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Cyrano4747 posted:I gave up on that dumb mini game really fast and modded it out. I thought tension was what gave games character?
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Mar 6, 2024 20:39
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i liked the fallout hacking, especially when I found out years later that you could get rid of duds and gain back tries by clicking on strings that were like <*dfjk/>
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Mar 6, 2024 20:42
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OddObserver posted:I thought tension was what gave games character? There is a difference between tension / friction and tedious, poorly implemented puzzles. You could put the a Hanoi tower puzzle into doom every time you open a door but that would be loving dumb and you would get really tired of that puzzle really fast.
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Mar 6, 2024 20:46
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Morrowind still has the best lockpicking. e: so it's not a drive by shitpost. I don't actually mind the Skyrim or F4 lockpicking. Oblivion's seems fine by never worked for me. Starfield's was actually interesting but got way too tedious, way too fast, when I'd spend a couple minutes on a puzzle and make out with less value than the cost of the pick. Skyrim locks are super quick to deal with at least. But what I like about Morrowind's is: It's real time. Time freezes in the other games when you try to pick something, which lets you spend a ton of time on a hard lock in the brief second the guard turns around. In Morrowind, you need to watch your back because the NPCs are going to keep moving. It's also character based. I'm sure most of us could solve a master level lock in Skyrim at 1 skill, even if it takes a few picks. Same as the others, although Fallout 4 will gate lock difficulty by perks. With Morrowind, if I have a lovely skill and a lovely pick, I can't unlock difficult locks. It makes it a skill you need to invest in, and having multiple tiers of picks based on the situation expands that even more. Orcs and Ostriches fucked around with this message at 20:54 on Mar 6, 2024 |
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Mar 6, 2024 20:48
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I actually liked the starfield hacking thing. What I didn't like was how mandatory it was because unlike in Skyrim the ability to unlock things wasn't in direct opposition to other skills I wanted. I could just level my lockpick up by picking locks and eventually pick the highest locks. In Starfield I have to invest like 3-4 points (I forget which) because there are no 1-100 skill levels in individual skills anymore, and now I don't have those points to make shooty bits or flying bits easier. That particular grievance at least is something modding can kinda fix. I thought it was bullshit that I couldn't just rip a mod off a looted gun and put it on another one. Goddamn FO4 let you do that.
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Mar 6, 2024 20:50
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Cyrano4747 posted:There is a difference between tension / friction and tedious, poorly implemented puzzles. Was that how you solved hacking puzzles in, what, KOTOR? I had to Google the puzzle just now and that game was my first time encountering them; I definitely had to just move things around randomly the first few times to understand it and my goodness I was certainly better at it, and sick of it, by the end of whatever game that was. Orcs and Ostriches posted:Morrowind still has the best lockpicking. I strongly agree; Deus Ex 1 was also good, just let me expend the resource and watch a little progress bar or animation. Do you think I'm not going to succeed at this little game? Man I have to do this a thousand times, stop it. Jack B Nimble fucked around with this message at 20:54 on Mar 6, 2024 |
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Mar 6, 2024 20:50
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Jack B Nimble posted:I strongly ago; Deus Ex 1 was also good, just let me expend the resource and watch a little progress bar or animation. Do you think I'm not going to succeed at this little game? Man I have to do this a thousand times, stop it. also a bit of tension, it didn't pause the game, am I remembering it correctly?
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Mar 6, 2024 20:54
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Splorange posted:also a bit of tension, it didn't pause the game, am I remembering it correctly? In both games yeah. Hell, the Lock picking in Thief had more in common with Morrowind and Deus Ex than Skyrim, even though it LOOKED more like Skyrim it was still mostly a forgone conclusion that happened in real time and you were more concerned with being caught.
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Mar 6, 2024 20:56
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Deus Ex is another good one, yeah. They were real time and you just expended resources. Couldn't just quickly pause the game (ok, you actually could) so you could pick in peace. Had a bit of an inventory investment as well as you needed multiple picks based on your skill level.
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Mar 6, 2024 20:56
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My theory on Towers of Hanoi is that's what happens when the designer team delegates putting in a puzzle to the programmers (since it's a common recursion exercise, and is much better at that than being a puzzle).
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Mar 6, 2024 20:56
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Cyrano4747 posted:I gave up on that dumb mini game really fast and modded it out. I stopped doing any past “advanced”. They weren’t harder, they just took more time and the loot table for a basic lock was, as near as I could tell, exactly the same as a master lock. OddObserver posted:I thought tension was what gave games character? There’s no interesting decisions to be made in the lockpicking game, it’s just a time sink. It’s not even a challenge, just tedious. If it either went faster, had some kind of time/resource pressure, or at least had the decency to make longer locks give better loot it would be received a lot better. The primary impediment it presents to a player is tedium, not difficulty
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Mar 6, 2024 21:08
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Ugly In The Morning posted:
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Mar 6, 2024 21:09
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I don't mind the hacking minigame, but yes it would be nice if the loot was better in harder containers There are so many combinations of legendary affixes that they should drop more often, why not
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Mar 6, 2024 21:15
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The lockpicking minigame was one of the only parts I actually liked and thought was an improvement over past BGS games  Now I would have preferred there to be something worth experiencing on either side of the lock but, for those few moments where I wasn't clicking through a lovely menu or aimlessly wandering through anonymous corridors, it at least felt like I was playing a videogame for the purposes of recreation
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Mar 6, 2024 21:27
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Oh they fixed the "new atlantis apartment loses its poo poo after the brainbugs attack." NeatVasudus posted:I actually liked the starfield hacking thing. What I didn't like was how mandatory it was because unlike in Skyrim the ability to unlock things wasn't in direct opposition to other skills I wanted. I could just level my lockpick up by picking locks and eventually pick the highest locks. In Starfield I have to invest like 3-4 points (I forget which) because there are no 1-100 skill levels in individual skills anymore, and now I don't have those points to make shooty bits or flying bits easier. one of the biggest complaints in skyrim was lockpicking being useless because you could theoretically open every lock at once.
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Mar 6, 2024 22:20
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It'd be cool if there were ways to open locks for non-thief characters in TES6. Like maybe if you were really strong you could break them open. Or have a spell that you could cast if you were a mage. Or even just unlock scrolls you could buy. Alas the technology just isn't there yet.
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Mar 6, 2024 22:39
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Trillhouse posted:It'd be cool if there were ways to open locks for non-thief characters in TES6. Like maybe if you were really strong you could break them open. Or have a spell that you could cast if you were a mage. Or even just unlock scrolls you could buy. Same principle, but Starfield has a crafting bench and doesn’t have “thermite” or “a big fuckin drill”. FTL travel, but there’s no way to get through a lock besides looking though a monoscope and doing a one dimensional tangram.
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Mar 6, 2024 23:05
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The lockpicking thing (and really the combat in general) are always one of those things that lives in that area of tension between "what you, the player, can do in this action game" and "what your character in the RPG that this ostensibly is can do" I didn't mind the lockpicking thing but that's because I didn't mind it as a puzzle, not because it actually made sense in the context of....anything else, and even then I ended up in a spot where the only things I was lockpicking was "that one door in that one outpost layout that let you shortcut the way where you didn't pick the lock", because only specific handpicked-to-have-loot boxes had anything worth doing the lockpicking for in the first place. (I was also raised on fuckin' DX:HR hacking so my capacity and patience for some truly bullshit repetitive hacking minigames is un/fortunately pretty high) And that said, I also don't disagree that they probably should pick a lane and stick to one direction or the other-- either it's a player skill check like in Skyrim where your character stats don't really matter if you're good at it, or it's a character skill check where it succeeds or fails by interacting with it and doesn't gently caress you around with a minigame
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Mar 6, 2024 23:34
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Ursine Catastrophe posted:And that said, I also don't disagree that they probably should pick a lane and stick to one direction or the other-- either it's a player skill check like in Skyrim where your character stats don't really matter if you're good at it, or it's a character skill check where it succeeds or fails by interacting with it and doesn't gently caress you around with a minigame
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Mar 6, 2024 23:46
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Ursine Catastrophe posted:
I would play a game that was just the HR hacking minigame though- you were balancing detection chance vs rewards, and when you were detected it was a scramble to get to the goal while delaying the trace. You had to level up for certain locks but the game itself changed and had you weighing odds and making interesting choices. Starfield’s lockpicking is: 1)Do you have enough skill points. IF YES 2)gently caress you, takes longer. E: Talkie Toaster posted:The obvious midpoint though is “auto-succeed anything lower than your skill level, auto-fail anything above, only do the minigame for things your level”. It’s so odd they force you to do the easy ones you can do trivially over and over again. And that the higher level ones, once you learn the pattern which is very fast, arent harder and just take longer. Even before you learn the pattern, there’s no pressure so you can just line up all the rings without having to balance anything.
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Mar 6, 2024 23:48
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Talkie Toaster posted:The obvious midpoint though is “auto-succeed anything lower than your skill level, auto-fail anything above, only do the minigame for things your level”. It’s so odd they force you to do the easy ones you can do trivially over and over again. Jets n Guns had a vaguely Fallout -style hacking mini game. Except you could always try your luck with "auto hack" on containers. The gimmick was that every time you succeeded on a manual hack it would increase the success rate of the auto hack.
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Mar 7, 2024 05:32
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Looks like the patch is supposed to fix stuff in your Atlantis house(s) getting deleted during quest chains. Not that anyone who already got burned by that is going to risk it again, but it'll save newbies some grief. Didn't see any mention of the empty spaceships bug getting fixed, surprised that one hasn't been fixed yet when modders have already tracked down the cause and it's a hard progress blocker on more than one quest.
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Mar 7, 2024 05:56
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I just solo'd the Crimson Fleet at the Key. That's the closest this game has got to actually being fun in a while. And honestly, it was only okay.
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Mar 7, 2024 06:00
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Chronojam posted:Jets n Guns had a vaguely Fallout -style hacking mini game. Except you could always try your luck with "auto hack" on containers. The gimmick was that every time you succeeded on a manual hack it would increase the success rate of the auto hack. Both hacking games are just Mastermind, really. But the progressively improving auto hack was brilliant on JnG, and that was a game from 2004. I don’t know why I haven’t seen anything do that in the ~20 years it’s been out, it stops you from getting truly sick of the hacking
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Mar 7, 2024 11:53
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Never heard of Jets n Guns. Why does a side scrolling shooter have a hacking minigame?
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Mar 7, 2024 12:00
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Rinkles posted:Never heard of Jets n Guns. Why does a side scrolling shooter have a hacking minigame? You can find crates in the levels and open them after in the between mission screen. It’s usually for more money for jets and/or guns.
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Mar 7, 2024 12:09
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If Bethesda decided to make a game a single player Starfield/Fallout style game without this extreme level of inventory/item management, more similar to Far Cry 6 where you just collect components and the game just counts them and you use them or don't use them when you want to, would it piss off the Fallout fanboys or would we adapt? There would still be a big difference in character building and storytelling between Fallout and other open world games. It feels like this is now very much a drain on everything else in their games? It just feels like the answer to "why can't these games just...?" is always related to "Well, the game also has to keep up with 1,000 dinglehoppers, so it's just too much..."
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Mar 8, 2024 20:37
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It's never really about the mechanics or the crafting or the combat or anything else. I mean, it's what we latch onto to gripe about after six months because its' what we've got to chew on, but that was never the real problem. If you have a story that's engaging and interesting people will forgive all kinds of bullshit. GOG is full of old, beloved titles that have an amazing amount of just garbage mechanics. Hell, there are some recent games that everyone loves that have basic mechanics that can best be described as "yep they're there." Witcher 3 and Ghost of Tsushima are both, at their core, pretty uninspired as far as the minute to minute gameplay goes. It's not bad, in fact it's even pretty good, but it's not redefining poo poo. But those games are absolute loving bangers because they've got stories that really, REALLY loving land. Starfield's story is bland as gently caress even by Bethesda standards.
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Mar 9, 2024 00:05
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Cyrano4747 posted:It's never really about the mechanics or the crafting or the combat or anything else. I mean, it's what we latch onto to gripe about after six months because its' what we've got to chew on, but that was never the real problem. Yeah, but if you're just looking at just the story, Fallout 4's story was pure poo poo, but there was still fun to be had there if you ignored the story. Like your not wrong an engaging story will often let people ignore a lot of boring or jank mechanics, but the opposite is also true. The main thing is you need to at least land at least something to keep people playing. Bethesda has been leaning heavily on mechanics for a while now which is probably why people are focusing on that more. Not including DLC and side quest was Morrowwind the last thing the made which story was good?
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Mar 9, 2024 00:45
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I would kill all of you for the chance to play Witcher 3 for the first time again
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Mar 9, 2024 00:46
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Cyrano4747 posted:It's never really about the mechanics or the crafting or the combat or anything else. I mean, it's what we latch onto to gripe about after six months because its' what we've got to chew on, but that was never the real problem. I mean it's a salient point - my first playthrough of Witcher 3 was last year, and I actually didn't care for the combat very much (I felt it got better in the late game but by then I was an overtuned murder monster so that might've helped) but once I started I couldn't put it down because holy poo poo
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Mar 9, 2024 00:47
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tadashi posted:If Bethesda decided to make a game a single player Starfield/Fallout style game without this extreme level of inventory/item management, more similar to Far Cry 6 where you just collect components and the game just counts them and you use them or don't use them when you want to, would it piss off the Fallout fanboys or would we adapt? It's a tricky question because Bethesda made its name in part because of the stupid itemization. Morrowind was the first game where you could break into someone's house and steal their forks and people loved that, even though it's utterly meaningless and selling all that trash you pick up barely gets you any money. It turned into an amazing synergy for Fallout because all that trash suddenly was gold and it made perfect sense in context, but the idea that you can steal everything someone owns really tickles some people. And others just want to be interstellar garbageman who walks around with twenty tons of loot I guess. So yeah, they could streamline away items like so many other mechanics over the years and make a better game for it, but in doing so they would be losing some of the niche audience that came to them in the first place because they had nowhere else to go.
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Mar 9, 2024 02:04
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The combat in Witcher 3 never got good, and I never enjoyed it, but I eventually settled on a build that let me largely ignore it. (For me, personally, that was focusing on the medium armor that strengthens signs and doing all of my combat inside the slowdown field against functionality motionless enemies). I actually find the shooting and moment to moment of gunplay in Starfield is strong, but anything will wear thin after 100 hours tied to a bland story and a paper thin setting. See also: the end game of live service shooters when you're between expansions.
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Mar 9, 2024 02:51
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This game is about absolute content desert. Even the different kinds of landing points are just the same handful of things rearranged slightly. Spacers, Crimson Fleet and Ecliptic are all exactly the same with different color schemes. At least the Va'ruun carry unique weapons sometimes. It honestly feels like an old school Early Access game that should have a laundry list of poo poo they're going to add any day now.
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Mar 9, 2024 05:27
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isndl posted:It's a tricky question because Bethesda made its name in part because of the stupid itemization. Morrowind was the first game where you could break into someone's house and steal their forks and people loved that, even though it's utterly meaningless and selling all that trash you pick up barely gets you any money. It turned into an amazing synergy for Fallout because all that trash suddenly was gold and it made perfect sense in context, but the idea that you can steal everything someone owns really tickles some people. And others just want to be interstellar garbageman who walks around with twenty tons of loot I guess. To be honest I reckon they should ditch the packrat aspect of their games. Yeah it's funny to pick up every half-eaten sandwich and desk fan you can find, but what's the point? You've got limited carry weight, you've got (kinda) limited cargo storage, the inventory is a pain the arse to manage already, and even if you pick up valuable stuff, most vendors don't have enough cash to buy it. Which leads to the engaging gameplay of sleeping on a nearby bench for 48 hours so they can restock their cash. I know it's a Bethesda trademark, but like .. who cares? Especially if it's loving up the engine and the rest of the game. Jack B Nimble posted:The combat in Witcher 3 never got good, and I never enjoyed it, but I eventually settled on a build that let me largely ignore it. (For me, personally, that was focusing on the medium armor that strengthens signs and doing all of my combat inside the slowdown field against functionality motionless enemies). imo Witcher 3 combat is pretty decent, though not outstanding. I liked the whole "monster hunting" aspect where you typically needed to research the monster a bit, figure out their weaknesses, apply the right weapon oils, appropriate bombs, using the right signs and so on. By mid-game you're just bulldozing everything and it doesn't really matter, but that first act or so is great. Starfield could really have done with something like that. Actually make the starborn powers useful, crowd control, challenges that require more than "shoot for longer" to overcome. I know the combat is "fine" and not even close to one of the game's biggest flaws, but it could've been a lot more interesting than it actually is. Though I don't play a lot of shooters, maybe I'm wrong I guess?
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Mar 9, 2024 05:50
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dr_rat posted:Yeah, but if you're just looking at just the story, Fallout 4's story was pure poo poo, but there was still fun to be had there if you ignored the story. Like your not wrong an engaging story will often let people ignore a lot of boring or jank mechanics, but the opposite is also true. The main thing is you need to at least land at least something to keep people playing. Bethesda has been leaning heavily on mechanics for a while now which is probably why people are focusing on that more. Not including DLC and side quest was Morrowwind the last thing the made which story was good? Nick Valentine and Spunky Reporter are so much more memorable than... boring chick ( stroke ), boring chick ( snake ), gay semi-funny black guy ( the only passable companion who I can remember at least a few details about ), divorced cowboy, and no quest robot. For those who've played this when it came out, a fun challenge for me has been to try and remember huge parts of the game or quests beyond vague details... and just none of it was interesting or memorable. Just hire new writers and let them do stuff.
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Mar 9, 2024 07:46
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Starfield: maybe some new mini games would fix it.
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Mar 9, 2024 08:09
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When's the last time Bethesda actually had a decent story with a vaguely interesting antagonist? Morrowind?
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Mar 9, 2024 09:20
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Azhais posted:When's the last time Bethesda actually had a decent story with a vaguely interesting antagonist? Morrowind? I think the F4 story and Kellog as an antagonist works pretty well. Then it all completely falls apart once you get inside the institute. Also has the issue of how the game doesn't handle playing as Nora anywhere near as well as Nate.
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Mar 9, 2024 09:33
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DancingShade posted:Starfield: maybe some new mini games would fix it. Not even a in universe Game Pig with some Ultima on it could save this mess.
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Mar 9, 2024 10:04
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