legend

I finished Thousand Year Door today, and then played a little bit of Selaco. Still early in the latter, but I'm liking what I'm seeing so far. I played Lion King so fucking much as a kid. I got so good at it. I could pretty much play it from start to finish flawlessly. I bought it on Steam when it came out, and holy shit I don't know how I stuck with it So maybe The Cub would be good!

Andor is pretty universally well received here. A lot of the users (self included) liked at least a large chunk of Mando. Many here liked TLJ, a lot liked Rogue One. Rebels, Bad Batch, etc. I don't think many, if not any, people here who are willing to watch Acolyte have completely disliked all recent Star Wars media. You can't take people being critical of various entries -- even ones they like -- as evidence that everyone here being critical just hates all recent star wars.

All that sounds perfectly fine to me.

Then what are we arguing about? Who said anything about the majority of players? My first comment was a response to Biggie, and others, who said if you get stuck you can just cheese the game. And my response was I can see why someone wouldn't want to resort to that because it defeats the purpose. I went on to say that if the goal was to make the game accessible to people having a hard time, the developers should have done something else design wise including good ol' fashioned difficulty modes. We shouldn't be praising cheese options as a good or enjoyable accessibility feature.

Developers usually take great pains to avoid OP builds as much as possible, and they would consider that a failing in their game design, yes. There are exceptions where a game is designed to breakable as part of its very nature, but usually by requiring the player to think outside the box. E.g., Larian's games usually fit this mold where it's designed to be hard if you do the dumb thing, but very easy when you think outside the box by leveraging the various systems. Elden Ring's (or probably almost any From game's) design philosophy is at odds with cheesing and from what people are saying, doesn't succeed in making the OP cheesing strategy an interesting strategy. The point I'm responding to ITT is that people are citing very easy to cheese mechanics in Elden Ring as a feature to make it easier. But this is an absolutely awful way to unblock a player that does a disservice to their goal if the problem is people getting stuck. I haven't played it, but from what I've heard, it does sound more consistent with the design principles he's going for. Exactly -- the game principle is meant to be challenging and that's why my first comment was in response was to say I understand why people wouldn't want to use a cheese mechanic to get through. That solution is completely antithetical to the very point of the game. If From wanted to make the game more accessible, difficulty modes are a much better way to make it accessible without having the choice be "hard or trivial cheesing." I think my above comments cover this, but just to emphasize: the point I'm making is having cheese mechanics be how a player unblocks themselves is bad gameplay design that is a disservice to the rest of the game design. I think developers ought to be able to do better than that and design other ways to make the game more accessible, if that's what they want.

Actually, I somewhat take that back. Good rogue likes can get away with it because you're not doing the same thing every run. The story, your player, and world, are changing. However, even then my biggest problem with rogue likes is the time sink to get back to the challenging part can feel annoying. One solution not offered enough is having a training area when you die where you can practice boss fights, but without getting a victory if you win since it's just a practice. (With one of your last builds you had when you got there previously). Alternatively, I really liked Rogue Legacy 2's solution to this where you could lock the world (really, at any time, not just for bosses). It let you get right back to a boss immediately at the expense that you couldn't collect more stuff because all the enemies you previously fought would be dead. Although the Rogue Legacy 2 approach won't work for every rogue like. It depends on the mechanics.

Every once in a while you can skip up to 5 floors. Getting to level 50 was still absolutely painful as it was. I have a strong general opinion that making players play easy portions of game (especially if they have to replay it upon failure) just so they can get to the challenge they care about is absolutely awful game design. Maybe someday I'll find a game that does it in some way that actually seems like a good idea. I've yet to find that game though The best games encourage you to try again when you fail at an interesting challenge, not punish you for it. I'll die on this hill.

Seems a shame that they gated it behind incredibly mundane busy work then.

I have to assume that is a joke I mind numbingly did 50 levels of it just to get the inventory expansion and then bailed.

The developers have said on numerous occasions that they want to make a game where people have to struggle and work together to overcome it, which is defeated if trivial cheesing is the way people get through it. They've cited this very reason for not including difficulty modes. But hey, if you want to cling to the developers thinking trivial cheesing makes a fun game, okay fine. They want bad game design I guess. The criticism about the game design stands regardless of developer intention. I'm sure all the bosses can be beat without luck. That has nothing to do with the point I made. And now you're contradicting yourself and making my very point. If you want the game to be challenging, then it's bad game design to allow it to be trivially cheesed as an escape hatch. Difficulty modes that offer more than the binary "it's easy" and "it's hard" is a substantially better escape hatch, because then people can keep it challenging without getting blocked and resorting to making it trivial. Having mechanics that make it a breeze is akin to offering "hard" and "very easy" mode and nothing in between.

Finally finished this today. Overall pretty good, although I don't think I liked as much as its legendary status suggests. I'd give it a solid 4/5 stars.

The game design is ostensibly built around fun hard challenges that you have to overcome. If cheesing it is a solution people reach for, it implies that it has failed at making that part of the game actually fun and worthwhile. I'm not sure pushing through something so hard you're not enjoying it is great, but if your alternative is eliminating one of the pillars of the game, I can see why people might not love doing that either. A better solution might be difficulty modes so that someone can always choose something that gives a challenge *for them* without it being a binary "it's hard as fuck" or "it's trivial," but From seems allergic to adding difficulty modes.

Moving on to something else would be absolutely wrong conclusion to draw from it it not being the "current thing." The conclusion is to stop trying to make Halo cash in on the design of whatever the current "thing" is. Instead let the developers focus on making it unique and lean into things that are unique to the style of play of the franchise. This happens to be the best way to make it "the thing" again, but even if it doesn't, you'll still end up with a good game that will have a dedicated base and garner good will in general. I'm plausibly the biggest Halo fan on this board and almost certainly the biggest old-school Bungie fan. While I wouldn't rank Infinite's SP at the top of the series, it was still fantastic and the first SP Halo game 343 made that can confidently call itself Halo.

It's wild that after spending as much time as they have on table setting, this just comes out of the blue with no clear indication about why she's change. I think we all just desperately want to have good star wars and watch on the small hope it turns out good in the end. Personally, I wouldn't say this is bad so much as it's mediocre.

That would be nice!

I'm conflicted. The art style looks very appealing, but I really did not care for XI. Like @Xbob42 I found the characters deeply boring, the plot felt very by the numbers -- at least within the time I played it, maybe it gets better -- and I hated how grindy it all was. However, XI is the only one in the series I've played at all. How are the former entries? I fear they'll be at least as grindy if not more so since grinding was more common in the earlier gaming days. Maybe the characters and stories are better though?

Are we talking financial goals or life goals? Financial goals: * Save up enough for retirement that I can maintain my lifestyle with my wife throughout it. * Have enough money throughout life to not worry about medical bills to the extent that medicine can address any ills. * Not worry about having enough money to fix my house (or have a good house if I have to move). Remaining life goals: * Make reinforcement learning a robust technology that can be straightforwardly applied by non-experts. * Solve the AI problem, or at least come to understand the solution to it if not by my own efforts. * Build a star ship capable of interstellar travel. Some of those goals have questionable likelihood of being achieved, but I'm optimistic on the last one.

Not sure I tried a different controller, but I was also already annoyed because the PC performance was pissing me off. At the time, I think it didn't work properly with Gysnc and had some other issues I can't quite remember. Not sure if they fixed that now, but I screwed around with the settings for a long time and only got it to a point where it was "good enough" and then I was met with those annoying controls and decided to say fuck it. So I was already annoyed and then got mega annoyed with control issues like that and decided to bag it. Unless they made big changes on PC, if I ever try it again it will probably be on PS5 just to avoid that nonsense and give it more of a chance of clicking.

Short version: the attacks have no direction to the enemies making missing in free control easy. This can resolved by using camera lock, but the camera lock regularly breaks without you doing anything, and worse, it has no sense of priority. At one point I was fighting some big monster, the camera lock broke -- because of course it did -- and when I go to trigger it again, the game decides that I must have wanted to lock to to some distant non-hostile enemy in the distance instead of the big monster swinging at me right in front of me.

I really wish I didn't absolutely loath the controls in this game. There are a lot of things they do that I'd enjoy but it's hard to get over what feels like the worst controls since RDR2. (RDR2 is/was still worse though)

I swear this game just came out. I refuse to accept the passage of time. I'm not old, you're old!

That's certainly a Metroid Prime.

Never played this one so I could be interested. I couldn't really get into tropical freeze because I hated how much momentum was built into the control. Made it feel really imprecise and annoying. How does this one compare in that regard?