I think having areas with weaker or stronger enemies is fine. Good, even. So long as you can tell by looking at them what you’re getting into.

Dark Souls generally does this. A rotting skeleton is a low threat. A giant knight in black armor and man sized sword is a bigger threat.

Oblivion will often have dudes that visually and behaviorally are the same, but hit way differently because of the numbers assigned to them. You can’t really look at a scene and understand what you’re getting into.

Other games also do a bad job here. Borderlands for example will have identical looking bandits, but in this area they’re indestructible level 100, and that one they’re push over level 5. The ass-creed Viking one did the same thing. Archers on one side of the river you could ignore, but the far side would one hit you.

I think a lot of studios don’t want to invest in the extra art assets and stuff when it’s cheaper to just use the same monster model and assign it different numbers.

I feel like trying to combine

• high vertical power growth
• non linear “open world”
• power fantasy

all together is just fundamentally at odds with itself.

Personally I’d prefer to see less vertical power growth. I’d rather have the numbers stay somewhat constrained.

Like, let’s say the most damage you can ever do with a lightning spell is 100. Work backwards from that to figure out how much health things should have. We want a master mage to be able to blow mooks up in one zap, mid tier in 3, and big scary shit in 6.

A novice mage zaps for 20. We want mooks to take 3 hits, mid tier stuff maybe 10, and big scary stuff a lot.

Mooks: ~60hp Mid tier: ~210 Bosses: 600

If your gameplay is then deeper than a simple stat check, a novice can persevere and win against a big challenge.

I really super dislike it when you have stuff that looks like a mook or a boss, but is statted otherwise. I remember in Oblivion some witch lady was oddly high level, and she kept fighting despite having like 50 arrows in her face.

Something like that, but with more thought put into it than a Lemmy post from the couch.

Oblivion was kind of really bad though. It had the worst level scaling of the genre.

I think the spell crafting was also toned down and more gated than Morrowind. And the equipment I think was overly simplified.

It is a peeve of mine in a game where it’s like

• go to a cave. It’s empty
• go to a town. Guy says cave is haunted please clear it out
• go back to same cave. Now it’s full of ghosts and skeletons!

I feel like this has become less common in the last decade though

On the one hand, I don’t want another pandemic.

On the other, I want all the anti-vax and right wing idiots to go away forever. So maybe another pandemic would be a pyrrhic victory.

It would never occur to me to go watch someone do a whole speed run. Even less so to watch someone “doing a bit”. Like, making a character that looks like Shrek and invading in a swamp is kind of funny, but I’m not going to watch that.

I don’t know how to explain the complete void that is my interest there. Like, I wouldn’t be mad if it was on in the background. But I just… Don’t find it appealing. Like watching paint dry or looking out my window. It’s there. Sometimes there’s a cat. But I’m never going to be like "sweet let’s go watch outside the window "

This makes me feel kind of alienated.

I don’t think I’ve ever watched someone playing games intentionally, outside of like “how do you do this part?” guides, and maybe a couple hours spectating in games total.

Ok, and a handful of like “let me solo her” highlights that made it to me. But I never like seek it out.

I’m principal Skinner, I guess.

That would certainly help with a lot of problems, but won’t fix the underlying problem that hinders all of us. That is, that humans often weigh emotions more than they probably should.

It’s a good game, and I say that despite disliking DND 5e. Mods help

It’s like…the solution is right in front of their noses. Just treat people better/not like robots

I’ve been saying this in response to a lot of things lately, but… people are emotional. It’s an emotional problem. Management feels a way, mostly contempt, and any studies about how treating people better would be cost-effective don’t matter. Studies show that a 4-day workweek is good for productivity and profits? Nope, feels wrong, can’t be true.

Essentially, people are stupid and I don’t know how to fix it. Can’t just bop a CEO on the nose with a newspaper when he’s being bad, unfortunately.

il pleut. j’aime le son. je suis en train de lire sur le canapé avec mon chat. (il dor)

Their first pathfinder game was so excruciatingly guide dang it I never finished it, and never even considered this game. I kind of assumed it was the same way, where there’s stuff like “Ah, you didn’t return to this unmarked forest on day 7, so now you never get a wizard”

Oh, now I remember having an argument on here with some asshole who insisted I just have “fomo” over this. Sign posting and foreshadowing are only to appease fomo, I guess.

I failed calc2 and am gainfully employed as a mid/upper level software engineer.

One guy at work really saved the day because he’s good at math, and made a very slow process much faster because he knows … uh… vector math? He did magic with numpy

It was okay.

Didn’t really like the ending(s). I think one of the lead guys was like “cyberpunk can’t have happy endings”, so I guess they never read Neuromancer.

Gameplay was so-so, but I fixed some egregious problems with a mod. People who thought it was going to be life changing were living in a dream land.

Played the games. Not interested.

A new story in the setting could be good

Retelling the game sounds bad. Conveniently, the reasons why are nicely outlined in the article.

I switched to linux because windows 10 is going end-of-life, and I can’t upgrade to windows 11 even if I wanted to.

It’s been fine, other than some trouble getting mint to dual boot the first time.

I really don’t think Baldur’s gate 3 and whatever the fuck Monopoly go is are the same kind of thing.

Kid is lucky the racists didn’t murder him and say that he did something to deserve it.

I hope those racist almost-murderers are ruined.

At least you can improve inventory in-game (eg: do normal gameplay quest and crafting stuff to get bigger bags). Some monetization is cash or nothing.

Still bad when they make something annoying and then charge to fix it.

Guild wars 2 specifically has a surprising amount of quality of life stuff for free, but you can see places where “we can make money here” won out occasionally.

Baldur’s gate 3 characters aren’t even that complicated. You pick stats at the start from a limited range of options, and then make very few choices when you level up. Some levels you don’t pick anything at all. This ain’t path of exile.

I got a mod for bg3 that gives you a feat every level and holy shit did that make it more interesting.

To WotC’s credit, making character choice really shallow is probably why the game succeeded so well. A lot of people don’t really want a lot of choices, especially when some are traps.