ampersandrew @ ampersandrew @kbin.social

Posts

0

Comments

1,078

Joined

2 yr. ago

That's insane.

Cosmetic or not, it provides them an incentive to want to keep you online for multiplayer, so they're probably not in a rush to add a feature like LAN that's just plain better for the customer to have.

But not for multiplayer, correct? No LAN coming? I imagine they wouldn't want to let you play offline when it has the in-app purchases tag.

What country do you live in, if you don't mind me asking? One of those two consoles is just about ubiquitous among people who play video games in the US.

Do you have much crowd control in your party? Can you disable either him or his minions? Pay attention to what he is vulnerable to and what makes him vulnerable when he goes into that other state. Remember that you can inspect any enemy and see their buffs and what type of enemy they are. Perhaps you have special arrows strong against that type. Perhaps you have some spells that do a type of damage that works well against him.

Do you have any more info to provide for that fight without spoilers for others so that I can point you in the right direction? What's the issue you're running into in that fight?

You think that's the year the Epic store closes?

400 people across multiple countries and $100M spent on development doesn't count as AAA?

They almost certainly buy fewer things when the stuff they already have is designed to be played infinitely.

Careful with the spoilers. I've only done one trial so far, and it wasn't that one.

Yeah, I haven't seen any combo system. Following up a light with another hit is always that same jumping spin slash. If there's more depth there, the game didn't want to tell me about it. Likewise, when they had that developer direct, they said they were improving the combat system but with no description of how they were doing so; just a lot of fluff talk that was kind of about nothing. As for the puzzles, I like the ones that aren't just finding the symbols in the environment. Those puzzles can actually be reasoned out, as opposed to the symbols where plenty of things look like those shapes and they just picked one that they felt was the best fit for it, so I mostly just end up waiting for the game to inform me whether I'm hotter or colder as I get close to the magic spot.

This game also does something that I haven't seen many games do that always seemed like a natural evolution of story-driven games. The industry, operating at this level of production value, for the most part ended up going open world, even and especially for games that were better off being smaller and linear, and that's a real bummer. If you keep things small and linear, you can start loading the next scene while the current one is still playing, and then you can seamlessly cut to the next scene much like a movie would, but you get all the benefits of rendering the game in real time. This shouldn't be so rare, but the industry's obsession with being "bigger" made it rare.

I played a bit more Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice ahead of the sequel in a few months. There are a few major components to the game's core loop, and the one I'm not thrilled with is its hidden object puzzles, but the rest of it is working for me.

When I've got some podcasts to get through, Palworld has proven to be a great second screen game. There are some things I'd like to see them tweak about the progression, but they're very small complaints thus far. Ultimately, this game is working for me in a way that Pokemon hasn't in about 20 years.

I thought I would take a break from Pillars of Eternity after finishing the first game, because it did become quite exhausting late in the game, but after a discussion with some friends, I ended up excited to jump right into Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, and so far, it's answering nearly all of my issues with the first game. For one, more quests can be resolved by being clever and avoiding combat, plus when the combat does happen, it's far more readable. As a blessing from the gods themselves, the quest log also lets you know if a quest is too high level for you, so you know which content is intended for your current level without checking it out early and dying to an enemy mob in a few seconds.

Ahead of Combo Breaker, I'm also back on the Skullgirls grind. My Black Dahlia mix and setplay are weak, and I'm giving my opponents too many opportunities to take their turn back, so I need to tighten that up.

I thought the market was healing from live service, but it looks like we've still got a ways to go yet.

Volition surprised me by staying open as long as it did. It hadn't made a hit since Saints Row IV, and it had several high profile flops since then. I would have loved for Free Radical to finish making a type of FPS that doesn't get made anymore, but apparently they spent two years of that studio's life chasing Fortnite.

We're already looking at an exclusivity window for Final Fantasy reduced to just a few months, so here's hoping.

As I recall it, much more hype came from a squirrel witnessing sex with a bear.

I agree with you on the percentages, funny enough, and that's why it doesn't explain the game's success to me. If D&D was responsible, there'd be far more people picking up the enhanced editions of the first two games, Neverwinter Nights, etc., and the MMO would be way more popular. If it was 5e, Solasta would have set the world on fire years earlier. I just don't see it as the largest contributing factor when I've seen plenty of examples of people surprised to learn that the game is tied to Dungeons and Dragons after they've already started playing it.

D:OS2 sold several million copies btw. Maybe that doesn't quite count as mainstream, but it was already a healthy increase from what the first game sold, so they were trending up already.

What percentage of BG3 players do you think are/were tabletop D&D players before they played it? Because I'm betting the percentage is very low.

An order of magnitude doesn't mean anything when the market is much more than an order of magnitude larger.

It does, because who are you selling to if 90% of your audience never heard of the original thing?

If you don't know for an absolute fact that the primary reason that BG3 pushed Larian past niche into a blockbuster success is the IP, you don't know what you're talking about.

You don't see anything wrong with you asserting the opposite? It's not even sort of ambiguous? Yes it is! lol. The only way to prove otherwise would be to time travel back to 2017 and revoke the IP from Larian. D:OS2 already sold significantly more than its predecessor, and word of mouth was almost surely going to make their next game sell more than that too, and it turns out things like performance capture help to really pull people into a story-driven game. Most people who picked this game up probably couldn't even tell you that Baldur's Gate was a city and only knew that it had two previous iterations because this one has the number 3 in the title.

An order of magnitude is an order of magnitude. It's the same size no matter who portrays it. If you're comparing sales, it's always a huge difference. Doom, in the 90s, reached as many people as BG3 did today. That's largely because of the shareware model at the time, but that's how big BG3 is, and BG1 and 2 were nowhere near that. Speaking anecdotally, the thing that attracted me to BG3 had nothing to do with D&D and everything to do with the CRPG formula finally catching up to the production value of dialogue systems from games like Mass Effect, which are typically found coupled with a compromised RPG format, so being able to get both in one package has a lot of appeal.