spell and casting it yourself, with all the limitations that entails. Though I guess one more wrinkle is that unlike later games you just have to straight up buy new spells from other mages, there are no scrolls or books that teach you spells. There's *something* there, but boy do I also feel like it can be a bit of a headache to internalize it all with how much redundancy there is. It's this interconnected web of stats vs. carry weight vs. gold vs. other poo poo with no single, easy answer. You need to know a spell to be able to enchant with it, so like, making healing scrolls is silly if you can already cast healing spells. Alchemy is a huge hassle and requires heavy, dedicated equipment, experimentation, a chance to fail, and the end result is only notable because alchemy is one of the classic ways to break the game wide open because unlike Oblivion you can dump and infinite number of potions down your throat and stack effects to silly degrees. Otherwise you can just...go to the store and buy some scrolls/potions like everyone else. Enchanting is a giant money sink and also suffers from the same insane, convoluted system as in Oblivion, though with some minor differences for the better and worse. Big upside being that enchanted items slowly replenish their charges over time. No longer do you need to reload your sword with more souls every ten loving minutes because Oblivion's scaling is so completely and utterly turbo hosed. But actually getting your foot in the door requires so much prepwork and you still need to play stupid games summoning creatures just so you can soul trap them and shove them into items...which can of course also randomly fail and expend the soul. But also you can just up and find or be given really great enchanted items...or just get buried in lots of incredibly poo poo ones that barely do anything. Like, while my intent was always to learn Mark & Recall and the two Intervention spells, I've ended up with amulets that cast each of the four. These make Intervention scrolls completely obsolete since those are about as heavy as the amulets already. And at the cost of a little extra carry weight I never have to fumble around trying and failing to cast those spells myself. It's cool that the spell system is appropriately robust and the game involved enough where I can make that distinction, but it's also disappointing because these choices don't always feel appropriately balanced against each other. Ultimately I feel like like a bit of a fool for speccing into Mysticism, Enchanting, AND Alchemy. The game also does have the same D&D-esque issue I complained about in Oblivion, where because the spell system is so robust, wizards get to just do whatever the gently caress they want. Granted, Morrowind has more limitations and mechanical barriers to overcome, but it still rubs me the wrong way that you can either faff around with lockpicks in a system that by default doesn't feel great (no minigame at all, just die rolls, but also improved by a Morrowind Code Patch option in my case) or just wave your hand and cast Open on a locked object. It DID feel good to find a huge stash of open lock scrolls that could open any lock just as I started to bump into ones above my skill range, so I can't act like it's a strictly bad thing. On the other hand, 100 Acrobatics, the jump skill, will always pale in comparison to magical levitation or of course huge silly temporary acrobatics boosts (don't forget the slowfall component). It's certainly a step better than in Oblivion where everything just kinda sucked by default except for very specific uses of spell casting, mainly dumping raw damage or abusing the AI in stupid ways, I can say that much.
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Oct 25, 2023 08:17
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Dear god that's a lot of words about Morrowind
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Oct 25, 2023 08:36
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I think thats more words about Morrowind than there is in Morrowind itself
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Oct 25, 2023 08:59
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kirkbrideposting
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Oct 25, 2023 09:10
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Someone in the Switch thread said that one of the (many) reasons Star Fox Zero sucked is that if you wanted to get the high score in a mission, you had to play as boring as possible. There's no freedom allowed, you have to pick off every single reinforcement possible. Outside of Red Dead 2 and rear end Creed 3, what are the worst scoring systems in games?
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Oct 25, 2023 09:24
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Sleeping Dogs with the Cop/Triad experience was rough. Cop exp during Triad missions was a fine idea in itself, it's what caused you to lose it. You'd lose points for stumbling over a parkour object. Triad exp was bad sometimes because to max out a mission you had to really game the system. Can't take someone out too soon, you need to do more Counters and Leg Breaks before you can throw them into an Environmental Object.
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Oct 25, 2023 10:47
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Inspector Gesicht posted:Someone in the Switch thread said that one of the (many) reasons Star Fox Zero sucked is that if you wanted to get the high score in a mission, you had to play as boring as possible. There's no freedom allowed, you have to pick off every single reinforcement possible. Astral Chain, Platinum's otherwise absolutely amazing non-Bayonetta Switch-exclusive, basically ranked you on the amount of Things you did in the fight; no time rankings, you got scored purely on bonuses tied to what you were actually doing. Weirdly, the best comparison I can think of is Smash 64 and Melee's end-of-match bonuses. I think theoretically, it was going for an approach that entirely rewarded style and variety, but it mostly just felt like it was punishing efficiency. You got worse grades if you could finish things fast, because it means you were doing less Things in the fight. ...also, posting that just made me realize the Switch has a weird, disappointing little ghetto of 'mature' exclusive titles that have just sort of disappeared into obscurity as far as wider conversation goes. Astral Chain and all the Xenoblades just sort of vanish out of the popular consciousness despite all being great games, I think because the audience that likes those sorts of game doesn't really fit with the Switch's core audiences enough to remain in that conversation. Cleretic has a new favorite as of 11:26 on Oct 25, 2023 |
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Oct 25, 2023 11:17
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The worst scoring system is par times, because they're often set by taking a developer's best time and knocking off like 15 seconds or something, often resulting in just garbage times that don't actually match the level at all. Doom suffers from this pretty badly. Also Vivec gets much easier to navigate as you play the game, both from learning how it's set up and because better ranks in Athletics and Acrobatics make it a giant gymnasium. Don't need to go down if you can jump over!
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Oct 25, 2023 11:40
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Inspector Gesicht posted:Someone in the Switch thread said that one of the (many) reasons Star Fox Zero sucked is that if you wanted to get the high score in a mission, you had to play as boring as possible. There's no freedom allowed, you have to pick off every single reinforcement possible. I know it's technically nit a "score" system, but wasn't that also an issue with the older Fire Emblem games, where the most optimal way to play was to wait around on maps to make sure that you were able to farm as many enemy reinforcements a possible for exp, despite how counter-intuitive that was on the face of it?
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Oct 25, 2023 12:01
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Croccers posted:Sleeping Dogs with the Cop/Triad experience was rough. Yeah, it was pretty hard to max both in any reasonable timeframe. I haven't played the game for a few months (am due for a replay) but iirc it's possible to have the cop tree pretty far along by the wedding which is a great point for Wei to start going full gently caress it kill everything mode
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Oct 25, 2023 14:56
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