henke on 4/7/2022 at 09:17
I liked Invisible Inc more than XCOM thanks to its lack of random dice rolley bullshit. Yeah there's randomness in how the levels are generated, but as for what actually happens IN the level it's all up to you. Felt a lot more fair.
henke on 9/7/2022 at 21:38
I was gaming so HARDCORE I had to do a timelapse
[video=youtube;Fk5dQxwgByo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fk5dQxwgByo[/video]
Yeeeeeah Lawn Mower Simulator, babyyyyy! It's good lawnmowin'. If I'm being honest tho, this ridin' mower shit is for casuals. Real lawnmowin pros go for the push-mowers, which this game doesn't support since it's for babbys. I'm making a push-mower game for the hardcore crowd, I'll tell you more about it in due time. :cool:
Thirith on 11/7/2022 at 09:11
After finishing The Pathless (it's nice enough, but I wasn't exactly bowled over), I decided that I'd finally replay Dishonored: Death of the Outsider in parallel with Invisible Inc. I love Arkane's level design, and Dishonored is the closest I've ever felt to old-school Thief. I also like the setup: playing Billie Lurk *feels* different to playing Emily or Corvo because of who she is, even if the Dishonored games tend to be quite muted in terms of many of the characters and personalities.
At the same time, Death of the Outsider doesn't exactly have the best levels/environments in the series. I'm playing the second mission, and that one feels very much like run-of-the-mill DLC: it's competent, but there's nothing unique about the environment. I know that the next mission is more interesting, but after Dishonored 2's standout environments DotO doesn't leave much of an immediate impression. Perhaps that's also why it's taken me quite a while to get around to replaying it. (I remember that the last mission is decidedly different, but if I remember correctly it's much more of a corridor with weird-ass enemies, so the difference comes at the price of the game delivering an experience that's at a remove from what it does best.)
Jason Moyer on 12/7/2022 at 02:59
I haven't played it since it came out, but I remember the 2nd mission of DotO allowing some awesome hijinx.
Thirith on 12/7/2022 at 07:10
It probably doesn't help that I'm a boring Dishonored player. :cheeky: I don't play the game so much for the whole experimentation with powers and tools, I play it more like a mildly superpowered Thief-like. As a result, it's mostly the environments and their uniqueness that I enjoy best, and that's definitely something that is lacking in mission 2. It feels like the kind of fan mission that people put together within a week or two of the editor being launched, using all the assets of the main game and doing that reasonably well, but there's nothing that's novel or surprising.
henke on 12/7/2022 at 10:21
Playing Returnal. The difficulty in this game is very refreshing in how it doesn't let you half-ass it. Most games let you half-ass it. You can just play through, on instinct, and even if you mess up a checkpoint is probably not far behind, or at least you leveled up so the next time will be easier. In Returnal? Nuh uh. There are some permanent upgrades, but they're mostly like Metroid-style upgrades that let you access new areas, but as for your base stats, they're the same at the start of every new attempt, your pea-shooter just as flimsy against the baddies. In Returnal, your character doesn't level up, but you do. I'm fighting the baddies in whole new ways now than I did at the start. And I did try to half-ass it for the first couple hours with the game, but soon realised that the only way to actually progress is to treat each run like it's THE run. That means exploring everything and powering up as much as possible before facing the boss. This game is HARD CORE.
Nevertheless I beat the second boss on my first attempt because I'm a Gaming Expert.
Thirith on 12/7/2022 at 11:53
henke: PhD in Theoretical and Applied Gameology and Gameonomy
I do like that, though: games that do a good job of teaching you how to play them better. It sounds like an obvious thing, but it must be fiendishly difficult to get it right while at the same time ensuring that your game is accessible. So often, I find myself learning bad in-game habits and then running against a wall at some later stage because at best I learned how to cheese things, and those tricks then stop working.
Sulphur on 12/7/2022 at 13:09
I think that's what people mean when they invoke the pith of 'easy to learn, difficult to master'. I'm divided on whether something like Returnal is good game design, though: do I want a game that needed the ability to pause it patched in eventually? Not really.
Stepping back a moment and taking in the big picture, I always wonder what the entire point is of games that are so hardcore that they don't provide things like checkpoints or shortcuts to unlocked areas. Not in terms of 'this is a test of your gamer cred' or levelling up your gameface or whatever analogue the surface level play is for validating your pro gaemer skills, but in the messaging behind the design. Is there a story in there, is it trying to say something about the idea of difficulty, does the story build on its cycles of repetition, is there a point being made? Because if that exists, I'm more inclined to accept hardcore difficulty in a game rather than it just existing because that's an arbitrary baseline the developers landed on because of things like personal taste and inclination. Sure, there's merit in good design within that arbitrariness - Sekiro is difficult because it is, but it's also so precisely crafted that it's a joy to play if you accept it on its own terms - but it's a wasted opportunity to me if there isn't something more that it's trying to do than tell you to git gud.
This probably reads like I'm dissing Returnal, but I'm actually intrigued by it enough to want to know whether it pursues the follow through or doesn't.
Thirith on 12/7/2022 at 13:16
From what I've heard (mainly based on (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fimmD9EtVd0) Jacob Geller's video about
Returnal), there's definitely a point to
Returnal's format, though whether that point is strong or interesting enough to warrant the hassle and the friction I can't say.
Malf on 12/7/2022 at 13:34
Thirith:
Death of the Outsider is a lot less punishing for being violent than the previous games, and the morality system is almost completely absent. It sits in a sweet spot between Dishonored 2 and Deathloop gameplay-wise. It never feels quite as... inconsequential as Deathloop, while at the same time being nowhere near as passive-aggressively pacifist as Dishonored 1 or 2.
It's a shame that a lot of the levels are recycled from D2, as I feel this shift in gameplay deserved its own playgrounds.
But the upside is that you finally get to play with some of the more interesting powers without feeling like you're going to be punished at the end for doing so. It means that you're not hovering over the Quick save / load buttons as much as you were in the previous games, and can afford to let things get chaotic every now and again when something goes wrong.
