I think guild wars 1 you didn’t just pop on any clothing you found. One of the NPCs was even like “you think you can just pick up a jacket after you set the poor bastard on fire and stab him, and it’ll fit nice and snug? No. It won’t. Bring me materials and I’ll make armor that fits you”

Then gw2 was like "fuck it people like when items with cool colors pop out of monsters "

I thought the game was pretty okay. The romance with the detective lady was a little disappointing. The difficulty fell off a cliff pretty early on as a mage with life drain.

The arc with whatstheirface and their mother not accepting them seemed pretty plausible to me. I’ve got a friend going through something like that now. Seeing something like that in media is meaningful to people.

The loyalty mission prompt was kind of meh. I can see that they wanted loyalty missions, but it felt like they struggled to fit them in.

Overall it wasn’t quite the game I wanted, but it wasn’t bad.

I feel like how big I want the game to be is a weird quantum unstable value. When I’m interested in the game I want it to keep going. But at some point I lose interest, and I want it to wrap up. But usually I don’t want to skip content that’s at least okay, especially if it affects endings and other choices.

Like I enjoyed Veilguard, but there were bits near the end where I was losing focus and kind of wanted it to pick up the pace. There have been other games where I finished all the side quests but was like “that’s it? I want more”

Not sure how to square this circle. I don’t think procedural generated or AI content is quite up to the task yet.

I do think we’ll see a game that has AI content in the critical path in the next couple years though. You’ll go to camp and talk to Shadowheart, and it’ll try to just make up new dialogue. I don’t know if it’ll be good. There will probably be at some weird ass hallucinations that’ll become memes.

I mean… right now I’m using windows on my desktop computer because when I installed mint I encountered a bunch of problems (no Ethernet, no wifi, no HDMI out, crashes on steam games…)

I really wanted to use Linux, but the out of the box support just isn’t always there. I’m not using windows because I like or prefer it.

You’re almost certainly joking but also like … yeah everything has political subtext. A lot of Internet duds are just too stupid to read it.

I think most of the people mad on the Internet about this kind of thing couldn’t pass 12th grade English, and certainly not like a 200 level English Literature course.

I thought Warframe was a 3rd person looter shooter. What happened since I stopped playing??

I feel like as games and technology get more complex, the question of “Are we a company that makes an engine or a company that makes a game? Because doing both is hard” becomes more relevant.

I guess they have microsoft money now so they could probably hire a whole team and build a really nice engine to rival unreal, but they probably won’t. They can shovel whatever garbage out the door with “The sequel to skyrim” on it, and it’ll sell.

Also they’re kind of competing with themselves by also making Avowed.

… we should be breaking up these big companies.

Huh. That’s neat I guess.

My initial guess was it would somehow capture the energy from hitting keys. I guess that’s implausible? Too little energy without making the key press resistance too high?

I mean there’s a wide range of possibilities between “diablo 1, but you can walk faster in town” and “Diablo 1, with battle pass”

On the one hand, I have no interest in this. I already played the game.

On the other, as someone else said, if it makes dudebro duds mad then that might be worthwhile.

Morrowind. Every once in a while I reinstall it, but I can’t get over the “it looks like an action game but it’s a stats game” thing anymore. And I never liked Oblivion or Skyrim. But when I was a kid, Morrowind was so full of wonder and stuff to discover. I also wasn’t playing with a guide, so discovering stuff like “You can enchant an item to have 1-100 strength, duration permanent. It picks the bonus when you put the item on, and it stays that until you take it off. So put it on and off until you get a big number. Much cheaper than trying to enchant it to +100 straight out” felt more personal.

I don’t think I’ve ever purchased a battle pass and I don’t plan to. I think if a game I was interested in offered one, I’d consider just skipping it.

If no one bought the things they’d stop making them, but that is an impossible idea.

I’ve been playing it and enjoying it. It could be better. Most games could. I had kind of low expectations, honestly. I’m glad it’s a single player game with no live-service and no season-pass. I’ll probably play it a second time. Runs kind of like crap, so I might play it again in the distant future where I have better hardware.

I imagine a lot of internet duds are mad about how there’s a queer subplot, but they can go fuck themselves. Unfortunately, this creates a problem where if some random guy is bashing it I have to try to suss out if they’re really just mad about queer stuff. It’s hard to tell. And because we’re all just emotional idiots, some people might be mad about the queer stuff and not realize it, and the words that come out of their mouth will be “boring characters”.

But also a lot of their games have problems. Mass Effect 3’s ending is so bad it has its own wikipedia page.

Guild Wars2 is very good.

It downscales your level if you go back to older areas, so you can play with lower level friends. (Though it’s still pretty generous, and the high level friends will be more effective). So if your friends aren’t playing much, you can still coop with them when they do play.

There’s a lot of content. Most of the maps have stuff just happening. There’s also instanced content for 5, 10, or … I think private convergences can go up to 20?

There’s not really a gear grind. When you hit max level (which is pretty easy) good-enough gear is very easy to get. A smidge better than that is a little expensive but still very feasible. The fanciest gear is numerically the same, but let’s you reskin and swap stats for free, which is nice.

I think having areas with weaker or stronger enemies is fine. Good, even. So long as you can tell by looking at them what you’re getting into.

Dark Souls generally does this. A rotting skeleton is a low threat. A giant knight in black armor and man sized sword is a bigger threat.

Oblivion will often have dudes that visually and behaviorally are the same, but hit way differently because of the numbers assigned to them. You can’t really look at a scene and understand what you’re getting into.

Other games also do a bad job here. Borderlands for example will have identical looking bandits, but in this area they’re indestructible level 100, and that one they’re push over level 5. The ass-creed Viking one did the same thing. Archers on one side of the river you could ignore, but the far side would one hit you.

I think a lot of studios don’t want to invest in the extra art assets and stuff when it’s cheaper to just use the same monster model and assign it different numbers.

I feel like trying to combine

• high vertical power growth
• non linear “open world”
• power fantasy

all together is just fundamentally at odds with itself.

Personally I’d prefer to see less vertical power growth. I’d rather have the numbers stay somewhat constrained.

Like, let’s say the most damage you can ever do with a lightning spell is 100. Work backwards from that to figure out how much health things should have. We want a master mage to be able to blow mooks up in one zap, mid tier in 3, and big scary shit in 6.

A novice mage zaps for 20. We want mooks to take 3 hits, mid tier stuff maybe 10, and big scary stuff a lot.

Mooks: ~60hp Mid tier: ~210 Bosses: 600

If your gameplay is then deeper than a simple stat check, a novice can persevere and win against a big challenge.

I really super dislike it when you have stuff that looks like a mook or a boss, but is statted otherwise. I remember in Oblivion some witch lady was oddly high level, and she kept fighting despite having like 50 arrows in her face.

Something like that, but with more thought put into it than a Lemmy post from the couch.

Oblivion was kind of really bad though. It had the worst level scaling of the genre.

I think the spell crafting was also toned down and more gated than Morrowind. And the equipment I think was overly simplified.

I… I played a lot of guild wars 2. It’s a good game!

But about 40 games total. I don’t want to be a mono-gamer so that’s nice.

Nine Sols is squarely in the “good but not fun” category for me. It is well executed but I did not enjoy most of it. Also the story is a bummer.

I reinstalled Sekiro after finishing it to see if my memory was rose tinted. No, sekiro is still like music. Even cleared the “you should lose this fight” tutorial boss.

Path of Exile 2 is pretty good. Wasd movement and a dodge roll are nice. Some parts are still rough, but it’s been out like a month.

I don’t really trust that just anyone will make something new and fun. Something that tries to extract money, sure.