ampersandrew @ ampersandrew @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

Nah, even out of the gate, it's done far better than the likes of Punch Planet, for instance. They just made a good game, and people paid attention; perhaps not as much attention as they wanted or needed. If you ask me, they appeared to have started overscoping once they got their initial success. The Salt Mines mode seemed like a big money sink that had a detrimental effect on the matchmaking, for one.

It did better than most.

To be fair, it was always priced accordingly, and it wasn't in "early access", even though they still had something to deliver there. What they delivered for the story mode for this game had some really neat ideas that I'd love to see other fighting games steal from them. It also lacked a compelling call to action and got bogged down with traversable area maps with NPCs that you could talk to for no benefit or interesting story reasons.

Really? There's not much to get. It's just turn-based but harder to wield, in most cases. PoE just assigns lengths of time in seconds to particular actions rather than turns (or "rounds") like old D&D games did. You can also set the game to auto-pause when certain events happen, like when a spell is done casting or a target is killed, so that you can immediately assign a new action when the thing happens.

I'm going through the story mode of Backpack Hero, and I wish it was better. If I get too frustrated with being unable to tell how to progress, maybe I'll just stick to the classic roguelike mode. It does do a decent job of walking you through the various play styles the game offers though.

I started and finished Cocoon. It's a puzzle game that works a bit four-dimensionally, but it's also a very linear experience, so even though it seems like there are so many options in front of you that you can never figure it out, they actually keep the possibility space small and manageable. I can't imagine what the QA effort must have been like to make sure that you didn't get yourself into an unwinnable state, but they seemingly pulled it off.

I started Starfield. $54 on sale felt like a good price. It meets expectations for what you're getting out of a Bethesda game, with the exception of a lack of city maps (which I knew going into it was a complaint, but I really feel that criticism now). It's still early goings, but I'm enjoying it so far. I mostly had to put it down for Thanksgiving weekend, because I knew I'd have games that would run better on the Steam Deck while I was out of town.

Wargroove 2 has been a satisfying continuation of Wargroove so far. No complaints. It scratches that Advance Wars itch, arguably better than Advance Wars itself.

Speaking of which, in an effort to start carving through my RPG backlog and prevent myself from starting another long playthrough of Baldur's Gate 3, I started a game I picked up on sale this week, Pillars of Eternity. I never picked this one up back in the day due to its real time with pause mechanics, which always felt like a sloppier way to handle an RPG than just doing real time or turn-based. I still stand by that, but at least the game's mechanics seem to work with it in a way that matters with its "interrupts" where the casting time of each ability really matters. I'm still very early on in this one too, but the game does me the favor of showing me all of the dice rolls like any good CRPG should so that I can start to deduce the things I should be prioritizing. I want to get through this game and its sequel before Avowed comes out, since it's set in the same world.

It's worth remembering that the business model always affects the game design. 6th gen consoles were arguably the most "pure", since obtuse games with strategy guide and hint hotline revenue streams were just about dead thanks to free GameFAQs, and DLC had yet to be introduced. Still, their incentives were to cheaply make as much "value" as they could, which meant churning out levels so that they could put a higher number on the back of the box for how much content you got for your $50 (a little over $80 in today's money). They also knew there was a good chance people would rent the game and decide to buy it off of that experience, so the best content was typically front-loaded, and then you'd get a lot of padded levels in the later parts of the game. It was rare that I would finish games back then, because often times a game would start strong and then end up filling big rooms, that look a whole lot like earlier big rooms, with trash mobs repeating the same simple loop over and over.

LODs take up a lot of space. If it were just a matter of compression, everyone would be compressing their assets. In this case though, Tekken is going to have a lot of story mode cutscenes that wouldn't have a prayer of running in real time on modern hardware, much like MK.

The last one was PS4 though. I agree it's unnecessary, but it's not the exact same system.

Platform lock-in sucks, and it would be nice if a ruling on one of these became legal precedent so that console players also got a choice on their digital purchases.

Yeah, but we already know what those are. These games that we didn't buy yet are new to us and, therefore, shiny.

One of the worst protagonists in all of video games, but it is also a lot of fun.

The night prior, current and former Epic Games employees told Polygon, a mystery meeting got added to everyone’s work calendar. There was no information included, except for a directive: Cancel any meetings that conflict with this one, because this one is mandatory. “I jokingly messaged my team and was like, ‘I don’t feel good about this meeting. Is this how we find out we’re all getting fired?’”

Yeah, that's the only thing a meeting like that ever means. Not in games, we got one of those where I work too.

I don't think you actually let your friend fail and try to figure out how to not fail, and I don't think it makes the game better when you're so afraid of letting the player fail and apply what they've learned that there aren't actually any decisions to make, like those Sony examples (God of War and Horizon's latest entries, to be specific, were the ones that caught flak for this). That's where the fun comes from.

I don't recall any tutorials explaining anything beyond the cursory "you have to be in range to attack"

And that's all you need to know in order to determine that positioning matters. They also explain opportunity attacks.

The tutorial titled "Combat" simply tells you that there's an initiative roll, combatants are listed at the top of the screen, and during a turn, a character may take an action, bonus action, and move.

Which are a few of the things you said your friend was unaware of, despite the fact that several of these things are reiterated on most of the cards for your available actions during combat.

I've been playing Larian games for a long time and I don't remember a single one of BGIII, DOS2, or DOS ever explaining these concepts.

Me neither, but even in my brief time with DOS1, I don't recall needing to be told either. I just somehow found out that poison clouds can be set on fire, and very quickly.

This is not an insult to your friend, but just because he falls into the group that didn't catch on immediately, I don't think that's indicative that the game is bad at teaching you how to play it. The Nautiloid highlights exactly where you have to go and how many turns you have to do it. If you let him fail once and try again, presumably, he'd realize that what he was doing wasn't working and notice that giant UI element telling him how many turns he had to get to his objective.

We had to explain it to him.

This line strikes me as curious. Were you playing co-op together for his first time through? There are a lot of tutorials in the early game that explain so much of this stuff that you have to explicitly dismiss that they're hard to miss...unless you're in a discord call with some friends. And did you have to explain it to him, or was that just the first opportunity he had to raise the question, and you answered right away without him having time to figure it out himself? Did he ask you because he found the game difficult, or did you just tell him without him even asking because you observed that he wasn't using his movement? The opening moments of the game actually require you to use your movement in turn based combat in order to continue, and you can observe which enemies can reach you or not as you approach your objective.

If your friend really had this hard of a time learning that without trying to see how to overcome the challenge by just doing anything else besides what didn't work, it sounds like the type of person that Sony gets for their play tests that tells them they need to give an answer to a puzzle after looking at it for only a few seconds. I don't know that you can onboard that person without frustrating everyone else, other than easy mode, which BG3 does have, and it tells you what kinds of expectations it has of you on that screen.

I agree that fighting games haven't made it where they need to be yet. In fact, I've only ever found one that explains how to defend against a command grab, which is a very basic thing they should be doing better. As you agreed though, they're getting a lot closer, with a lot of intermediate steps along the way.

I disagree that the teaching tools are insufficient if they never teach you about something like positioning in Baldur's Gate. For one, you can observe that your opponents are doing so, and you can observe which things that makes easier or harder for you and why, like now it's harder for your melee character to hit them when they run away. That's way better than someone telling you about it, and it's better onboarding to not info dump all the rules at once.

I'm no D&D expert myself. I got through those other two BG games with a lot of frustration (and "narrative"/god mode for the last quarter of BG2), and pretty much the only things I didn't understand just from reading tooltips in BG3 were the numbers governing saving throw DCs and the to hit chance with certain spells.

Bottom 3 character

Nah, in most modern fighting games, the tier lists just don't matter. Whatever tiers exist in Strive are pretty tight these days, and they mostly always have been. You're good with whoever you like. I play a character with a white WA (Goldlewis), so I'm using it more as a neutral tool than a combo tool, but yeah, the general flow is just hit 1, hit 2, special move, red RC, then whatever's good for your character to juggle with. So since you're blessed with one of the game's best 6Ps, stain state confirms, and enormous buttons that win neutral against almost everyone, you're usually doing Slash, Heavy Slash, reaper, RC, and you can just about make up the rest and it won't matter much. You'll get that in no time. Go into training mode, practice it against a bot set to block after the first hit. Then when you've got that down, set them to block randomly so you can practice confirms.

The first two Baldur's Gates sure did, but not so much BG3.

Nah, BG3 rewards you for just doing more stuff. If you keep doing the things you find as you explore, you'll level up plenty. They also let you respec more or less any time you want after the first couple of hours.

Baldur's Gate 3 has a lot of mechanics to it, but it does a really good job of onboarding you in most of them. On character creation, or on leveling up, or anything where the game asks you to make a decision about how you've built out your character, there are tooltips to explain the mechanics. Mouse over it if you're on mouse + keyboard, or press Select or click in the right analog stick if you're on controller (it should tell you which one). It will explain everything you need to know there. But if you'd like to breeze past the character creation screen, you can choose an origin character, which are pre-made, or you can stick to basics. Choose a Fighter with 17 Strength if you want to do melee stuff. Choose a Rogue with 17 Dexterity if you want to do ranged attacks like bows. Choose a Wizard with 17 Intelligence if you want to do magic; magic uses "spell slots" instead of mana or MP, which basically just means you can use a spell that many times. When you get the option to choose a "feat", which is approximately every 4 levels, upgrade that primary attribute until it hits 20, which is the max. Whatever that attribute is (the ones I just listed for those classes), the higher it is, the more likely you are to hit with your attacks.

The gist of it is, when you find a complicated game, you can often just engage with it on the most basic level, and then once you master that basic level, you build on it a little bit at a time. BG3 is a long game, so you've got plenty of opportunity to master what you know before building on it; rinse, repeat. I've applied this same methodology to fighting games plenty of times as well, which many people would consider to be a difficult genre to learn. We got rid of game manuals a long time ago, so complex games have had to get better and better at teaching you how to play while you're playing.