I don’t like that kind of game, and have barely played any of the Elden or Souls games.
But, in addition to the gameplay, for some reason the graphics really are off-putting to me. Even though they look really good, there’s just something off about them. Maybe it’s a kind of uncanny valley thing. I even find the fonts they use to be just slightly wrong. Like, the weight and spacing of the characters is subtly off.
You just reminded me that I was in the middle of playing Odyssey and I just… drifted away from it again. That has happened a bunch of times.
I like sailing around in that game. It’s fun to discover new things. But, yeah, you can’t play it as an assassin, you have to play it as a warrior, and the warrior mechanics are frustrating to me. If I remember correctly there are 3 different skill trees in the game, one that’s stealth-related, one that’s bow-and-arrow related, and one that’s combat-related. But, you can’t really play the game as just a stealth-assassin. You can’t play the game as a ranged bow-and-arrow user. The skill trees reflect this because in the bow-and-arrow one there are all kinds of abilities related to using a bow-and-arrow while you’re in melee combat, and in the stealth tree it’s the same.
I still love climbing to the top of a high thing, unlocking an area, then jumping off. A lot of the little side quests are fun. Sailing around on a boat is fun – and sometimes the boat-to-boat combat is fun too. But, too often it becomes “fight these 50 dudes in melee”. And yeah, they telegraph their attacks, and give you plenty of time to dodge and counter. But, when it’s 50 dudes, sometimes the attacks line up in a way where you can’t deal with all of them, and so they whittle your health down, even if you’re doing the right thing 95% of the time.
Ooh, I just remembered another fun part of it, though it can sometimes also be tedious. There are the missions where you need to clear out an enemy base. You don’t have to use stealth to do that, but you can. And, it can be a really fun problem-solving challenge where you figure out which dude gets isolated at which time, and you stealth-kill him and hide the body before the nearby patrol sees. One by one you can eliminate everyone in the base, until there’s just one guy walking around in a base, all alone, every one of his buddies is dead. Clearing out a base like that can be really satisfying, although sometimes it takes too long. I just wish more of the game allowed you to solve it with stealth.
It was also the first time it happened, so people were more put off by it.
Anybody who plays now knows that their gear is only going to be useful for the current expansion and that they’ll have to start from scratch again if they play the next one.
As someone who joined late in Vanilla, I think the fact that tier 3 armour became meaningless a few days into Burning Crusade was a great move, and necessary for the game.
In Vanilla, if you were late joining, you could never catch up unless someone was really nice and basically carried you for a few weeks. I spent months hearing tales about all the fun that my friends were having, but I couldn’t join them because farming the gear to catch up to them was essentially impossible on my own, and would have taken them a lot of time to level me up.
The game needed a reset so that people who hadn’t been playing for over a year could catch up. When BC came out, the Tier 3 stuff helped people for the first 2-3 levels, but by the time everyone hit 70, all the gear was reset and everyone was on the same footing again.
That was really healthy for guilds and for the game. If you already had a bunch of people who you liked playing with, you could start on the harder dungeons and then the raids immediately. Everybody started out in crap gear that kept those initial things challenging, and then everyone slowly got better gear. If you had just joined the game, you could catch up to those groups, and either join them, or form your own new group and you weren’t behind.
What killed WoW for me was all the borrowed power stuff, where you got new abilities and learned a new way to play, which they’d then just reset with the next expansion. There was also ridiculous button creep, where in the early days (ignoring downranked spells) you’d have maybe two dozen abilities, half of which could be used in combat, and a third of those were rare and situational. By the time I quit, you might need two full bars worth of abilities in combat, your typical “rotation” would use 8 or more, and so-on. On some characters, I had so many buttons that even with maxed out button bars, there were some that had to remain in the spellbook.
The story also got stupider. In the beginning, your character wasn’t the centre of the story. You could earn personal achievements, or group achievements, but it was clear that it was a game being played by millions of people, half of whom had also done those same achievements. In later expansions, they tried to pretend that you were the unique person. You weren’t an archdruid, you were the archdruid… and so were the other 100 people on your screen. Or you were the maw-walker, but so were the other 1000 people in the maw. And, of course, the lore got more and more incoherent as they kept trying to find corners of the lore that they hadn’t yet exploited.
The other major issue with WoW is that both time and the advance of technology, but also Blizzard’s choices, killed the social aspect of the game. In the beginning, there weren’t good resources to learn how to play, what kinds of equipment were out there, that sort of thing. That meant that one of the best ways to find that out was chatting with other players. That was great. Even if other players were sometimes obnoxious, the fact that you had to chat with them meant that the game felt alive. The only way to join a group for something was to send messages to other people in the game. And, since servers were isolated, people got reputations. If someone was nice to other people, they’d be known for that. If someone was a jerk, or tried to cheat other people, they’d get known for that too.
These days, people use communications not tied to the game at all. There are amazing resources to learn about the game and optimize how you play outside the game, which means there’s no need to chat with people in-game. They added a group finder and raid finder so you could join a group for something without ever talking to anyone, which also killed socialization. They merged servers and made cross-realm events so that there was always someone to play with you… but now everyone was effectively anonymous to everyone they played with, so being nice wasn’t something that gave you a good reputation, and being a jerk carried no long-term penalties.
Combine all the technological changes with all the lore / storytelling changes and you get a very good, very polished single-player online game, where other people happen to be there sometimes. These days you can be doing a 25-man raid and feel lonely because you’re not actually interacting with any of the other players in any meaningful way.
I really wish another MMO would come out that would add back all the social things that Blizzard broke. But, even if someone did everything right, I don’t think you could ever capture the magic of that early Vanilla / BC experience because the world has changed.
Yeah, hearts of Iron is a game that I played a lot for a short time, but have no interest in playing again.
If the DLC was truly separate it would be one thing. But, with each DLC they modify the base game a bit… but not completely. To get the complete modification you need the DLC. That leaves all kinds of stubs in the base game that don’t make any sense without the DLC. Like, you can create a special weapons research centre where (sans DLC) you can research 1 item, and that 1 item isn’t even useful or interesting. Or, you can choose to research a vehicle chassis that… can never be used because all the vehicles that use that chassis are in the DLC.
It even seems to me like the basic “war” part of the game is broken simply because certain DLC exists. Like, at certain parts in the game, it is essentially 100% impossible to break through an enemy’s entrenched position, so you simply reach a stalemate where neither side can advance.
What I think happened is that they added mechanics to some DLC package that make it possible to entrench more than in the base game and also to break through that entrenchment. But, then they basically added the entrenchment to the base game and the way to break it was only in the DLC. I don’t think this was necessarily done in a malicious way. It’s just that with dozens of DLC packages, it probably becomes impossible to properly test things (and they care more about the users who buy their DLC).
I couldn’t get into it. I’ve always loved space games, and thought an MMO in space sounded fun.
Little did I know that you couldn’t actually pilot your ship or aim your weapons. What’s the point in playing?
I think the player-driven economy is an interesting concept, and at times the space battles are fun to watch. But, people aren’t kidding when they call it spreadsheets in space. The game part of the game seems to be missing.
I don’t know what there is about it that would be rage inducing. It’s challenging, but there’s nothing about it that’s unfair.
When people tell me I must know some Taylor Swift songs, I try to explain that I’ve probably heard some, but there’s just nothing in them that catches my interest so I just forget them immediately. This is a good way to explain what I mean. I recognize the pattern enough to say, “yeah, that sounds like it could be Taylor Swift”, but it’s all so forgettable.
Here it is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VE5JMEu5hZA
Pretty funny, pretty accurate too. But, I can definitely hear the lack of Flea.
For reference, here’s the isolated bass for Californication (which I think is the song they’re imitating, and, IMO, is one of Flea’s least interesting basslines):
Wait, they renamed it? And back to the previous name? The previous name of the pre-Unix version of the OS was MacOS.
I thought these stats meant there were still significant numbers of people on 25 year old computers.
They’ve been doing that for years, why now?
You have old computers that are friends?
Yeah, there are presumably also 0% running BeOS, 0% on Microsoft DOS, 0% on OS/2…
that Jesus is 100% God and 100% Man
That makes about as much sense as Trump saying that prices were down by 500%.
The “zoo animal” thing seems about right. Sometimes they look at you like they think you’re about to start flinging shit around. Sometimes they’re curious about how the zoo animal is going to do something simple like handle chopsticks. Often they don’t make eye contact or keep their space because they don’t want to have to interact with the zoo animal.
OTOH, part of their being polite is that if the gaijin actually asks them for help, they’re obligated to try to help.
Overall, I liked it. As an introvert, I don’t like countries where people approach the foreigner and try to practice their English on them. There are also too many countries where you’re frequently approached by someone who wants to scam you, or wants you to give them money.
You found that the Chinese weren’t racist or sexist? I agree with you about Japan, but China was hardly enlightened. They were mostly just louder and more obnoxious, where the Japanese were overly formal and quiet.
Both cultures also had a lot of superstitions, like words or phrases you shouldn’t say, or lucky or unlucky numbers.
As in 3 minutes and 56 seconds? At that speed you can’t even build a base. Can you even get the wetsuits for deep diving in that time?
For me, it’s the opposite. In Factorio you know that to produce one Z, you need 3 Y and 4 X, and to produce 1 Y you need 3 V and 1 W, and so-on. And you can make the perfect conveyor system so that your mine connects to your smelter which goes to your gear factory, and so-on. You never really have to struggle with space because you have an entire world to build your conveyor belts on.
Sure, until you get a certain kind of explosive, you might be annoyed by cliffs, and the locations of the resources are random. But, other than that, you can build the exact same optimal thing every time.
Once I launched a rocket in Factorio once, I never really got the urge to build the same thing again.
With Oxygen Not Included there are a dozen ways to solve each problem, whether that’s how to make air, what to feed your dupes, how to deal with heat, etc. As a result, each time I play it my base looks different because I’m dealing with a different set of opportunities, a different set of challenges, and so-on. Also, with laying out your machines in 2d, the same basic machine (say an O2 generator that uses water and feeds a hydrogen power generator) can be built a dozen different ways, none of which are fully optimal, it all depends on how much space you have, where everything else is, etc.
But, what I especially like about ONI that you don’t get with Factorio is the “physics engine” solution to things. I know it’s unrealistic and simplified, but still, the fact that you can make petroleum by boiling oil instead of using the machine is great. And then there are the various techniques to make a reverse-flow heat exchanger so that your oil is pre-heated and your petroleum is cooled. That’s awesome. AFAIK that kind of solution doesn’t exist in Factorio.
I don’t think I care enough about Taylor Swift or her songs to care about reviews of them, even if the reviews are funny or whatever.