Xbob42

I'm playing King's Field 1 right now. Not the same at all, but weird that this would come up on the day I started playing it. Surprisingly fun game, weird to see how similar it is to a lot of FromSoft's modern stuff.

So what's so good about Dungeon Master, what do the other games not nail about it that you liked, and does this look like a good spiritual successor?

The problems I had with this game are many, and none were because it was "too different," unless, as mentioned, "too different" means "worse."

Since we're doing lists, here's a few critical issues I have with Starfield...

• Skyrim already had an issue of density, and for me it was twofold: major points of interest were too close together and evenly spaced, making them feel less exciting to find. Starfield just made them really far apart but they're still evenly spaced. So it feels just as artificial except they also suck most of the time because planets are so barren and you're on foot. Minor POIs between major POIs (combat encounters, environmental storytelling, a weird cave, treasure, etc) are important, and Starfield tends to only have this as like detritus within a certain sphere of a major POI, meaning the negative space of the game world is too sparse.
• Planets are barren, but they also each have people living there. Random homesteaders, pirates, fucking electric company crews. You don't feel like an explorer at all.
• While there are more total POIs, because they're spread so thin, it means outside of towns, and especially outside of quests, there's just jack shit to find or do. This is different than just the density, this is like a core problem where even if the density and even spacing were fixed, you'd still have almost nothing to do when not on an active quest.
• Loading Screen Simulator is not what anyone wants to play, ever. Some people say it's the same as No Man's Sky, and while to a certain degree that's true (open an overly complex galaxy map, choose a planet) the fact that GOING to the planet is part of the world and experience and not a literal load screen/cutscene is huge. It builds a sense of cohesion, which for this kind of game is critical. It's why loading screens going to interiors of buildings or ships also sucks. It's way cooler to just walk inside! It keeps you invested and holds your attention!
• They went all out of their way to keep any visible intelligent alien species out of the game for their "NASA punk" theme, but brought in dragon shouts. Okay, fine, I like actual gameplay variety. I'll take magic over not magic 100% of the time in any game. That shit's fun. Oh wait all the space dragon shouts suck ass. How do you make a magic system where all of the magic sucks and is not fun to use?!
• There's several "types" of guns but most feel identical. Shooting a laser gun feels no different than shooting a ballistic gun. Give me wild stuff! Stop being like the Division! Even the Division got away from being the Division and started giving crazy ass sci-fi guns!
• Ship building was super cool and surprisingly robust. It was also almost entirely pointless since there's almost nothing to do in your ship since you don't actually fly anywhere with it (enjoy your loading screens) and it's only actually used for the occasional space dogfight, which, if you don't keep up with your ship's power level will surprise you by being a tedious numbers game near the end, forcing you to go do ship upgrades for unfun space combat.

Here's my expensive-but-you're-Bethesda-you-can-afford-it solution: take all the POIs, get rid of the ones that are like 'scan a rock' because fuck you that's not gameplay, and then put them on a single planet, maybe two. Have them concentrated around civilization, with more procgen stuff further out. Launch the game with fucking vehicles.

Take the ship building, base building, etc. and beat Star Citizen to the punch by making everything outside of the story some weird quasi-MMO where you can fly around the other planets, and find other players and their structures. Like No Man's Sky but actually connected with everyone's shit visible. This is gonna require you to throw Gamebryo or whatever in the trash, so make sure to do that before development starts and use a modern engine that can handle this. Get rid of Todd Howard, designate the entirety of Capcom as the new game director, have them make the combat better.

Bam. Easy fix.

9 minutes ago, ort said:

The craziest thing is that it was such a round number, 50,000 bees? What are the odds of that.

The bees had an entire industry dedicated to a daily census and execution of any bees above the cap and you fucking reduce it to a coincidence?! Goddamn bee racist!

4 minutes ago, Keyser_Soze said:

Oh interesting, they're un-BSGing the game 🤔

 

 

I mean, that's theoretically a good change, but I think it'll only superficially help, since they didn't like... make any scenes. It's everyone standing and speaking one at a time in a really stilted way.

3 hours ago, Ghost_MH said:

 

It's likely a dumb overcomplication by whoever is gathering these rumors. Watch it just be like rails with a hook that can be engaged/disengaged with a quick polarity flip. Pulse power into the magnet in one direction to flip the hook into place. Pulse power into the magnet in other direction to retract it.

Yeah that makes a lot more sense if it just helps it hook into place. Actually using magnets to hold the thing together would obviously be terrible and would never work, and every other idea I've seen has seemed really farfetched.

Also calling it "electromagnetic suction" is the dumbest shit ever.

19 hours ago, skillzdadirecta said:

Todd Howard Talks About Starfield: Shattered Space Expansion, Creator's Kit, and a 'Big Update' Coming Soon - IGN

WWW.IGN.COM

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Bethesda fans won’t have to wait too much longer before they finally get their hands on Starfield’s first expansion, Shattered Space, and there is a lot more content on the way, too.

 

But the space was already shattered? It was fragmented into 10 billion loading screens...

1 hour ago, best3444 said:

It better release with a new Mario 3-D title and Metroid Prime 4. 

It's gonna release with the sickest Metroid Prime 4 teaser trailer and apology jpeg you've ever seen!

5 hours ago, Air_Delivery said:

I still can't believe no one has posted the GOAT ONN bit

 

 

Wonder how her hive is doing?

I've got way too many games to bother with this at the moment, but some of these takes people have been posting from the Reddit are cracking me up.

3 hours ago, Paperclyp said:

Anyone playing this?

If I wanted to control a town of dirty white peasants I'd run for governor in Missouri!

Can't wait to read about best going from loving it to wondering why he "ever put time into this piece of shit." 

Why the fuck are the Yakuza devs making Monkey Ball games? Wait, they were ALWAYS the Monkey Ball dev? What the hell is the history here? Why do they suck so bad at making Monkey Ball now?! Why would you make a Monkey Ball game Switch exclusive, that makes no sense??

Despite having no interest in mecha, I do have a great interest in Level-5, so I picked this up to give it a shot.

So far I'm enjoying it! It's split between a pseudo-RPG where you can run around town using pretty nice looking 2D... sprites? Not sure if they're still sprites when it just looks like anime dudes. But you can run around town, talk to people, find stuff, buy stuff I think, etc. That's how most of the story progresses, then you do big mecha battles which remind me of PS2 era games. You go down into an area, beat the hit out of a bunch of enemies, and collect lots of colored loot. I found an epic item at the end of a machine and a lady went "EPIC!"

Too early to go into much detail on how many missions or anything, but the combat was fun. Jumping around, boosting, fast and satisfying melee attacks like an action game, ranged weaponry, active abilities by holding right bumper and hitting a face button, good stuff.

A lot of people have been favorably comparing it to Gundam Breaker, but I have no idea what that is, for me it's kind of vaguely like PSO with a surprisingly kind of dark story attached (given Level-5, that is) that's been entertaining enough. While this is the English release, voices are only in Japanese, which is actually kind of a pain in battle sometimes because I'll be fighting something and won't have time to read, or will start reading a line too late.

Also there's a code entry system to put in promo codes, like from Twitter or whatever. But the first English code is borked because it contains a "banned word," the "word" in question is the number 69. Well done!

Anyway, I've been liking it a lot more than I expected, and there appears to be a high amount of customization, so at least for a non-mecha person, it's been a good time.

6 minutes ago, Ghost_MH said:

 

So you want an OG Xbox controller? Not really C buttons, but it's the only dual analog, 6 face button controller I can think of. There's also some dual analog Saturn gamepad by Retrobit there that has been tempting to pick up for emulation.

No, not quite. I want proper C-buttons in the correct size and arrangement. A six button controller is superficially similar, but it just feels different.

Also I have that Retro-bit controller and it sucks fucking monkey ass. Holy shit the sticks are terrible.

Man, I still want an N64 controller (old design, modernized design, doesn't matter) that has both the C-buttons and a second stick.

Specifically for Ship of Harikinian, where I can play OoT with full right-stick camera movement, but still want C-buttons for items, and more importantly, ocarina playing. That shit's too ingrained in my brain to relearn on other buttons. Makes me sad.

Hopefully someday, someone makes this extremely niche product for me specifically.

They did him dirty. His eyeball wasn't fucking melting off his face. 

29 minutes ago, AbsolutSurgen said:

Apparently this is racist.

 

Internet taught me yesterday that a "Hard R" isn't when a movie really earned its "R" rating.

The amount of people who genuinely don't know what "hard R" means is astounding to me.

But I have a much more pressing question: have they removed her vagina bones?

I'm in the hard "no bones, no bone" camp ever since this masterpiece.

I've lived in Silicon Valley my entire life and have sadly never seen one of these goons. They'd be perfect for a surprise unmarked van ride!

12 minutes ago, TUFKAK said:

This is why I’m no longer participating in American politics. Shining city on the hill ya’ll. 

Iceland has less than 400,000 people. If we got even half a city the size of my hometown to move there we'd be the majority, it would be OUR country!

 This fuckin' company and its dweeb fans, man.

This remains a hilarious farce due to the fact that they're raising these "concerns" while a President who opposes them is currently in power. "Hmm, should Biden be able to have the entire Supreme Court and Congress executed and replaced with puppets? Hmmmm... It's a real head scratcher!"

Of course, this only applies to a universe where Biden is fuckin' rad as hell, not ours.

Taking freedom away from small businesses?!

Randomized loot?! Oh boy, I'm a sucker for randomizers...

Thanks! That's quite the list. I'm not sure what some of it is, but it seems neat. "Game modifier system" sounds right up my alley!

Can I get a summary of the updates? I feel like it might be spoilery, and I'm still really early in the game. I only played it for about 45 minutes when it came out, before I was bombarded with higher priority games, but I quite enjoyed it.

I also enjoyed Dark Souls 2, along with every other Dark Souls title. Whatever it is that makes people hate Dark Souls 2, I guess it's just not in my brain? I mean some folks point to shitty hitboxes but goddamn I could make a compilation video of the shitty hitboxes in every FromSoft game. I happily beat DS2 multiple times.