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Jack Trades posted:FFX is the most boring game I have ever played and I have suffered through 30 hours of it become one of my friends kept insisting that "it gets good soon". FFX "gets better" once you leave the first island where you meet all the main characters I'd say. You get some more control then, there's more characters to interact with, and the story actually gets going. Which means 30 hours in you're well past it. I think the next "it gets better" point would be shortly after the Calm where you get a bunch of revelations. But that's more of a story/stakes ramps up thing, it doesn't change the game fundamentally. After that there's the point where the map opens up and you get your usual airship. None of them are going to change your mind unless your complaints were specifically "the story is a little slow" or "I wish I had more freedom". The point after Calm might be a point where you like it better because it recontextualizes the story and characters, but if you're truly bouncing off probably not. Jack Trades posted:Do any of the Final Fantasy games hold up if I strongly disliked FFX's characters and story? FFX is the best entry in the series IMO and it fits into the general style of FF games so... probably not. I'd say if the characters and story were a problem then any of the FFs from 7 onward are going to be a similar problem. You might like some of the earliest FFs because I think they are more story-light? You'd have to ask someone who played them though. John Murdoch posted:Supraland Crash is such a bummer. I knew going in it wasn't going to be as good as the base game, but it's worse in an almost scientifically precise way where every aspect is exactly 65% worse across the board. I got stuck in Supraland and quit it. It was just after the point where you make a health drought by putting a wet sponge and a red seed into an underground device. Past there you can get into an area where there's a barred window and if you do it a certain way the door closes behind you and there appears to be no way forward. Or back. Phigs fucked around with this message at 22:13 on Jan 2, 2023 |
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Jan 2, 2023 22:00
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kazil posted:The way back is completing the zone and getting the device in it. You are stuck on purpose. Ah I looked up a walkthrough and I didn't realize you could jump across that gap.
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Jan 2, 2023 22:43
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Bad Seafood posted:Dishonored had a playtester get stuck on the costume party level because a guard told him (Corvo, the assassin) he wasn't allowed to go upstairs. I feel like focus groups should have access to a video lets play they can load up if they get stuck because that's the actual real world conditions. The real test should be whether the player likes the game enough to hit up the walkthrough or if they're just done the moment they get stuck, and how they feel after having seen how to do it in the walkthrough. I recently quit Supraland because I got stuck, but if I cared enough about the game I would have just looked it up. But because I wasn't really feeling the game in general I just gave up. You can fix me getting stuck, but that doesn't fix me not caring enough about your game. If anything you'll just bland it up and give me even less reason to like it. EDIT: Changed to playtesters to focus groups as it as more what I meant. Phigs fucked around with this message at 01:41 on Jan 8, 2023 |
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Jan 7, 2023 12:13
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Stux posted:your brain has rotted You don't think there's sense in having testers play under the same kind of conditions actual players will? My main point is it doesn't really matter if some small number of players get stuck because they can just look up a solution. If everyone gets stuck then yeah you've done something wrong. Or if when looking up the solution everyone's mad at how stupid it is or whatever. But if some small number get stuck it's probably better to just let them get stuck and look up the solution than it is to dumb down the game for everyone else.
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Jan 8, 2023 01:25
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:Or you can be like Valve What does that mean?
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Jan 8, 2023 01:36
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ymgve posted:pretty sure playtesters get told exactly what to do if they repeatedly get stuck, it is their job to test the full game after all Playtesters wasn't the right word, focus groups is what I was talking about.
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Jan 8, 2023 01:40
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A Bystander posted:I'm in the mood for a new game like Everyday Genius: SquareLogic. Is there one like it on Steam while also being relatively cheap? Here's a weird suggestion but https://store.steampowered.com/app/563200/Slay/. It's a territorial control game but it plays out like a hex-based puzzle game that for me light up the same brain cells as hexcells.
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Jan 12, 2023 19:58
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If you're easily frustrated Outer Wilds is not a great game for that IMO.
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Jan 15, 2023 13:36
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ErrEff posted:The rumor board in the spaceship can be helpful for guidance when feeling frustrated or stuck (particularly by telling you if there's more to see somewhere) but the core of the game is blind exploration and running into walls where it isn't always obvious what to do next. The worst is doing something you think should work only for it not to because you missed the small window in which it works or the path you needed randomly broke early.
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Jan 15, 2023 15:11
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Propaganda Hour posted:The annoyance from cliff racers comes down to two things: new players that get mobbed by them with a weapon skill that can't hit for poo poo, and mid- to late- game players that are trying to rest but can't because a racer is stuck on geometry somewhere nearby. It doesn't help that there's trees and rock spikes that cliffracers get caught on all over the place. They definitely made use of the third dimension in that game.
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Jan 16, 2023 17:30
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Cowcaster posted:for all the negative press blowing up about it, it looks like forspoken's sitting at #2 on steam's "top sellers" list. AAA Marketing budgets are higher than the development budget for a reason.
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Jan 23, 2023 20:06
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Sab669 posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cR8GVePOdpY Man I love it when first thing I'm shown is a complete pain in the rear end enemy in a highlight of what to expect in a game. "Disorienting their prey" You mean me, you mean you put an enemy in your game that disorients me. "Can even shift through the floor to avoid damage!" Cool. Cool. I love undamageable phases AND enemies that shift about. It looks too horror-focused for me to like it anyway so no loss I guess.
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Jan 27, 2023 07:10
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sirtommygunn posted:Yeah the anime warriors games are the ones with decent gameplay and the rest are trash. Which one specifically should you get if you want to try out those kinds of games and don't care too much if they're anime. I've just always been curious about these games but couldn't deal with Dynasty Warriors 8's jank PC port.
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Jul 12, 2023 01:06
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Relax. They weren't attacking your precious animes, they were just trying to feel out if a purchase was right for them.
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Jul 12, 2023 05:45
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Captain Invictus posted:eh, that's pretty important for new customers. "does this affect the experience of a new player or not" is a pretty good metric for invalidating mass reviews like this, someone hopping in now would never notice the missing content, as opposed to games that get review bombed for adding a patch that literally breaks the game or bricks a hard drive or something absurd like that that warrants it. Presumably they will be effectively hidden by not being the most upvoted reviews.
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Jul 12, 2023 19:49
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Gotta love it too when there's a save and a exit, but not a save + exit, and when you go to exit you get warned you will lose all unsaved data even though you saved literally half a second ago.
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Jul 18, 2023 01:56
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RPATDO_LAMD posted:Most gamers are smart enough to not spend any money on skin microtransactions, whether they're $20 or $5. They are just never going to pay real money for any ingame item, no matter how much you reduce it. That's why the concept of "microtransactions" failed and they're all macrotransactions now. Companies are adjusting the pricing to milk as much as possible out of the tiny minority who actually do pay. It doesn't help that a bunch of gamers see free to play as essentially a challenge mode that paying for things breaks.
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Jul 19, 2023 01:57
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Omi no Kami posted:Man, I've been enjoying my time with Dave the Diver but I'm not a fan of the way someone on the dev team went "What if we occasionally had an infuriatingly difficult QTE button-mashing thing?", and the other devs went "That's a terrible idea. We should have all the different infuriating QTE button-mashing things, and you should have to do them constantly." This mashing is the only reason I haven't bought the game and I'm glad goons warned me of it beforehand.
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Jul 21, 2023 17:54
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kazil posted:If it takes you 3 weeks to locate a fetish you might as well just give up bro But then how would I guard my home from evil spirits?
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Aug 9, 2023 13:39
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Sighence posted:Sure, but where on earth is the intersection of the Venn diagram of "I may buy this" and " I don't want to see this"? The intersection of games you might buy but wouldn't choose to be shown would include stuff that's heavily marketed and/or is part of the zeitgeist. Personally I've bought a couple games where I was pretty sure they weren't for me but I just kept seeing them and hearing people go on about them to the point that I wanted to see what the fuss was about. I especially have this habit of wanting to buy multiple things when I buy one thing. If I'm making a purchase I'll check my wishlist and whatever sales are on to see if anything interests me and maybe Steam will show me something and I'll go "sure lets check this game out I keep seeing everywhere". The more susceptible a person is to it the mere act of being shown something over and over could get someone to buy it eventually. Or maybe the game has a really interesting thumbnail or premise that makes a person buy it on impulse. Etc. Phigs fucked around with this message at 04:01 on Aug 10, 2023 |
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Aug 10, 2023 03:58
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mycot posted:I unironically think some games are more addictive than they are fun. The "I can stop any time I want" of video games. This is why I uninstalled Melvor Idle after playing it for 4 hours and still having fun. I could see where it was going and I don't need to be obsessing over numbers going up long after the novelty has worn off. Assepoester posted:Their decline has been rather precipitous ever since Warcraft 3 Remastered or thereabouts, and with all of the sexual harassment coverups and hostile workplace allegations and overall mismanagement (like Kotick personally sabotaging Overwatch 2 development) make it impossible for anyone to really defend them. In fact I'd say most of their fanbase has turned on them. I felt Blizzard was changed after playing Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm. Those games just felt off to me, not quite the Blizzard I knew. Like fan fiction. Phigs fucked around with this message at 04:40 on Aug 13, 2023 |
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Aug 13, 2023 04:34
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Huh. I guess I hadn't thought of it that way when I've seen that image before. "My life is a lie" really could be them them stating that what they do is less important to the perceived quality of games than they thought. I guess I'm so irony poisoned that I interpreted it differently. Now I'm not sure what to think.
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Aug 14, 2023 10:26
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That assumes he thinks his job is to make games better. I could easily believe he thinks his job is to make number go up. I mean, it's definitely why Ubisoft employ... well everyone they employ.
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Aug 14, 2023 10:46
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I guess I don't understand the problem. I don't know why you'd want to play a co-op game when your co-op partner isn't there.
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Aug 16, 2023 18:16
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Please nobody elaborate on the Pentiment spoiler even in tags. This discussion just made me earmark it for purchase this sale out of curiosity and I'm too broke-brained not to hover over spoilers.
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Sep 23, 2023 04:34
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HopperUK posted:I am constantly driven mad because character creators will lack a haircut that is just 'about an inch and a half long all over, slightly untidy'. You can be Fashion Anime Boy or you can be Stern Crewcut Boy but you can't just be a guy. Yeah I unironically hate the lack of the "I got a number 4 a couple months ago" haircuts and do not understand it at all.
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Sep 27, 2023 06:23
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ARPGs essentially have 2 audiences: the people who like the campaign, and the people who like the loot grind (and people who like both). This happened because they started out with Diablo 1 inspired by traditional roguelikes where the point of the game was to play through the 'campaign'. Diablo 1 was very much in this spirit, but it also had the level-gated Nightmare and Hell difficulties for multiplayer, presumably because they didn't have difficulty scaling for player numbers and they wanted to keep up the challenge for multiple people. There wasn't any real reason to play higher difficulties beyond this as the way leveling worked made higher levels kinda pointless and there was no new loot. Diablo 2 expanded on the higher difficulties, including it in singleplayer and actually adding in items that only dropped at higher levels and putting in a skill tree that benefited from higher levels. This essentially created a sub-audience who focused on high level builds and farming high level zones for loot for those high level builds. For these players the campaign was just something in the way. Eventually, across a decade, they became the largest audience of active Diablo 2 players because of course grinding focused players played the game longer and so Diablo 2 came to be seen as being all about the loot and high level builds. Enter the Diablo 3 team who were not at all the developers of Diablo 1 and 2 and so had to go look at what Diablo was all about. And what they saw was a bunch of people who treated the campaign as an obstacle to cross in the way to farming endgame. Diablo 1 and 2 had campaigns so they couldn't just drop that aspect but unlike the developers of Diablo 1 and 2 they didn't treat the normal campaign as a reason to play the game in and of itself, so we got a game with a campaign not worth playing for itself stuffed into in a game otherwise all about the endgame.
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Oct 5, 2023 05:52
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Orv posted:As mentioned earlier in the thread this isn't true at all and is weirdly revisionist or just only aware of post-RoS. D3 was extremely true to D2 at launch in the sense that the running the campaign on higher difficulties was more or less the endgame. It didn't have runewords to farm or anything like that though and basically lacked any substantial reason to do that unless you really wanted to make use of the RMAH. Endgame in release Diablo 3 was farming for gear at the highest level you could manage (well, buying from the AH was more efficient, either by grinding gold, running the AH, or using real money, but still...) so you could take on higher Torment levels. The Normal campaign was mind numbingly easy and didn't really become worth playing until at least Nightmare. I wasn't saying release Diablo 3 had its current endgame, only that the endgame it had was the focus, which was evident in how easy Normal was. In Diablo 2 you could have a bunch of fun just running the Normal campaign because it was a decent challenge in its own right, whereas Diablo 3's was a warmup to the real game of grinding higher difficulties.
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Oct 5, 2023 06:33
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Orv posted:Ah okay I misunderstood you. Yeah the first run of the campaign was an absolute snooze fest (and we'll leave out how I feel about how D2 handles higher campaign difficulties, it's more heresy from me) and then it was just grinding really uninteresting gear forever. I still think D3 is the pinnacle of how ARPGs feel to play, maybe a case to be made for Lost Ark but it fumbled basically everything else. Have you played Diablo 4? I've heard people say the same kind of thing about that game's gameplay which is a shame because I agree that Diablo 3 had really awesome base mechanics and if Diablo 4 is even better that's saying something. I wish they could deliver that in a better overall package.
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Oct 5, 2023 06:42
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Zereth posted:I am pretty sure "Torment" didn't exist before Reaper. It went Normal, Nightmare, Hell, and The Italian Word For Hell for difficulties. Ah, true. Weird that I played more during when it was Inferno but still got Torment stuck in my head instead.
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Oct 5, 2023 09:30
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John Murdoch posted:That cat was already well out of the bag within Diablo 2's lifespan, if not immediately upon the shift from D1 to D2. I have never once heard someone talk about an ARPG's moment to moment tactical merits. I'll try to explain this. Playing a melee class in Diablo 2 (solo, self-found, minimal/no grinding, no excessive potion spam) means a lot of mob manipulation and spacing. You're often a little too weak to just sit inside enemy mobs and swing away so you're constantly positioning to keep 1-2 enemies on you so the rate of incoming damage is manageable. Plus dodging projectiles, LOSing ranged enemies, killing high priority targets, and splitting up really tough groups. Strategies like drawing out melee so you can leap attack or charge onto a high priority target and survive. Whirlwinding the edges of mobs so you survive. Just all kinds of positioning and mob manipulation tactics that come from the enemies being challenging but not overwhelmingly so. That's the tactical aspect I found it a lot of fun in Diablo 2. Ranged has similar things with kiting and shaping enemy mobs for your AoE and whatnot but I personally found it a little less compelling. Still fun though. Diablo 3 ruined if for me because it was so binary. You either stomped everything or you got 1-shot, often from off-screen. There was no sweet spot like Diablo 2. And the only moving you had to do was to dodge 1-shots or bullshit on the floor. Moving because some bullshit is on the floor is so much less compelling than moving to manipulate the enemies in the same way that quicktime events are less satisfying than actual combat mechanics.
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Oct 5, 2023 17:26
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John Murdoch posted:[...] Either that or they're such a fundamental aspect of normal play that I don't even perceive them as interesting tactics. It's like praising a shooter's deep tactical choices because you have to reload your guns and take cover. It's not that it doesn't add anything at all, but it's kinda just there by default. [...] Yep that's pretty-much it. There's a default tactical fun to an ARPG as long as the game is balanced well enough and the encounters are varied enough to keep the feeling fresh throughout the game. Diablo 2 is the shooter equivalent of a standard FPS while Diablo 3 is like the shooter equivalent of a shooter where you can just run around shooting and ignoring incoming damage until oops you definitely have to use only cover and can only pop in and out or else you'll die, and sometimes you get a grenade notification and have to move to a different bit of cover. It stripped out all the middle section where the actual interacting with the mechanics of movement and space and enemies takes place.
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Oct 5, 2023 20:19
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Call Your Grandma posted:more villains should do this imo Only if they're written well.
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Oct 6, 2023 00:36
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Rinkles posted:I thought this was animetized Doc Mitchell at first. Glad I'm not the only one.
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Nov 8, 2023 00:34
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I'm a little over capitalist misery themes in games personally. Specifically light theming, if you're willing to go all in like Disco Elysium then I'm all for it. But if you're just pasting in a theme of oh hey isn't the system you're working under pretty poo poo then I'd rather they didn't. They don't typically do anything new with the theme and just make games a bit miserable when they don't need to be. It's not enough for me to skip a game over though.
Phigs fucked around with this message at 01:03 on Nov 8, 2023 |
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Nov 8, 2023 01:01
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resistentialism posted:I actually never had much success playing quickly in risk of rain, and I had a lot of wins where I just kept collecting piles and piles of upgrades and managed to stay on top of the difficulty curve. I simply cannot stand the scaling of Risk of Rain. It's just a straight up red line for me. I tried in both 1 and 2 but nope, it's a game killer.
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Nov 10, 2023 07:33
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Azran posted:Grim Dawn's not just getting a new expansion in 2024, it's also getting a pretty great patch on November 16th. Sounds crazy. I bought Grim Dawn a while ago but haven't gotten around to it. Now I'm downloading Grim Dawn and turning off updates so I can play it before the changes and be able to compare the experience. Should be pretty interesting (to me anyway).
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Nov 12, 2023 09:11
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This might be the biggest instance of genre modernization I've ever seen happen to a game, especially this long after release. Can't wait for the expansion.
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Q-sixtysix posted:What's the consensus on Outward? It looks like the kind of game that I'd like but the reviews are mixed. Outward is janky and tedious. The main problem I had with it is that the combat is too janky to be so lethal when traveling back from your spawn point is so long and tedious. You can just take 1 hit you shouldn't have and it's now a 10 minute minute walk punishment. It's like the worst Dark Souls boss run but with combat that is both jankier and more lethal. One time I died and respawned and imagined the runback and just turned off the game and uninstalled. This was 17 hours in too so it wasn't like I didn't give it a chance. EDIT: Here's an interesting mechanic: If you use stamina you burn maximum stamina. Running uses stamina. So if you don't walk everywhere you're burning your maximum stamina, making it harder to fight, or even impossible if you burn enough of it. There are ways to restore it like certain consumables or resting, but it's just a taste of how the game just does not give a poo poo about how much time it makes you waste traveling. Phigs fucked around with this message at 09:50 on Mar 12, 2024 |
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Mar 12, 2024 09:45
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The Steam these games have sprung a leak and a bunch of their prices came out. Get em now before we refill em sale.
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Mar 14, 2024 06:09
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Baldur's Gate 3 better be on sale that's all I'm gonna say.
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Mar 14, 2024 09:16
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