Grim Dawn also has a mod called Reign Of Terror that lets you play the entirety of Diablo 2 in GD, complete with classes, skills and items! It has some differences because it's built on Grim Dawn's systems, so it has the dual-class system from Grim Dawn (with similarly laid out skill trees), item affixes work like Grim Dawn, etc, but it feels great to play! And you can combine Grim Dawn classes with D2 classes, D2 classes with other D2 classes, or just play the D2 campaign with a regular Grim Dawn build. It's great!
I heard about it when Skill Up, whose YouTube channel I have notifications turned on for, posted his review of it. Before that, I'd seen absolutely nothing about it, and I heard very little about it after that, too. I was shocked to find out it was an EA game - partly because it didn't look (visually) polished enough to be an EA game, and partly because of the complete lack of marketing I'd seen for a major publisher game.
Finding out it was an expensive flop and not just a smaller AA game they decided to put out on the side is a surprise, too.
that game is over for me once I've launched the rocket
Ahh, well that definitely isn't the case for me! I usually keep playing long after I've launched the first rocket. For me, launching the rocket is a somewhat arbitrary "ending"; it's a good objective for people to focus on - especially new players - but I don't think anything really changes before or after the rocket launch in terms of gameplay loop (and there's no narrative to change). Just like before the rocket launch, there are still things to optimise, new ways to build, etc, (some of which are supported by the science you get from launching rockets, in fact).
I suppose it partially comes down to whether you're an objective-driven player or someone who enjoys the process. For me, it's all about the process/journey, and the objectives are more of a guide than anything. If the objectives are complete and I'm still enjoying the process, and there's still room for me to enjoy the process, then I'll keep playing.
I can definitely think of quite a few non-live-service games with an "end game" that I've enjoyed:
(Older) Pokémon games with their battle towers, where putting together a flexible team with as few weaknesses as possible is the aim.
Loot games like Borderlands, Grim Dawn and Last Epoch where I want to make new builds and test their limits against harder and harder challenges.
Factorio, where I want to optimise my factory. Although there's absolutely an argument to be made that that is the game, but I think it becomes more about player-set goals once you've launched the rocket.
All of them are either offline or have offline modes available. All of them have potentially infinite "content" if you're the sort of person who like optimising, or just being able to set yourself new targets. They're all enjoyable to play for their "campaigns" alone, but they also have very strong sandboxes that players can continue to engage with even after the game stops giving them objectives.
I don't necessarily disagree with your overall sentiment, though. I think MMO-style "end games" where you login for your daily, time-gated quests and do the same thing you always do with no variation or sense of progression (be it narrative, emotional, build-related or some other kind of progression) isn't necessarily healthy. And I dislike the way "end games" have tended to move away from being optional post-game content for people who aren't ready to finish playing yet and instead are often viewed as the main game that you have to get through the sorry excuse for a campaign/story to access.
Not that your suggestion is necessarily bad in general, but I don't really think it's necessary when it comes to Factorio. I think it should be clear from playing the demo whether 100+ more hours of that seems worth the asking price for someone. It's probably the most representative demo I've ever played; the full game is just the demo but more. There are no surprises down the line. There are no random pivots to other genres, or the game trying to stick its fingers in too many pies. There's no narrative to screw up. There's no "oh, they clearly just spent all their time polishing the first hour of the game and the rest of it is a technical mess". It's the same gameplay loop from the demo for another 50 hours until you "win".
... and then another 50 hours after that when you decide to optimise things. And then another 100 hours when you decide to make a train-themed base. And then another 700 hours when you discover some of the mods that exist...
What's changed about Instagram? I'm not familiar enough to know, but I don't feel like I've heard anything all that controversial about it outside of Meta's general "pay to remove ads" thing. I certainly haven't heard anything about systemic enshittification like I have with Twitter, Reddit and TikTok; have I missed anything?
I hate that male artists do it, too. Spectacle and visuals are a part of live shows, of course, but I wish recorded music could stand on its own without relying on sex appeal or any kind of visuals in order to sell.
Even of that were true (which it may be), there are loot games and loot games. Personally, I want itemisation to make a meaningful difference to how my build feels to play and how it performs. I want to be able to have a unique/legendary item drop and think, "wow, I'm going to make a while new build around this".
Games where the loot is just +1 damage or 7% extra armour, and where there's no real depth to the loot, would be better off without loot, I think - I'd rather just see an armoury where I pick the weapon I want, and not have to deal with the loot scaling, enemy level scaling, etc. Save the looter aspects for games like Path Of Exile or Borderlands where loot is actually engaging and impactful.
And also just websites compressing images without the user getting any input. A meme that goes from Facebook to Twitter to Reddit to Twitter to Tumblr to Reddit to here will likely be compressed every time it gets reuploaded. Most social media sites use some form of image compression.
And it obviously doesn't help that artefacts from compression are multiplicative.
Mine, too! It really showcases the kind of narrative that is only possible with the interactivity of video games as a medium. If I could experience any game again for the first time, it'd be Outer Wilds!
Absolutely. I think perhaps my all-time favourite romance of any RPG is Parvati's from The Outer Worlds, where you play wingman and confidant to Parvati. It feels so much more fleshed out and intimate than any player romance has ever felt to me, despite the player only being an onlooker.
Branching dialogue and decision trees are great for letting players decide what actions to take, but I feel that giving players that level of freedom with their romantic relationships feels very limiting and shallow - especially when the player is given multiple romanceable NPCs to choose from. The fact that the player character is often a blank slate means it's impossible for there to be any real chemistry built up, too.
Give me railroaded romances between clearly defined characters where I can actually believe the characters are into each other, or give me no romances at all.
I'm not cheering for the layoffs, of course, nor am I necessarily in favour of monopolies and the consolidation of the gaming industry (although, in this instance, I think it's probably a positive thing for fans of Blizzard IPs). But layoffs during this kind of merger/buyout are expected. Microsoft has its own legal departments, payroll departments, marketing departments, etc, and while they might need expanding slightly as the company grows/absorbs new companies, they don't need an entire second company's worth of those departments.
These layoffs were about cutting redundancy rather than just chasing short-term profits. It sucks for the people who were laid off either way, but I think it's good to be realistic about why they happened.
It seems like targeting vaping at children has worked for them. The handful of millennials I know who vape are people who started smoking at 14 years old before transitioning to vaping instead. I don't personally know any millennials who went from being non-smokers to picking up vaping. And the millennials I know who vape all use the rebuildable, customisable ones, too.
The percentage of zoomers I see who vape is far, far higher. A lot of them have never smoked a cigarette in their lives, they just went straight to vaping. And it's almost exclusively disposable vapes, too.
I think vaping is preferable to smoking cigarettes, but I think not doing either is ideal. And I'm obviously dead set against disposable vapes.
So yeah, in this case, "for the children" actually seems to be appropriate. And not that Sunak really gives a damn about the environment, but I think framing this as "for the children" rather than for environmental reasons is the right approach for a conservative government anyway; left-wing people will support it for environmental reasons anyway, but the government directly saying it's for environmental reasons would probably upset a segment of right-wing people who think doing anything for the environment is "woke". This way, it's seen as a good thing for everyone (except the disposable vape buyers, I guess, but it is good for them, too, even if they don't agree now).
loobkoob @ loobkoob @kbin.social Posts 1Comments 263Joined 2 yr. ago
Grim Dawn also has a mod called Reign Of Terror that lets you play the entirety of Diablo 2 in GD, complete with classes, skills and items! It has some differences because it's built on Grim Dawn's systems, so it has the dual-class system from Grim Dawn (with similarly laid out skill trees), item affixes work like Grim Dawn, etc, but it feels great to play! And you can combine Grim Dawn classes with D2 classes, D2 classes with other D2 classes, or just play the D2 campaign with a regular Grim Dawn build. It's great!
EDIT: spelling