Xbob42

55 minutes ago, Dre801 said:

Considering how disappointing the past several Alone in the Dark releases have been, I can't allow myself to feel hope.

Hey, 6/10 is like 8x better than the last Alone in the Dark I played.

4 hours ago, stepee said:

Sounds like it’s short with terrible combat (and a lot of it) but good atmosphere and puzzles.

If I'm being completely honest with myself, this is exactly how I would describe Silent Hill games and Resident Evil games (pre-RE4). And I still love those! It depends on how terrible the combat is, and in what way!

Oh, the plot is about to go to many, many places.

If you're not at the very beginning of chapter 10, and focus exclusively on just railroading that story, I think you can do it.

4 hours ago, best3444 said:

@Xbob42 @BloodyHell

 

I'm on chapter 10. If I play 8 more hours just focusing on the main quest, would I beat it by then? It reads I'm 20 hours in. 

I mean, it'd be a close call. Maybe?

Oh, much of it is speculation, but the base facts are pretty obviously telegraphed!

Worth noting that synergy skills don't just not spend ATB, they rapidly build it for both characters. Use them a lot!

32 minutes ago, BloodyHell said:

It’s done, and frankly I loved it.

 

Tears in my eyes. 
 

still so much for the finale, but im so glad they ended the way they did. 
 

Ending Spoilers:

  Hide contents

For a second I thought Cloud saved Aerith the fake lut of it was heart wrenching, but the correct decision.

 

few games have been more worth my money. 

1 hour ago, Keyser_Soze said:

Actually in terms of improvements I would want to see. I never had any of Xbob's issues but things I'd like would be more practical like being able to see what time it is, as in like a watch or clock. Many times I would want to go out on a quest but I didn't want to be caught out at night time and you can't really tell what time it is so I would just rest and go out in the morning instead.

 

Other things I think I've mentioned before would be maybe more granular pawn commands and maybe be able to tell them what to pick up and stop them from just picking things up you would want to pick up yourself.

I already see that the sequel has a map on screen which is an improvement over the first game where you had to stop and check your map constantly.

Oh I just got a mod that puts the time on-screen, but yeah that'd be a big help. And maybe like... actually telling us what time things are happening instead of us having to intuit it.

Also no stupid fucking quests like the one where you escort the dude's kid around town and if you fuck up even a little bit you don't get the golden idol which unlocks a bunch of much better weapons at the smithy. She tells you to "run earnestly" in the race against her, but you're supposed to just jog near her and let her win. Just stupid horse shit designed to waste your time, especially with the single save slot and autosave nonsense. It's like it was designed by snickering middle schoolers.

On 3/17/2024 at 10:09 AM, Spawn_of_Apathy said:

As kind of an aside to Xbob’s impressions; I learned a long time ago not to play prior game in a series unless I need it for story reasons or I already really liked it. Two reasons:

 

the world or gameplay is likely dated and since I have no nostalgia for it I wont be able to get into it. Chances are there could be multiple little improvements to the new entry that everything I hate is gone or not that bad. 
 

burnout is the other one. Even if I didnt hate something, it could flip on me like a switch in the new game that I no longer tolerate something. Or I could just get bored with the whole formula and stop playing the newer game prematurely. 
 

at this point I can never go back and experience the last game like others did when it was new and at a certain time in the industry. 

For me it kind of works the other way, seeing all the improvements directly after playing the previous title makes me enjoy those improvements so much more. It's one of the weird reasons I sometimes like getting early access games. You get so many big improvements in such a short amount of time that it really helps me appreciate them in a way you can't if you just got the finished product. But with early access games that's only sometimes, since it's a gamble if things even improve at all.

I think I'm nearly done with the first game? I believe my save was further ahead than I thought when I started at it. Looked at a full main story quest list and I'm like 3 away from done, and I'm level 50ish. Not sure if I'm gonna do the DLC since I know you should be like level 100 for it, but we'll see what happens.

There's a couple critical points I hope are addressed in DD2:

- No built-in defensive moves is terrible in DD1. No dodge roll, no blocking. Some vocations get these, but only after you grind some currency to unlock them and eat up a skill slot. Terrible. It just makes the combat feel super bad without them. You can even see when your pawns are getting attacked, if they don't have those defensives unlocked just just repeatedly jump away from an enemy. It looks so dumb. It IS so dumb. (EDIT: Correction: you do unlock dodge and block, but they do not eat up skill slots, I was thinking of the Reset/Instant Reset skill which cancels out of animations, but it's kinda broken so I guess it can be worth a skill slot.)

- Climbing on enemies, despite being touted as this great thing, is jank as fuck and terrible. At least every time I've tried it. Enemies constantly try to shake you off, can often attack you while you're on them, and the controls, especially when trying to maneuver around the the head or limbs (you know, most of the places you want to be at) are ABYSMAL. Alright I'm on the head tilted downward towards the enemy's eyes. Which direction will move me closer to the eye? Well take a gamble motherfucker cause it ain't gonna be any direction that makes sense. Also having to spam stamina items to stay on the enemy feels weird.

- Spamming items from the pause menu for unlimited heals sucks. Terrible system. As much as I hate the 300 year long heal cast times (which as also a bad idea) the ability for unlimited heals with absolutely no danger to the player makes a lot of combat completely nonthreatening without you imposing your own limits on yourself. It just doesn't jive with the style or feel of the game. The game is almost like Monster Hunter, and Monster Hunter is quite strict about how many heals you can have and how you can use them. This doesn't have to be exactly like that (Since it's not Monster Hunter after all) but it should be closer to that than to BotW's silly healing system that's built for kids.

- A lot of abilities have you standing in one place for a long time both during and after activation, and only a few vocations get the "reset" skill (again, takes up a skill slot...) to cancel out of these faster. I think this is really boring for multiple reasons. Having some openings is fine, being completely helpless if an enemy comes from offscreen (which they often do) is just annoying. This might work better in co-op, but we don't have co-op, we've got the stupid pawn system.

- I dunno if it's just me but the default stamina regeneration sucks balls. You use up so much for any fun attack and then it takes 40 days and 40 night to regen to full. Again, making me spam stamina stuff from a pause menu to keep things fun.

Plenty of places to improve, and I hope they improve on all of them!

I thought it was fine. Wasn't any better or worse than the other Bioshock games to me -- but I never liked any of them as much as others seemed to.

Surprised the porn industry hasn't dabbled in payment processing itself yet to get around these virgin loser rules.

Yup! Haven't had a chance to play it as much over the last several months since there's a lot of new games coming out on the regular, but I still at the very least log in for the much reduced daily login bonus.

Yeah this shit ain't doing 8k @ 10 without massive reconstruction, and frankly it's still AMD, so save us all the blurry ghosting nightmare that completely fucking kills the point of high resolution and stick to 4k, or better yet 1440p.

A sensible and practical law made by sensible and practical people.

The idealism isn't the criticism, it's the part where all this is presented as though any of this is a meritocracy. The term "deserves" shouldn't even be in the conversation as it's been used because it's so far removed from the reality of the situation. My point was that nothing any of these companies are doing results in them "deserving" their cut. If we were to go down that route, then you "deserve" the cut you're able to carve in the market and demand of your clients. You "deserve" to get paid for what you bring to the table, and seeing as how everyone is willing to pay except Tim Epic, it seems to me that they "deserve" it.

Now, being a de facto monopoly may not be ideal, but no one's even making an effort to actually compete, even the most motivated competitor with loads of money and a deep personal interest, Epic Games, does not give half a shit to build up their storefront to compete and instead relies on lazily passing out free games of varying quality and hoping that'll hook ya.

It's not that I thing any of these things are good or fine, it's that I see no realistic solutions presented and if the "competition" can't even be assed to even pretend to compete, where does that leave us? If the hotblooded, hyper-invested, hyper-rich Steam hatin' Tim Sweeney can't muster up enough shits to make a functional storefront to compete against the assholes, what's the takeaway? It's not that he can't compete, it's that he won't.

Valve just sitting there taking their cut that they have been for 20 years while everyone acts like there's big some sea change. But as far as I can see, if I go on Steam I get massive unified input support and customizability, free cloud saves with every game, free online play (including Valve's own servers and workshop that devs are free to take advantage of), massive promotions and sales, and plenty more. They continually add value for both the consumer and the dev/publisher. Is it perfect? No. Is it worth the 30%? Well that's not for me to say, but I've yet to see anyone even attempt to do better. Alternatives like GOG and Humble have been chuggin' along just fine, .io seems to be thriving, it seems to me the competition is there taking on specialized fields where Valve is not delivering, while copycat shops like EGS can't even get their pants on.

Sounds like something for parents to worry about, not the government.

3 hours ago, crispy4000 said:

The issue I take with Valve’s margins is that by and large, it’s because they were first to the scene.  Yes, there is a value add with their efforts with the Deck/Linux, and the way they’ve expanded the storefront.  But I’d honestly trade all that in a heartbeat if I could for a Valve that was serious about making games again.  This is what happens when competition dies, a reduced focus on bringing homegrown creativity to the table, and centering your business about leveraging others’ work.  So of course they’d keep the standard rate that existed before digital distribution.  
 

Because they’re first and stayed first, they’re deserving of their cheese.  Lol, sure.

All this talk of what they "deserve" is so idealistic and disconnected from reality. Netflix has raised their prices every year for ages and the quality of their offerings has only gone down. Top Ramen went from dirt cheap food for poor people to hilariously expensive for being waxed cardboard. EA has charged full price as they rerelease a slightly more broken version of [name any game they make here] for decades.

No one is "deserving" of anything in this regard, that's a borderline children's fantasy as a concept in the world of business. They have all the leverage and that's literally all that matters. It's not about deserving or what you offer or anything like that. You can bet your ass nothing EGS does is worth their 12% cut, not even close. Nothing MS or Sony does is "worth" the 30% cut and you can bet your ass every publisher under the sun would scoff at their "support" if it meant keeping that 30%.

Conflating idealistic wishes with actual business is so bizarre and it's really funny how everyone keeps making excuses for the console manufacturers when it's the exact same shit, lol.

Also I would not trade any of that for a Valve that focused solely on games again. I like Valve games, but getting one real good game every 4-6 years is not something I care too deeply about when I'm already inundated with leagues of amazing games every other month nowadays.

3 hours ago, crispy4000 said:

They hyped up that Queen’s Blood tournament a lot for how easy it was.

Oh don't worry, there's Queen's Blood challenges later on that will slap your dick real good.

I guarantee you that getting your game in front of hundreds of millions of people is a lot more value add than EGS or whatever only taking 12% for most indies. I don't know how much "support" or what form that "support" takes from Nintendo, MS or Sony, but apparently most industry devs think the Steam cut is worth it, including ones that went running from Steam at one point, many of whom opened up their own shops. And some who've had their own shops for longer than Valve, like Blizzard. Including Sony and Microsoft. Including every Kickstarter indie game ever, and pretty much every notable indie game ever. Seems to me there's clearly value there.

But again, that's not my fight to fight. You sell your game, and I'll buy it. I'm not going to go out of my way to buy it in a way that maximizes your profit because come on dude, don't sign up with anything you don't agree with if it's going to hurt your bottom line. This is way overcomplicating the simple "you sell, I buy" nature of these business transactions. Do as you please of course, but please don't expect me to give a shit about the revenue cut someone is making. I expect these people to be smart and competent adults who are making decisions that they hope to be in their best interests.

To me, if things are so dire that paying industry standard rates to be on an extremely popular platform is enough to put the "squeeze" on your indie studio (but not all the other platforms??) then Jesus, fuckin' figure it out, man. 

I don't get how you type that up and think "and so Valve should willingly make a lot less money for no reason" lol

I'm sure Sony gives a lot more support than Nintendo, but you sure as shit don't see Nintendo lowering their rates. Epic offers more on their (vastly inferior and vastly less popular) platform, but the only reason they have that platform is because they filled their diapers over not being able to keep more of their Fortnite money, so clearly making a lot of money is important to them, so I don't buy their EGS "altruism" for one second. If EGS had actually accomplished its goal of ousting Steam, I could see those rates "unfortunately needing to rise" each year, bit by bit. We'd stop hearing about how hard it is for developers to make money and start hearing all these details about server costs and account maintenance and how much it costs to keep an army of support and IT around, etc.

Again, from a dev perspective, I totally get why you want more money. Yet from a platform holder perspective, I also get why you want more money. It, as always, is a matter of power. And Valve holds it, while Epic wishes they did. As a consumer, I really don't care that much either way, these are business deals for the suits to fight, our opinions are completely irrelevant, but I do think it's funny that the argument is always basically Valve should just make less money for some reason.

If you figured out how to improve your company's profits by 5%, you might be promoted to CEO. If you decided to lower your company's profit by 12% or more, they might feed you to piranhas. 

I keep trying to get into the first game, as I typically like to play through one game before playing the next (fun to compare what's changed/improved/regressed) even though I watched the story via some analysis review years ago. But man... I just can't get into it. I just hate the pawns, I hate how when anything casts a spell it takes a million years (making spellcasters boring as shit by just standing there is the lamest way to go, see Black Desert Online for how to make a caster play like a fucking beast) -- and I'm not even a caster! Just standing there waiting for my pawns to finish some shitty heal spell takes like 5+ seconds for a heal that only restores a certain part of my health bar. Meanwhile I can snack on 500 herbs I picked in a pause menu to heal faster and with less risk. So weird.

But those are just quirks I can deal with. The real problem is I can't get invested in anything. I don't care what any NPC has to say, I don't care about any of these quests, the world feels brown and dead and it's not fun to traverse.

Like, the actual part where I'm fighting, as I said years ago, is good! But it's like wading through a swimming pool filled with pig shit to get to a candy bar.

That said, gonna keep trying. Maybe it'll finally click. Either way, I'm looking forward to the second game regardless, as I assume they've improved a lot since then. Also I hope there's a pugilist class and you can put one pugilist on each side of that Sphinx and speedbag punch her tiddies.

3 hours ago, TwinIon said:

Apple based their 30% cut on the horrific carrier controlled app distribution of the early 00s and Valve based theirs off of the cost of physical distribution. At the time, neither was really a bad deal. Now that digital distribution has become the norm it's basically unjustifiable for that high of a cut to become standard and the only reason that fees have remained that high is monopoly control.

 

If you're selling a product outside of one of those monopolies, fees go down very quickly. Etsy runs a store, and their fee is 6.5%+payment processing, so call it 10%. On Squarespace once you're paying them more than $23/month the transaction fees go to zero and you're only paying the 3% payment processing fee. If you're only paying for their cheapest plan, then their fee is 10% (which includes payment processing). Those are imperfect comparisons and I'm well aware that Steam offers a bit more value than just a website, but it's not 27% more value.

 

Sweeney and Epic aren't saints and I'm not necessarily defending them, but these fees are way higher than they should be and I think it's bad for consumers that they've persisted for so long.

How much do Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony charge?

Last I checked, it was 30%.

Thus, industry standard.

Also last I checked, Fortnite is available on all of those platforms, didn't hear Sweeney pitch a bitch about that.

Not wanting to pay 30% makes a lot of sense, picking and choosing when it's "okay" to pay 30%? Ehhh.

Wanting Valve to just give up a huge portion of their main revenue "just because" is really funny though.

24 minutes ago, Biggie said:

I prioritize sleep over gaming. My games ain’t going anywhere. But fuck feeling like shit the next day.  

Feeling like shit in the morning is what keeps me ALIVE!

9 hours ago, legend said:

Played through the gears and gambits main mini games. Pretty fun. But you know would make it even more fun? No arbitrary timers!  

 

The timer seemed much more forgiving in this one, but I stand by it being a shit game design! It would have been far more interesting to remove it and just keep the waves coming until someone died.

Know what cemented in my mind that Unicorn Overlord will never be for me? When I not only used the auto-gambit function for Gears and Gambits, but when you unlock the hard mode, it says "now you can't use auto-gambit" so I was just like "fuck you I'll use the same set the AI already made for me" and brute forced my way through the hard modes like that.

1 minute ago, best3444 said:

 

I don't know how you do it with that many hours. You must not get any sleep. 

It usually goes something like last night:

Think I've got maybe 20 minutes left, continue despite it being 1AM

Play for 2 hours

Realize I've actually got 3+ hours left

Go to sleep late and wake up feeling like absolute dog shit