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Subjunctive posted:Path of Survivors came out today, about $5 Canadian with launch discount. It’s on my wishlist but I don’t remember anything about it? I wish the list let me leave notes to myself. lmao, this game seems to have already been delisted on Steam
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Jan 9, 2024 23:35
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Huh. What happened I was planning on buying that later today!!! Ibram Gaunt fucked around with this message at 23:40 on Jan 9, 2024 |
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Jan 9, 2024 23:36
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I know the Duelyst assets are open source or whatever but considering it straight up just copy the POE tree I guess there is a good chance there is probably something in that game that got as a no no
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Jan 9, 2024 23:41
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The itch page is still up and their twitter hasn't said a peep. So weird.
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Jan 9, 2024 23:44
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The dev's discord doesn't say anything about it either - looks like people were playing as little as an hour & a half ago. Weird Wonder if this is a case of Steam Tuesday-itis vv 
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Jan 9, 2024 23:46
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It did happen pretty recently it looks like, just join their discord and nothing there either. e: Ciaphas posted:The dev's discord doesn't say anything about it either - looks like people were playing as little as an hour & a half ago. Weird lmao i knew i recognize that avatar from somewhere
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Jan 9, 2024 23:46
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I'm assuming it has something to do with the name + skill tree elements being too close to Path of Exile, it could be misconstrued for an official PoE Survivors-like. The dev has been actively posting replies to feedback on Reddit as of 5 minutes ago but I'm guessing they haven't noticed that the game is delisted yet. E: there's also some game in development called Path of Survivor (singular) that may have filed a complaint but I'm just taking wild guesses deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 23:52 on Jan 9, 2024 |
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Jan 9, 2024 23:48
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Dev just replied, DMCA takedown from GGG 
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Jan 9, 2024 23:53
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Ciaphas posted:Dev just replied, DMCA takedown from GGG Too close to the sun, etc. etc.
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Jan 9, 2024 23:56
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Hopefully they can just change the name and get it back up. No way GGG can claim ownership of the concept of a big sphere grid. Freakin FFX beat them by like 20 years.
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Jan 9, 2024 23:56
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At least they should be able to just rename it to "Survivor's Path" or something and re-release it. Having a similar skill tree isn't enough to qualify it for a DMCA but having both a similar skill tree and a derivative name is
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Jan 9, 2024 23:57
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victrix posted:My mildly spicy take on action roguelites is 3d games are fundamentally better at this than 2d games - Risk of Rain 2 vs Dead Cells or Hades to pick big successful examples I spent some time thinking about stuff adjacent to this, back when I was theorycrafting a "1999" game. For those not into Castlevania, a bit of context first (and spoilers for a 21-year-old game). Aria of Sorrow, which is possibly the best of the Metroidvania-style games in the series, teased fans with its backstory: in 1999, Dracula dies for real, killed by Julius Belmont. Julius shows up as an NPC and secret playable character in Aria, which is set in 2035, and he's just ludicrously powerful. He's hyper-mobile, can "fly" by chaining shoryukens together, can phase through enemies, has free pick of subweapons at all times, and does huge amounts of damage with his whip. So it's fun to try to imagine a game set 36 years earlier, with Julius at the peak of his anime bullshit prowess, and the kind of forces you'd need to throw at him to pose any kind of challenge to the player. The problem is that selling "your character is ridiculously OP" tends to require giving them very visually flashy and wide-sweeping moves, which, in 2D, will cover a lot of screen real estate. And those moves need to actually hit hard, or they don't feel powerful: imagine having a knife subweapon that fires a spray of 6 knives in a 30-degree arc...but you need to fire 10-20 such sprays to take down a basic enemy. But "big attacks that hit hard" means that you're throwing Vampire Survivors levels of enemies at the player in order to have a chance of one getting through to hurt them. And Vampire Survivors isn't exactly known for visual clarity, even though they've put a ton of effort into making the game readable. Moving to 3D does help solve a lot of these issues. Your 30-degree arc goes from covering like 20% of the screen to covering <5% of the volume around the player, without losing much in the way of visual punch. You can throw a lot of enemies at the player without taking away all of the space around them. But like you say, it also makes the game much harder to implement, and brings a lot of extra problems to the fore. And Castlevania in particular has a spotty history with 3D games... TooMuchAbstraction fucked around with this message at 00:00 on Jan 10, 2024 |
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Jan 9, 2024 23:58
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I dunno who needs to hear this, but Path of Achra not only runs fine on the Steam deck, but the developer wants to officially deck verify it eventually too. It works right now using the right trackpad to move the mouse and the triggers act as clicks. This is gonna lead to a lot more playtime for me, lol
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Jan 10, 2024 05:16
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victrix posted:My mildly spicy take on action roguelites is 3d games are fundamentally better at this than 2d games - Risk of Rain 2 vs Dead Cells or Hades to pick big successful examples I dunno. I hear ya, but I don't have problems with this in like Dead Cells or Risk of Rain Returns to the degree Skul does it. The formers can get visually messy but are usually possible to spot at the very least what attacks are coming/what I need to dodge as long as I'm looking for it. Skul drowns it screen in floods of indistinct visual effects, gigantic effects from your skulls that obscure enemies and projectiles, and enemies with very short or indistinct windups that are not helped by any of this. (I've never had an issue with visual clarity in Hades- it and Entropy Effect are the two major 2D Roguelites where I feel like if I get hit it's almost always my own fault- I didn't spot something not because it was hidden or inscrutable, but because I wasn't looking for it or got hyperfocused on something else or just wasn't paying attention.) Lotta good points about how 2D visual clarity has gotten worse with the time going around tho, yeah. A lot of very pretty and visceral visual design does not play well with the restraint to keep visuals clean enough to suit gameplay needs. Mr. Locke fucked around with this message at 17:53 on Jan 10, 2024 |
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Jan 10, 2024 06:36
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eggrolled posted:I dunno who needs to hear this, but Path of Achra not only runs fine on the Steam deck, but the developer wants to officially deck verify it eventually too. It works right now using the right trackpad to move the mouse and the triggers act as clicks. This is gonna lead to a lot more playtime for me, lol I play it on a logitech keyboard with a track pad on my couch. really well set up for that Absolutely playable with 1 hand 
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Jan 10, 2024 06:59
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Ibram Gaunt posted:Hopefully they can just change the name and get it back up. No way GGG can claim ownership of the concept of a big sphere grid. Freakin FFX beat them by like 20 years. It wasn't "the concept of a sphere grid" it was "i literally copy-pasted the path of exile tree". And made it worse by getting rid of all the nodes that actually do something interesting.
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Jan 10, 2024 08:36
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I'd say Hades has a slight visual clarity problem, but it's mostly down to certain enemy quirks rather than a universal problem of having too much poo poo on screen at once.
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Jan 10, 2024 13:50
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Ibram Gaunt posted:Hopefully they can just change the name and get it back up. No way GGG can claim ownership of the concept of a big sphere grid. Freakin FFX beat them by like 20 years. I'd agree with this except when I saw the image linked a few posts back I laughed.  Compared to this section from POE.  It's more than a little bit similar. A majority of the skill clusters and pathing are literally identical down to the point, including stuff like gem sockets in the tree. It's got a bit less overall, and is missing keystones, but yea.
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Jan 10, 2024 14:04
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Yeah that's fair. I only could see the one screenshot on the store which looked similar but I didn't know it was basically identical lol.
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Jan 10, 2024 14:05
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Oh god it gets worse lol, I just started reading the effects on the left. Those are literally word for word exact terms used in POE like Energy Shield Recharge Rate and Avoid Ailments.
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Jan 10, 2024 14:10
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I think the problem a lot of people have with the roguelike genre is the feeling of loss when you...well lose. I think metaprogression is a bit of a bandaid, but I think one of my favorite 'run' games are games like Zeroranger, where every loss feels like I've learned something. Too often the losses in a lot of roguelikes (particularly action ones) are 'i need to dodge better' or whatever. I still stand by, the second best metaprogression system is content, not power. The best is when death meaningfully is teaching me something new. Whether you appreciate 'oh sphinx's turn you to stone if you don't have all the riddles memorized' kind of lessons or 'oh I died with a lot of scrolls that might have saved me' is I think the dividing line on how much you enjoy ye olde roguelikes.
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Jan 10, 2024 20:15
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funny, I feel like I’ve learned half a dozen times that I suck rear end at fighting the r type miniboss
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Jan 10, 2024 20:20
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nrook posted:funny, I feel like I’ve learned half a dozen times that I suck rear end at fighting the r type miniboss sadly, I am good at zero ranger (lying) so I simply did not have this problem (I did, my save got deleted, I have never recovered)
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Jan 10, 2024 20:22
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Gungeon's master rounds are very interesting to me. You get an extremely useful thing called a master round that gives you +1 heart when you no-hit a boss. So there's this sub-task of getting good at boss fights which rewards you exceptionally highly and you can see/feel your progress very tangibly because you're going into stage 5 with six hearts instead of 3 after you no-hit three bosses. And no-hitting bosses is something you really want to do anyways and you arent really punished much for burning blanks to force a no-hit because you get set to minimum 2 blanks at the start of each stage. It creates a measurable sub-goal where the game becomes notceably easier once you know bosses good. It's like exaggerating progression in a way that feels good.
No Wave fucked around with this message at 20:37 on Jan 10, 2024 |
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Jan 10, 2024 20:28
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Pladdicus posted:I think the problem a lot of people have with the roguelike genre is the feeling of loss when you...well lose. Nobody likes losing but I personally also don't like winning if it doesn't feel like an accomplishment. I don't think I'm alone in that. Power-based metaprogression, I feel like, robs the game of its ability to actually present a challenge. Losing doesn't actually mean that you failed because you benefit from it directly and, after you lose enough times, you will eventually win purely because losing made your number go up until it was big enough. Winning is inevitable even if you never really get better at it, and therefore it doesn't mean anything. Well, most of the time. Some games cap your power progression low enough that you kind of run into the opposite problem: you start off so pathetic that you have no hope of doing anything, and essentially just have to lose a few dozen times at a minimum to power yourself up to the point where you can actually play the game, which remains hard after you've reached maximal power. Those ones are difficult to get a read on but it just makes the system itself seem kind of pointless. Content progression is a mixed bag, and I think it mostly doesn't work. More often than not it seems like they basically just took a finished game and then arbitrarily sealed half of it behind a wall, like if you had to play a demo 20 times before you were allowed to install the real game. It can work if the only thing you're unlocking are starting options, and there are a load of them, and ideally if they're locked by interesting achievements rather than just some kind of metacurrency you grind. That's kind of how TOME and FTL did it, and I never really had a problem with their methods*. *tome also requires you to unlock a few things that are not starting options and is sometimes infuriating about it, like "congrats on unlocking the archmage class, you can't actually play it yet though because all of its good talents require their own dumb thing to unlock them", this is bad and dumb, but it's mostly just races and classes
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Jan 10, 2024 20:40
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No Wave posted:Gungeon's master rounds are very interesting to me. You get an extremely useful thing called a master round that gives you +1 heart when you no-hit a boss. People used to bitch a ton about this but I never got it, it's good design. Lots of similar games can feel like the first couple floors/zones are low-stakes after you have a few runs under your belt -- tying a reward with significant impact to actually mastering early stages rather than just sleepwalking through them keeps things more interesting. Dead Cells is pretty good at this too.
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Jan 10, 2024 21:18
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If I were going to make a game that included metaprogression, I think I'd want it to adhere to the following design conducts: 1. The game must be reasonably beatable from a fresh save. No "until you've grinded out a few lives, this zone/boss will OHKO you and you'll need 100 hits to kill anything" kinds of situations. 2. The metaprogression needs to feel like a reward. If you're struggling with the game, scrape through a run by the skin of your teeth, and are told "congrats, now the game's harder!", you may not be too happy. 3. The metaprogression needs to be going somewhere. Grinding for grinding's sake is fine for some folks, but I find it tedious, personally. Working towards unlocking the super secret bonus boss, though? that's cool. As to how to achieve those three goals? I think there's plenty of ways, but they require some nuance and forethought. For example, you can be rewarded by being given more control over the run's high-level RNG. This doesn't per-se make the game easier moment-to-moment, but it can make it more predictable, and thus easier to plan around. For example, 30XX allows you to force certain levels to show up early/late, to adjust how much scaling the generator applies to them. Tiny Rogues allows you to force certain special rooms to appear on certain levels. Rewards that allow you to change the difficulty are also valid, so long as they're opt-in. I know everyone's doing the Supergiant thing of giving you a bunch of different mutators you can apply to the game, and that's fine and seems to work well.
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Jan 10, 2024 21:46
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goferchan posted:People used to bitch a ton about this but I never got it, it's good design. Lots of similar games can feel like the first couple floors/zones are low-stakes after you have a few runs under your belt -- tying a reward with significant impact to actually mastering early stages rather than just sleepwalking through them keeps things more interesting. Dead Cells is pretty good at this too. I didn't really mind it myself but I do understand, it is a bit silly to give a +1 heart pickup to someone who is not being hit ever.
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Jan 10, 2024 22:02
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goferchan posted:People used to bitch a ton about this but I never got it, it's good design. Lots of similar games can feel like the first couple floors/zones are low-stakes after you have a few runs under your belt -- tying a reward with significant impact to actually mastering early stages rather than just sleepwalking through them keeps things more interesting. Dead Cells is pretty good at this too. If you're already doing metaprogression, I think it's much more interesting to just make those zones higher stakes on higher difficulty levels. Part of what made me enjoy Hades as much as I did was that while doing a bunch of heat 32 runs, I would still often lose death defiances in Tartarus.
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Jan 10, 2024 22:05
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I think two other key things about metaprogression are pacing and diversity. You want rewards to come at a steady pace and more or less match the average player's burgeoning skill. If you need to go through an entire grueling run beating every secret boss to come out the other side with 1 whole upgrade token that inches the metaprog along then that's awful. By diversity I mean having multiple channels of progress rather than one single unwieldy skill tree or whatever. Hades is a masterclass in this - you've got the mirror boons, weapon unlocks and then upgrades, social links, charm levels, and renovations. And it then ties all of that stuff together by having fishing give a drip feed of extra rewards and the trader letting you convert leftover stuff you don't care about into stuff you do. A lot of other games do do this, but tend to tilt the balance towards one main progression system and then tack on a few other minor ones and it doesn't work as well.goferchan posted:People used to bitch a ton about this but I never got it, it's good design. Lots of similar games can feel like the first couple floors/zones are low-stakes after you have a few runs under your belt -- tying a reward with significant impact to actually mastering early stages rather than just sleepwalking through them keeps things more interesting. Dead Cells is pretty good at this too. People complain(ed) because it's disheartening (I guess literally  ) for the truly struggling player to feel like they're being held back by a compounding lack of HP. The benefits of the design are there to be sure, but I don't really blame people for balking at it either.Edit: Also yeah, even as a veteran Gungeon player I still get annoyed if I miss a round on floor 1 or 2. Perfection-based mechanics are very risky in terms of pissing off your players. John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 22:09 on Jan 10, 2024 |
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Jan 10, 2024 22:05
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I generally despise metaprogression in all its forms. That said, I think BlazBlue Entropy Effect has a very cool idea that I've never seen before: a feature called "Mind Trials" where you can take one of your dead character builds and have them fight a superboss! It's like a "last hurrah" for a build you'd been enjoying, without feeling at all like the game's giving you an artifical second chance. The reward for beating it is just more metaprogress of course, but I wouldn't mind seeing this idea come up in other roguelikes too.
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Jan 10, 2024 22:09
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Ibram Gaunt posted:I didn't really mind it myself but I do understand, it is a bit silly to give a +1 heart pickup to someone who is not being hit ever. Not really, it's kind of a soft way to ensure you get further if you play better, even in the easier parts of the game. As mentioned it adds an incentive to take even the starter levels seriously.
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Jan 10, 2024 22:10
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You need to get all the master chambers to win for real anyways so I just never found the health particularly good of a reward I guess.
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Jan 10, 2024 22:17
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Tequila Bob posted:That said, I think BlazBlue Entropy Effect has a very cool idea that I've never seen before: a feature called "Mind Trials" where you can take one of your dead character builds and have them fight a superboss! It's like a "last hurrah" for a build you'd been enjoying, without feeling at all like the game's giving you an artifical second chance. Path of Achra does something like this. The game saves your characters (all by default, but you can limit it to only winners) to a Hall of Fame where you can take them through the Paths of Dust in the afterlife as many times as you like trying to go as deep as possible.
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Jan 10, 2024 22:28
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There's a one time item unlock for getting all five in a single run, you don't have to get all five in one run outside of that. I only ever got all five in one run once with clone (which is cheating) even though the game gets super easy to win after a point.
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Jan 10, 2024 22:29
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the master chambers are kind of meh because they are an inversion of isaac's formula which works really well. isaac says "you beat the level and boss without taking damage, would you like to burn your health for power since you clearly don't need it?" and that makes sense. angel rooms ended up muddling the clear link between damageless play and sacrificing health for power of course but the original design is very elegant. just giving health is both boring and not appropriately related to what you've done to earn the reward in the first place
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Jan 10, 2024 23:05
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I absolutely hated how your first mistake disproportionately punished you compared to the rest (and primarily punished you 30 minutes later during the part of the game where you personally needed more health rather than at the boss you almost coasted through), that poo poo sucked Been playing a bit of nuclear throne again for the first time in years and this 60fps beta is great, I immediately made it to loop 2 which is much farther than usual and feel like the extra smoothness really helps with fine reactions
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Jan 10, 2024 23:15
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I'm playing Dungeonmans for the first time. Some questions: - Is there any point to donating books to the library if I've already fully upgraded it? I got the cheevo for it yesterday. - Is there a bank for currency anywhere? - Do shops ever restock items? - Any benefits to breeding chickens? Do they get more powerful as the "generation" number goes up? - Does the win condition require any secret/missable BS or will it be revealed to me over the course of just playing the game normally? And an observation: apparently I can shoot enemies outside of LoS with a 6-range bow and, if they take multiple hits, they just stand there until they're dead. That seems pretty odd.
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Jan 10, 2024 23:19
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Ofecks posted:I'm playing Dungeonmans for the first time. Some questions: Always nice to see someone discovering Dungeonmans for the first time! It's one of my favorites. As for your questions: There's no benefit to turning in books to the library once it reaches full size. There's a piggy bank you can unlock. I forget what it does (in particular, whether it lets you give currency to future characters), it was added after the last time I was playing the game. I think it may require finding the pig vendor, which is a vendor that spawns in like 1 in every 5-10 towns or so. It's possible to get a world seed with no pig vendors, but you can generate a new overworld from the Academy. Shops gain new stock when you give purloined inventory to the town mayor. If you buy out a specific shop, you can give that specific shop purloined inventory to restock it, but you have to buy it out first. You can also find secret shops in dungeons (specifically the regular dungeons, not swamps, towers, graveyards, etc). Chickens get more powerful when you breed them, yes. Their generation is one of the core stats for making them more powerful. Beating the game does not require you to do any stuff you can miss out on. Specifically, all you need to do to beat the game is complete the Mountain Fortress, then complete the Dread Spire in the bottom-right corner of the map. The only "missable" stuff I know of is: if you encounter an injured bandit on the overworld, hear him out, and don't lose the map he gives you.
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Jan 11, 2024 00:04
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SKULL.GIF posted:Path of Achra does something like this. The game saves your characters (all by default, but you can limit it to only winners) to a Hall of Fame where you can take them through the Paths of Dust in the afterlife as many times as you like trying to go as deep as possible. That sounds great as well! Thanks!
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Jan 11, 2024 00:17
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