conciselyverbose @ conciselyverbose @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

Even though it was kind of mediocre (it would have been a lot better with the "modern" combat than the early counter spam version), boarding was one the best parts of black flag. Brutal to take all that away.

Skill ceiling is a concept completely independent of the players involved. It's a trait of the game itself.

A lower skill played having the game of their life playing way above and beyond the other players in the match is supposed to see the results that match that. A lower ranked player learning quickly and progressing faster than average is supposed to see results that reflect that. Having a great match and being nerfed because some idiot thinks it's broken for you to see the success that fair mechanics earn you isn't a good experience. Having your performances nerfed by rubber banding also keeps you from getting better by not having your successful and unsuccessful actions provide the consistent feedback correct mechanics do. On top of that, it completely destroys the matchmaking mechanics by not having the outcome be the rout it's supposed to be when one player is significantly better.

Rubber banding is not a valid solution to any problem in any context. It's proof that you don't understand anything about games.

If you could magically identify smurfs, you could just put them at the level they should be or ban them without putting them in a match. There's no such thing as rubber banding that only affects cheating.

A meaningful skill gap resulting in a rout is the whole point of a competitive game. It's the definition of a competitive game. It's why people are playing. Go play a casual game with a low skill ceiling it that's what you want to play. Don't play a game with a high one then demand that they break it.

There is no possible scenario where rubber banding can ever be better than dogshit game design. The core concept is incompatible with sound mechanics. The person playing better is supposed to get better results.

Games can be fun to play for reasons besides ‘did you win.’

They're fun when they're fair. They're not fun when they're not fair. Losing fairly is part of the experience. Losing unfairly isn't. Winning unfairly isn't.

Rubber banding isn't unconditionally horse shit game design in every context because of the end result. It's because it fundamentally breaks the mechanics of the game. A high skill ceiling isn't a design flaw. It's the entire purpose of the game.

I don't really care about ranking (or play the kind of leaderboard stuff that uses it) so I can't comment on implementation. I think it's genuinely hard to do in team competition environments, though.

I know with certainty it's extremely hard to do in heavily team based sports like football and basketball, because that I do pay attention to. Maybe MoBAs are closer to baseball where even though it's a "team" sport, you actually can isolate out parts reliably enough to measure effectively, but I don't play them to know for sure.

I just find any and all rubber banding (an opt in "skill handicap" casual mode is fine; dynamically changing it mid game just makes everything feel like horseshit) a truly nauseating excuse for terrible design.

I can't imagine anything less fun than playing way better than someone and losing because of trash rubberbanding nonsense to make games more "fun". Or anything more hollow than getting murdered and "winning" anyways for the same reason.

Fuck all of this.

Rubber banding shit to make skill mismatches still competitive is a dogshit excuse for game design that completely and utterly destroys the integrity of competition.

While I have no issue seeing them sell a license for a controller to even a niche market, the idea that they give said niche market the inside scoop on their internal roadmap is wild.

I thought the first one was great.

You're probably right that they were going to get sucked into GaaS and ruin it, but the first one was really fun. The frame around it was weird, but the actual modes worked really well with the mechanics.

So I'm assuming that means that they're admitting that they put a safety hazard in all those prior cars and are assuming liability for every accident where infotainment systems may have been involved, right?

It's a really good, well done stealth game that rewards very deliberate action and awareness of your surroundings. The multiplayer in the original was unique and really fun.

It's definitely full of sarcasm. But playing fair buried in that sentence is still implying that they don't have an explicit obligation to close the hole.

They're playing perfectly fair.

They don't owe anyone continued exploit access.

I really enjoyed CJ Archer's Glass and Steel series (and the Glass Library so far). So when I saw Scribd Everand had her Ministry of Curiosities series on audiobook last week, I jumped right on it. I'm really enjoying it 2.5 books in. Victorian England is a fascinating setting, but a lot of books trying to replicate the style just aren't that pleasant to read. Archer does a good job of using it without shoving it in your face by over explaining, and her magic is presented in a way where staying in the shadows is plausible.

Archer and Sherry Thomas's Lady Sherlock series are interesting to me because I like the story telling and character development, but they both handle the setting in a way that doesn't just ignore how actually awful the era was for women. They put their characters in position to directly clash with the harsh restrictions of the society in compelling ways.

A colon after Godot would massively improve the legibility of that title.

It's pretty fast. I play on hard for most games, and here that means you're reasonably lethal and enemies hit hard. There are encounters i've failed where I had to have an explicit plan to deal with the enemies prior to engaging (though I was probably also slightly under leveled) because of how fast the combat can be. It's not a perfect game, but they capture the Harry Potter "fencing duel" aesthetic of wand combat pretty well.

Overall, while I'm not a crazy Harry Potter fan (I've read all the books, but was older than most when I did, and have never actually sat down and watched any of the movies completely), the charm of the setting really shines through across the board. The writing, the implementation of Hogwarts and some of the other locations, the gear (while I wish it was more RPG-feeling in terms of stats and perks, it nails the look), the combat, everything from top to bottom. It's pretty clear the people who worked on the game are either big fans of the source material (movies, specifically) or at least did their research, because it completely nails the feel of the IP.

The downside is that that crazy densely packed setting is really demanding to implement, so there's a lot of loading (it tries to do it transparently, but if your hardware can't keep up you get spinning circle delays on opening doors) that has to happen. I didn't think it was bad overall in my 30 hours on steam deck (though traversing Hogwarts with 3-5 second door loads a couple times in quick succession can be frustrating), but tolerance for performance varies.

The enemy variety is mediocre, but there aren't that many 3D games with compelling magic combat, and Hogwarts does a decent job of it. I would have liked to see a little more variety in the spells/upgrades and the gear, but the decisions they made do fit the theme and work pretty well.

Wait, no physical sales on console, no steam on PC?

It depends on the game.

What the Xbox calls "haptic feedback" is pretty damn close to just "on" and "off". The Switch blows it out of the water, and the PS5 is way better than the Switch. It feels equivalent to a pretty high quality sound effect transmitted through your hands. Forbidden West, as an example, uses it to provide "audio" cues for a wind up power attack with multiple release times for different actions. It adds an incredible amount of thoughtless control, without taking away from the game's audio, and enables incredibly responsive combat. It's a very rich stream of information.

The adaptive trigger are on top of that. You can map partial vs full pulls on other controllers via steam input on PC, but actually executing that consistently is difficult for most people. The PS5 controller allows you to actually set a physical breakpoint for a partial pull, or pull through for a different action. It also allows even more information to be communicated through the amount of resistance on the trigger.

I think it's really unfortunate that the launch coincided with Covid killing in store console demo units. Getting hands on with Astro's Playroom would have showed a lot of people just how insanely impressive the tech is.

It doesn't even have gyro, and that's ancient at this point lol. Let alone the adaptive triggers that are entirely game changing or the way the vibration allows for extremely precise haptic feedback.

Many PS5 games are massively worse with any other controller.