Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

[Brantly B.]

I'm sure it becomes more obnoxious when you get further in and have to deal with factions and stuff

Apparently the obnoxious comes from "sometimes the game will spawn base raiders who are twice your level and force you to rebuild everything from scratch".

[Mongrel]

Oblivion

Unrelated...

It's funny how BG3 is so popular and well-liked, but me, not typically playing D&D derivatives, goes to look at the store page and seeing all the screenshots of spells and classes and builds and inventories and follower inventories, can't help myself thinking "My god, this looks insufferable."

That's not on the game itself so much as it is whoever put together the store page for it. It really takes work to make something which is so well-loved look so awful... I mean, I guess you're not going to include all the fuck simulator screenshots, but I hear there's more to it than fucking and spreadsheets. Supposedly.

[Grath]

I mean, I'm playing BG3 (only in Act 1 so far, didn't get it until Crimbo and haven't had the free time to get very deep into it) because it is very much D&D 5e but when I do munchkin-y broken powergaming builds, I'm not pissing other people off. (My current Main Character is a three-class multiclassed monstrosity.)

[Upthorn]

Palworld

Fun?

Fun enough

If people were wanting to get a server running, I've learned that the gamepass version and the steam version cannot (currently?) play with each other. And also the gamepass version is limited to 4 players at a time.

[Brantly B.]

[nosimpleway]

Inventory Party Technology Paldeck Guild Options

[Mongrel]

@Buge

[Thad]

Pretty satisfying to know I can still beat Boshi on my first try, literally with my eyes closed.

(I discovered, back on my first playthrough in the '90s, that it's actually easier for me that way. It's pure hit-buttons-on-the-beat; the visuals are just a distraction. I'm not sure I've ever beaten him with my eyes open.)

[Niku]

I played through Cocoon on Sunday; definitely recommend to anyone who likes cozy little puzzle games. Made by the developer of Inside and Limbo but with far less child trauma, you're a little dung-beetle man in an alien world who solves some simple environmental puzzles to unlock an orb you can carry around. The orb is an entirely different alien world that you ferry around like Atlas, and you can slip back and forth between the two until you find another alien world orb that you can then juggle with the first one, and take in and out of the first one and vice versa, until you find ANOTHER little alien world orb ... etc.

It's like a Russian nesting doll of puzzles that you put together and pull apart over and over again, and it's always just clever enough to make you feel clever without ever totally roadblocking you into frustration or rolling over and making things seem entirely obvious. It only takes about four hours for a playthrough so it's a perfect little afternoon game.

[Mongrel]

Most of the time I use Discord, but sometimes friends of ours need to use Steam for some reason, and it bowls me over how Steam chat is still completely dogshit at just maintaining a basic fucking voice connection, and has been for the last DECADE. Even plain old group text chat sometimes breaks (and what fucking genius decided that the default for every convo between the same members should open and SAVE a new instance of that chat???). This has persisted across entirely different games, OSes, and computers.

I mean, I forget about this most of the time and then every couple of months or year or so I jump in a Steam chat and within a day or two, oops there it goes again! How is such a large platform still THIS BAD at something THIS BASIC after all this time?

[nosimpleway]

i finished legend of zegend: tingdom of the kingdom a while back and i've been thinking of how to summarize it

and really, there should have been only one zelda game like this. i can't imagine a world where breath of the weath didn't exist, but tingdom of the kingdom would have been better if ideas from breath hadn't already been explored, forcing the devteam to come up with something else just to avoid doing the same thing twice. like i said before, there are three maps and very little to do in the two new ones. i could not give less of a shit about the zonai as a whole concept, might as well have stuck with the shiekah magitek. gloom could just as easily be a side effect of the calamity and nothing would be lost -- come to think of it, there were big gooey piles of calamity you had to shoot in the eyes in breath already! that's gloom! end of game spoiler, maybe: there's not even a pig ganon at the end of this one!

on that topic: rather than Guardians the big "oh shit" monsters in this game are Gloom Spawn, big pools of evil goop with a bunch of hands with eyeballs on the palms coming out of them. and yeah, up until you get the master sword, they're fuckin' scary to deal with. but to earn the master sword, you have to fight a gloom spawn! and after you kill it, it spawns a Phantom Ganon in a fantastic OH SHIT WHAT moment... or would be, if every other random-encounter gloom spawn didn't also have a chance of having phantom g-dawg show up. i'd seen gloom spawn despawn themselves without issue a couple of times, fought a couple more, and ran into one in some random cave that turned into phantom ganon. then i went and got the master sword, which lost all of the surprise and shock of having the second phase of the earning it fight since i'd just run into the guy a few minutes before.

and then you get to the last boss, and it's just... that. real ganon fights exactly the same as the phantom ganons you've challenged a dozen times up to that point. he gets to his second phase, turns bigger and scarier... and still fights exactly the same way. get that extra-huge lifebar down to half and he enters his third phase... and still fights just like the phantoms did.

so... yeah, breath and tears are both pretty good games? I played both of them kind of a lot, so i can't act like they're not at least a little fun to play. but it really feels like both of them had half of the good ideas that put together would have made a really fantastic experience.

[Friday]

Breath of the Wild made me look at game design harder than any other game I've ever played. It's an amazing game to just chill out and explore. I was probably too harsh on it in my thread. Now that some time has passed, the good memories have stuck and the frustrating stuff (fucking rain) feels less annoying.

On the other hand, it does really feel like a game that could have been truly great if some different choices were made. But I have to give Nintendo credit for making a world that really sucked me in. I don't know if I'll ever play Tears, and not because I think it's bad, just, I don't know if I need more Breath of the Wild, glue machines together edition. I feel like I got my fill.

[Niku]

I'm gradually playing through Dad of Boy 2 and even early on it might feel like they are running the bit into the ground but I don't really care because it is funny to me every single time that I take a left instead of a right to go get a treasure chest and one of the chucklefucks in my entourage is like "hey, where are you going, we've kinda got plot critical time sensitive shit happening?" and Boy is just resigned like ".. yeah dad really likes loot"

also played through spider-man 2 which has one of the dumbest fucking dev-spoiler discourse things since star trek into darkness but is very much More Insomniac Spider-Man and therefor fun as hell to play. the first game ends with a tease that harry osborne has the symbiote, and the devs were very like, DON'T SPOIL VENOM'S IDENTITY prior to sm2 coming out. WELL FUCKITY HO, GUESS WHO VENOM IS.

[nosimpleway]

well the good news is that there's an armor set with a set bonus of 'you don't slip off of slick walls, at all, ever'.
and in another baffling design decision, it's a separate set of armor than the 'you climb at faster than a snail's pace'.

there is too damn much armor in this game tbh honest

the armor you wear in the volcanic areas to keep from being set aflame because the air is too hot will not help you against areas where it's less hot than that but still hot enough to drain your life away, same as in breath. the 'don't die in the desert sun' set is different from the 'your attack power goes up in the desert sun' set and neither include the 'you can walk on sand without slowing down' boots. there is, of course, two armor sets and snow boots for cold as well. you're likely to find the 'immune to electricity' helmet well before you collect the 'resist electricity' set. you can find the old champion's tunic, a new updated better champion's tunic, and the reward for completing all the shrines, and all three offer a different bonus to using the master sword (which still runs out of power in the middle of fights and isn't even all that good against gloomy enemies).
and all the amiibo extra bonus nostalgia armor from breath is the prize for exploring the depths. you can get a cosplay set of original link, awakening rerelease artstyle link with black-bead eyes, ocarina link, fierce deity link, twilight link, great sea link, skyward link, and probably another one or two i'm forgetting. appearances aside all of these sets are exactly identical.

so whenever you enter a new environment, go into the menu, scroll past all the bullshit armor sets you'll probably never use but maybe want to keep because you'll need them later? and change into the 'don't die here' armor. in the desert, of course, you will be doing this every dawn and dusk. time for combat, do you want the armor you've managed to power up into resisting enemy attacks, the one that boosts your attack power so you can win faster, or are you going to keep on the 'don't lose health to the weather' set?

'gee r2 you sure are big mad about having a lot of options' listen
gluing your equipment together is already a fundamental aspect of the game
let me combine armor enchantments into one actually-useful super suit, since so damn many of the bonuses are mutually exclusive anyway. let me heap on 'resist weather' effects into one big varia suit so i don't have to drop what i'm doing and go into the menu whenever i'm in the desert and twelve ingame hours have passed. let me slap the 'attack power up when it's hot/cold' and 'move at normal speed in sand/snow' onto that. combine the 'climb good' and 'climb wet' armors, and hell maybe throw in the 'extra stealth' armor on there for a metal gear sneaking suit. and if i want to cosplay as a previous link, break the functional aspect of the armor away from its appearance. i'm already forking over piles of ingredients to the great fairies to have it enchanted, just let them move effects around too.

[Friday]

it's funny because you're describing why I think Link's Awakening is a worse game than A Link to the Past. It would be the better game, and that's me saying that, little miss "A Link to the Past is the pinnacle of game design" but the sheer amount of time it makes you spend going to your menu and swapping items in and out of your active equipment is just so goddamn irritating. And it's not even like LttP doesn't make you go to your menu a lot to swap out your hookshot or whatever, it's just that LA makes you do it so much more. LttP could really benefit from like two more buttons to assign items to, and LA needs like four more.

I really feel like a fundamental rule of game design that should be taught to everyone who wants to make games is "fucking minimize the amount of times the player has to go to their menu."

Come to think of it, were the L/R buttons used in LttP at all? Why the fuck weren't they used for item assignments?

[nosimpleway]

lttp at least has the decency of always having items in your inventory in the same spot, la moves them around every time you swap equipment

idk how link between worlds or the rerelease of awakening handled the inventory, maybe those are better

[Büge]

the sheer amount of time it makes you spend going to your menu and swapping items in and out of your active equipment is just so goddamn irritating.

Hey, Oblivion has that problem, too! You can only assign up to eight things to hotkeys (because the game was designed with the Xbox controller in mind), which means that if you have more than eight things you need to use (which you often do), you have to open up the menu and scroll around until you find what you're looking for.

[Mongrel]

That reminds me of how the last time I played Skyrim I literally ran out of keyboard keys assigning hotkeys to activate and control all the different mods.

(the main culprit were mods which let you place and move new items in the environment, so moving furniture, decorating, etc.).

[Yoji]

The remaster for Link's Awakening was MUCH better with the items. The sword, shield, and boots get their own buttons right away and forever, and you still get two hotkeys for your other stuff. There's still some switching things around, but it sure beats having to put away and take out your sword so much.

[Friday]

oh, nice. Yeah, that would go a long, long way toward fixing my biggest issue with the game.