Steam Thread: 1000xPAGES

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Steam Thread: 1000xPAGES

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

ShadowMar posted:

game devs see Diablo/ARPG loot and think "ah randomizing loot will make things easier!" instead of realizing that the best games in that genre had to have spent a long loving time during development figuring out how to make number go up fun instead of a chore.

Very few ARPGs got it right just using random loot explosions either. Even Diablo 3 has a lovely gear score system and Path of Exile's itemization revolves heavily around crafting as opposed to sifting through random incremental upgrades. The problem is basically that gear optimization is a nonlinear problem so it's impossible for individual item-to-item comparisons with green and red numbers to tell you whether it's actually a good upgrade in the long run or not unless the system is so linearized (i.e. boring) that that's all that matters. That's why the good ARPGs tend to have offline theorycrafting resources so you can compare entire builds against each other, taking into consideration the fact that one build might be weaker than another temporarily but become stronger in the long run, instead of thinking about whether +2% damage against stunned enemies is better than +1.7% damage against slowed enemies at each level.

# ? Jan 13, 2024 16:51

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# ? May 27, 2024 08:31

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

Yeah. A "snapshot of an item's value" could be helpful except gear scores rarely do more than take base stats into account (or decide whether you're allowed to hit an enemy for full damage, or tickle them with a wed noodle :v:

).

Sub stats, upgrade slots, set bonuses and special effects/procs are usually not included so you buy the highest gear score item because you have to, but then you're still trying to make sense of all the other stats. Either the score is meaningless and boring (higher gear score = better, then why have all the other stats and options on gear?) or it's useless outside of gating progress and forcing players to go through loot treadmills (higher gear score will let you play X, but you still have to optimize all the other stats and options on gear).

# ? Jan 13, 2024 16:58

LuckyCat: Jul 26, 2007; Grimey Drawer

Really craving a nice first-person puzzle game to sink into with the nasty weather and 3-day weekend. My fallback will be Portal because I haven't run through it in a couple of years and it's always good. Would love a new experience though.

Games I am looking at are:

The Talos Principle
The Witness
Superliminal
What Remains of Edith Finch

Money is tight right now or ordinarily I would make this decision on my own. Any thoughts on the games above, or anything I have missed which would be better?

# ? Jan 13, 2024 18:01

tripwood: Jul 21, 2003; "Cuno can see you're trying to shit him, but Cuno's unshittable, so fuck does Cuno care?"

Hint: He doesn't care.

Flair posted:

GDQ Humble Bundle: https://www.humblebundle.com/games/awesome-games-done-quick-2024

What a nice bundle.
Astalon is an EXCELLENT single screen style NES/MSX inspired metroidvania with awesome music. It is a labor of love and quite worth it!

# ? Jan 13, 2024 18:01

Tenacious J: Nov 20, 2002

LuckyCat posted:

Really craving a nice first-person puzzle game to sink into with the nasty weather and 3-day weekend. My fallback will be Portal because I haven't run through it in a couple of years and it's always good. Would love a new experience though.

Games I am looking at are:

The Talos Principle
The Witness
Superliminal
What Remains of Edith Finch

Money is tight right now or ordinarily I would make this decision on my own. Any thoughts on the games above, or anything I have missed which would be better?

Talos Principle 1 is one of the best puzzle games ever and I wish I could memory wipe myself to experience it again. Make sure to experiment with how you can "break" the levels.

# ? Jan 13, 2024 18:04

kazil: Jul 24, 2005; Derpmph trial star reporter!

LuckyCat posted:

Really craving a nice first-person puzzle game to sink into with the nasty weather and 3-day weekend. My fallback will be Portal because I haven't run through it in a couple of years and it's always good. Would love a new experience though.

Games I am looking at are:

The Talos Principle
The Witness
Superliminal
What Remains of Edith Finch

Money is tight right now or ordinarily I would make this decision on my own. Any thoughts on the games above, or anything I have missed which would be better?

Edith Finch is a great game but it's like 3 hours long. It's also not really puzzles.

The Witness is a good puzzle game, if you like the type of puzzle it offers. It adds a lot of variation, but it's all basically the same type of puzzle.

Haven't played much of Superliminal.

Talos Principle would be my recommendation. It's good a good variety of good puzzling and a good meta story.

# ? Jan 13, 2024 18:06

LuckyCat: Jul 26, 2007; Grimey Drawer

Talos is it. Thanks friends. :glomp:

VV Yoink!

# ? Jan 13, 2024 18:08

Kragger99: Mar 21, 2004; Pillbug

The Talos Principle is ~$6 right now on GamesPlanet:

https://isthereanydeal.com/game/talosprinciple/info/

# ? Jan 13, 2024 18:09

StrixNebulosa: Feb 14, 2012; You cheated not only the game, but yourself.
But most of all, you cheated BABA

LuckyCat posted:

Talos is it. Thanks friends.

VV Yoink!

I'm so jealous of you getting to play that for the first time.

# ? Jan 13, 2024 18:17

ultrafilter: Aug 23, 2007; It's okay if you have any questions.

LuckyCat posted:

Really craving a nice first-person puzzle game to sink into with the nasty weather and 3-day weekend. My fallback will be Portal because I haven't run through it in a couple of years and it's always good. Would love a new experience though.

Games I am looking at are:

The Talos Principle
The Witness
Superliminal
What Remains of Edith Finch

Money is tight right now or ordinarily I would make this decision on my own. Any thoughts on the games above, or anything I have missed which would be better?

Edith Finch is a walking simulator with no real puzzle elements. If you're keeping this list around, strike that and add Viewfinder.

# ? Jan 13, 2024 18:41

abraham linksys: Sep 6, 2010

TeaJay posted:

Incidentally, I quit Grime somewhere about half/ 3/4th of the way since I couldn't handle the puzzle platform mechanics required for progressing. So it doesn't fill me with gleeful expectation.

Prince of Persia apparently gives you the option to skip particularly difficult platforming segments. I'm a little ambivalent about this: I like Metroidvanias and suck at platforming so on paper this should be good for me, but I also hate admitting defeat.

# ? Jan 13, 2024 18:52

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

abraham linksys posted:

Prince of Persia apparently gives you the option to skip particularly difficult platforming segments. I'm a little ambivalent about this: I like Metroidvanias and suck at platforming so on paper this should be good for me, but I also hate admitting defeat.

It's not defeat if you never tried!

# ? Jan 13, 2024 18:53

Flair: Apr 5, 2016

LuckyCat posted:

Really craving a nice first-person puzzle game to sink into with the nasty weather and 3-day weekend. My fallback will be Portal because I haven't run through it in a couple of years and it's always good. Would love a new experience though.

Games I am looking at are:

The Talos Principle
The Witness
Superliminal
What Remains of Edith Finch

Money is tight right now or ordinarily I would make this decision on my own. Any thoughts on the games above, or anything I have missed which would be better?

If money is tight, I recommend Portal Reloaded. It is a free mod on top of Portal 2 with difficult puzzles

# ? Jan 13, 2024 19:12

John Lee: Mar 2, 2013; A time traveling adventure everyone can enjoy

People sure like The Talos Principle a lot! I'm not a fan, myself; it's got one of my pet peeves in it.

For example, Void Stranger? Amazing puzzles and secrets, top-tier game.

Fez: required out-of-game knowledge and technology I didn't have. Talos Principle? Same deal, game's full experience required a smartphone, big negative points. (Also a lot of the puzzles took forever)

The Witness? Easy to hate, but also has puzzles entirely contained within the game, so it's fine.

# ? Jan 13, 2024 19:31

Snake Maze

Jul 13, 2016

3.85 Billion years ago

Having seen the explosion on the moon, the Devil comes to Venus

To be clear Talos Principle has one (1) of the bonus stars require out of game knowledge. (Specifically, translating a QR code to get some hexidecimal, then translating that into base 10. It's dumb but it's a one-off outlier that makes up 0.1% of the game's content, and they never repeated it in the dlc or sequel.

# ? Jan 13, 2024 19:46

TheOneAndOnlyT: Dec 18, 2005; Well well, mister fancy-pants, I hope you're wearing your matching sweater today, or you'll be cut down like the ugly tree you are.

abraham linksys posted:

Prince of Persia apparently gives you the option to skip particularly difficult platforming segments. I'm a little ambivalent about this: I like Metroidvanias and suck at platforming so on paper this should be good for me, but I also hate admitting defeat.

I just got Star Wars Jedi Survivor and it has an option that lets you turn off the health loss when you gently caress up a jumping puzzle and fall into a pit. I thought that was a good compromise; it lets you relax a lot more during platforming sessions since you don't have to worry about having low health for the encounter after it.

# ? Jan 13, 2024 20:48

John Murdoch: May 19, 2009; I can tune a fish.

I remember Hellgate London of all games being an early adopter of gear score or something close enough to it, but it just made everything incredibly confusing and the lovely UI made it hard to parse, say, what your weapon's actual damage/DPS was. Edit: Or maybe it was that you could see gear score or DPS but literally no objective damage value at all. Point is, that game was a fuckin mess.

Serephina posted:

People are mocking you with counter-examples, but I've been playing some Fromsoft games lately and yea, it's loving awful. No I don't need you to do a five second fade to black before the main menu comes up. I especially don't need the same multi-menu fadeouts when saving and exiting.

DS1R is the worst for this, and it has nothing to do with fading things in. Start the game, title fades in, press a button, wait for the online system to handshake, dismiss the useless message that has been permanently changed to "don't cheat or we ban u", and then finally hit continue to actually load into the game. But oh boy if you want to quit the game...go over to the options tab in the menu, hit quit which triggers a "are you really sure?" choice that defaults to no, then go through all the other poo poo described because the actual quit option is on the main menu behind that stuff.

And you can't even loop from the top of the menu straight to the bottom.

If you do alt+F4 the game yells at you, adding yet another message to dismiss next time you start the game.

But woe loving betide you if you're in a hurry, because the menus are all laggy as gently caress so if you try to mash past the "press something to begin" and news message you WILL accidentally press continue and be forced to go through the entire process again. :argh:

John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 21:28 on Jan 13, 2024

# ? Jan 13, 2024 21:23

Unlucky7: Jul 11, 2006; Fallen Rib

John Lee posted:

Same deal, game's full experience required a smartphone, big negative points. (Also a lot of the puzzles took forever)

I played through the Talos Principle and did not need a smartphone, once. Are you talking about the QR codes? Those are read if you just centered them on your screen, and even those are optional.

# ? Jan 13, 2024 21:24

John Murdoch: May 19, 2009; I can tune a fish.

Exactly one of them does not for the sake of a dumb star puzzle.

I think worse still, even if the QR code displayed in-game, it'd still be pretty crappy puzzle.

# ? Jan 13, 2024 21:25

Bloody Hedgehog: Dec 12, 2003; 💥💥🤯💥💥
Gotta nuke something

I don't know if Talos was considered good looking on release, but I tried it recently and couldn't get past it's "we made this with old rear end Serious Sam assets" look.

# ? Jan 13, 2024 21:56

John Murdoch: May 19, 2009; I can tune a fish.

Excuse me, they made it with contemporary reused Serious Sam assets.

# ? Jan 13, 2024 21:59

FutureCop: Jun 7, 2011; Have you heard of Fermat's principle?

Cross-posting from beat a game thread:

FutureCop posted:

Just beat Blood West, posting my steam review here:

As a fan of exploration imm sims with lite RPG elements like Thief, System Shock, Weird West, and STALKER, and as a fan of antique wild west weaponry as seen in Hunt Showdown, I had a nice time with this!

If you're a fan of these properties below, then I think you'll have a good time too:

1) Sneaking around and exploring big, hostile environments and hoovering up all the cool and unique loot that has been finely crafted by the designers to be hidden down every path, nook and cranny in secret caches for you to find.
2) Deadly and intense combat that, while possible to deal with, you'll want to avoid with stealth and caution due to aggressive, high-damage enemies and your weapons being antique wild west implements that are slow to fire and reload.
3) Hardcore mechanics that punish you for sloppy play by progressively cursing your character for every death, which can only be recovered from through quests or expensive items (can't reload your save since it's all autosave-only).
4) RPG-ish build customization through a lot of interesting trinkets, weapons and skills with very unique properties beyond just simple statistical changes that allow you to change up your playstyle.

That's not to say it's all sunshine and rainbows though. Some rough aspects:

1) Only having two weapon slots, one for something big and another for something small, can feel quite annoyingly limiting. For example, your instinct might be to have a shotgun for trouble, a pistol for general use, and a knife for stealth, but that's three, and you can only have two at a time. Therefore you either need to get good at awkwardly switching weapons quickly in your inventory, or just make some hard choices to limit yourself.
2) Don't come to this for the story. Yes, there are some fun characters and events, but for the most part the story is non-existent, with the worst being the ending, which felt incredibly unsatisfying (and that's coming from someone who's perfectly fine with doom and gloom endings).
3) As much as you can build your character in all sorts of ways, I don't think it would be significant enough for replayability beyond self-imposed challenge runs: the way its balanced feels like you're always gonna play somewhat the same as a jack of all trades. In particular the skill tree felt awkwardly skewed, with the bulk of them going towards melee.
4) As the game went on, it did start to drag for me a bit. It tries its best to keep changing things up which is nice but it wasn't as much as I'd like. Furthermore, some events that should've been great, like the final boss and some other dungeons, felt a bit lackluster.

# ? Jan 13, 2024 22:11

Jack Trades: Nov 30, 2010

FutureCop posted:

Cross-posting from beat a game thread:

Ooh...I gotta check that out. Thanks for bringing it up.

# ? Jan 13, 2024 22:13

Bloody Hedgehog: Dec 12, 2003; 💥💥🤯💥💥
Gotta nuke something

John Murdoch posted:

Excuse me, they made it with contemporary reused Serious Sam assets.

I mean, it was Serious Sam 3 assets, not SS4. SS3 came out 13 years ago.

# ? Jan 13, 2024 22:14

NoEyedSquareGuy: Mar 16, 2009; Just because Liquor's dead, doesn't mean you can just roll this bitch all over town with "The Freedoms."

Bloody Hedgehog posted:

I don't know if Talos was considered good looking on release, but I tried it recently and couldn't get past it's "we made this with old rear end Serious Sam assets" look.

Talos 1 isn't much to look at these days, Talos 2 looks amazing if you have a computer that can handle it. One of the most graphically impressive games out there at the moment imo.

# ? Jan 13, 2024 22:24

FishMcCool: Apr 9, 2021; lolcats are still funny; Fallen Rib

Bloody Hedgehog posted:

I don't know if Talos was considered good looking on release, but I tried it recently and couldn't get past it's "we made this with old rear end Serious Sam assets" look.

This is actually acknowledged and justified in-game.

# ? Jan 13, 2024 22:28

Eason the Fifth: Apr 9, 2020

Jack Trades posted:

Ooh...I gotta check that out. Thanks for bringing it up.

I'm enjoying it. It feels like someone took Blood (story, setting, and goofy narration) and Thief (stealth gameplay) and blended them into a 25-year-old vintage.

# ? Jan 13, 2024 22:29

Snake Maze

Jul 13, 2016

3.85 Billion years ago

Having seen the explosion on the moon, the Devil comes to Venus

Bloody Hedgehog posted:

I mean, it was Serious Sam 3 assets, not SS4. SS3 came out 13 years ago.

Talos Principle 1 came out 10 years ago

# ? Jan 13, 2024 22:32

Saoshyant: Oct 26, 2010

Snake Maze posted:

Talos Principle 1 came out 10 years ago

You lie!

# ? Jan 13, 2024 22:43

Ghostlight: Sep 25, 2009; maybe for one second you can pause; try to step into another person's perspective, and understand that a watermelon is cursing me