Sorry to hear that but I can definitely understand why that would happen lol. That button is getting a lot of action.

Have you figured out any way to mitigate the arthritis issue? I know there are accessibility controllers out there to help with that. Would hate to hear that it causes you to play games less if that’s the case.

Luckily this game just clicked for me in that way with the parry system but I get why people would immediately be turned off if they couldn’t get it down.

I wouldn’t say it’s really bugs I experienced, the game just seems to play fast and loose with its hitboxes at times. Some of it is fine and it’s a game that needs to be playable so I understand but I think most souls players have had the experience of being hit by a weapon whose speed is nearly zero at the end of a swing but still does full damage, it’s just how the games have always been from what I can tell.

That and being hit because I’m too close to an enemy so the cylinder hitbox around their sword clips me, that happens. Or being hit while behind or beside an enemy happens sometimes. Just frustrating in this game more than most because when those confusing hits do happen, they do massive damage that is harder to recover than it would be in a souls game.

Also very good to hear the final boss is what I’m working toward. I know Owl 2 is optional but I wanted to push myself. I’m fine with the difficulty but the fight was pretty silly and grindy. Just highlighted some of the issues I had with other enemies but I’m not judging the whole game on either that or the demon.

And yes you’re spot on about the demon lol. My thoughts exactly were that it seems just ported from another game and utilizes few of the mechanics I’ve been honing my skills at.

I did think it was the final boss though so hearing people talk about how the actual final boss is better is giving me hope. The souls games are at their peak when you finish a final boss and feel like a Karate kid moment where the wax on wax off of the systems are showing their merit of teaching you to master them. Looking forward to it and thanks for your input

I think that’s why I don’t enjoy this as much as other souls games. It means you spend a lot less time just wandering and slowly getting to a new room or hallway bit by bit. And there aren’t a whole lot of regular enemies that I have to square off against, just mini bosses. The levels also don’t have the same variance to them that other Souls games do, it’s all pretty locked in reality.

So yeah I can’t say I will super remember the locations like I do with other souls games or remember certain enemies like I would the knight archers of Anor Londo. It feels more like a boss rush game

They are all over the place for certain enemies, you’re probably just used to it and are using sound and rhythm for most of it. Which is something I’ve had to get used to but I noticed many of the enemies make it harder to learn them because what I expect vs what I get out of the parry makes less sense.

I think most of the sword based enemies you’re correct, their attacks are fair and the timings make sense. It’s on the other enemies that I have issues. Specifically any spear enemy or any enemy who puts their weapon in the wall or floor or any enemy who has an exceptionally large weapon.

For enemies that put their weapon in the floor, of which there are quite a few in this game, they are incredibly hard to parry. How are you supposed to parry a weapon you can’t see coming? You just have to memorize the timing on most of them.

Similarly due to how circles work, if you’re close to an enemy with a large weapon you’re going to get hit sooner if you’re closer to them. Works mostly fine if the enemy is still, this makes sense to the brain. But when the enemy is jumping, flying, moving quickly it makes it very hard to even understand when the weapon might land. And if you’re close up to one of these enemies, the hitbox often extends even from the hilt of their sword. For instance I’ve been hit several times while hugging an enemy who thrusts away from me toward the side but the hilt of their sword does damage to me because its hitbox is likely a cylinder.

It’s not the worst thing in the world, it’s an improvement from other souls games. But they even do this intentionally just to mess with you and make swing speed varied at times even though there’s no way you can do it visually for some enemies.

So yes the timings are all over the place but it’s even intentional. Each different weapon used by the different enemies is something you must die and learn to parry. On the whole it’s mostly fair, but certain enemies it’s deliberate and frustrating.

Definitely I appreciate that. I’ll see how the ending goes and maybe give NG+ a shot. Just have a lot of other patient games on the list ya know? Either way thanks for your input!

It’s possible my perspective may change for sure. It’s happened before to me with the souls series. I initially didn’t like bloodborne but it grew on me so we’ll see how the ending works out.

Also, I only found that fight because of a walkthrough. Normally I don’t use walkthroughs but I got the game stuck to where I needed to converse with an NPC before the game would progress. It wasn’t one of the main ones so I got very confused and had to look it up and I read too much lol. I do have a lot of other games to play though so I wanted to experience the harder optional route while I could in case I never came back to it.

Don’t get me wrong, I knew that the steps you take to even just find the owl memory were not something intended for first time players to do but since I found his first fight so easy I wanted to explore it. Not judging the whole game on that fight either for obvious reasons but it did solidify some of these things for me.

Either way we’ll see how I get on and what I think of the final boss, thanks for the comments

Oh no worries, I should clarify that I’m not finding the game to be too difficult. If anything, it’s been kind of easy because I got the combat down pretty quickly. I haven’t been dying to bosses very often at all until I hit that second Owl fight.

As crazy as NG+ 13 is, I don’t think I’m going to go through it again for NG+. Even with the higher difficulty enemies, I just think the combat is almost too straightforward.

I agree 100%, parrying is the way to go with combat like this though I wish for a bit more of a balance between parrying and other things that this game doesn’t quite hit. Still when it works, it works well.

As for difficulty it’s not that I find the enemies easy per se, it’s that I find the game loop easy and kind of dull. Those problems I don’t expect a harder difficulty to fix. For instance I fought Owl for the second time and the tedium of that with his high damage convinced me pretty well that the difficulty wasn’t the issue. Enemies in this game are already extremely deadly so harder must be like playing a no hit run right? Lol

That is indeed a decent boss battle. But I do think the game has a wide range of battles. Most of the sword battles are great, I really liked the first Owl fight. But the other fights? They kind of feel like filler at times.

I will say that the game is mostly fair but I’ve died a fair bit to some things beyond my control. The camera in particular is a real struggle at times particularly when fighting indoors.

As for me being too good, I actually think that’s probably fair. The Genichiro fight I think I cleared on my first or second attempt. The other bosses mostly were 10 attempts or less. The only one that has given me trouble so far is the second Owl fight that took me dozens on dozens of attempts. And the fire demon doesn’t seem so easy.

Even then though maybe I’ve played too many souls games. They don’t feel as fresh anymore. Like being honest I don’t think the world design is all that great in Sekiro when comparing to bloodborne or DS3. Same with enemies. I can’t really name too many places from Sekiro that have stuck with me or feel different. Whereas with dark souls; Anor Londo will be seared into my brain along with various swamps and boss arenas. But hey, at least the story is great in sekiro so it’s got that in spades.

I’ll be honest, that may be one of the issues. I found about 90% of Sekiro to be easy for a souls game. Most bosses I attempted 10 times or less. Until the last few bosses I had no issues so maybe I just find it boring because I don’t die very often?

But even the hard fights didn’t feel like huge achievements because I knew the very next boss was 5 minutes away. Maybe the game is a bit too boss heavy for my tastes, I don’t know.

Appreciate the detailed response. I think there are merits to what you’re saying about the combat being very tight but it’s extremely demanding of the player on those specific skills and that’s exactly what I find incredibly boring about it actually.

Sekiro is at its best for me when there are sparks flying and I’m fending off a flurry of blades left and right, getting those perfect timings and sussing out the beat to which the enemy is coming at me with. Even some of the regular enemies do a great job at showcasing what’s possible with the system.

But then I hit the second Owl fight. In this fight you are fending off attacks that it does not matter if you fend off or not. You will spend minutes fending off attacks for a one or two hit window to chip at damage. You will do this over and over again for 15 minutes. It’s boring. And if you get clipped by a hitbox or dodge at the wrong time, instant death. It makes all of the flaws of the game including the camera and lock on system just come out in full force.

Let me put it this way: I feel like a speed runner trying to execute what I know are the exact right moves over and over again for 10-15 minutes without making minor mistakes. As opposed to other souls games where the combat would ebb and flow, this game is one speed and you must approach enemies a few ways at most. That’s the part that gets boring is that I can’t go in going “I’m going to try to dodge this differently” and instead I’m going back in thinking “I sure hope I hit jump at this one part faster” or “don’t miss that one parry or you die” or “how do I avoid that broken hitbox?”

Specifically I had to take a break after fighting the fire demon and seeing it about to charge forward so I dodge behind it, only to die from it charging away from me despite have multiple feet of distance between us. This isn’t the first fight this type of thing has happened in either. The sumo dude in the memory is pretty bad for this as well.

Have you ever noticed that about these games? Maybe I’m off base but I feel like FromSoft is almost like Bethesda in the way that they have some rough edges to a game demanding perfection from you but a lot of people just say it adds to the difficulty or that it’s expected. It’s not massive issues but I’ve lost many fights in this game to stuff that wasn’t my fault at all.

In defense of my 12% new games, a lot of that is Humble Bundles fault

Surely it blocks snipping tools new recording feature on windows 11 though right?

Honestly with how many absolute bangers Obsidian has put out even just recently, I’m very excited for this and for Avowed. Looks like 2025 will be a very big year for them.

Doing this off of the back of games like Pentiment and Pillars of Eternity 2, I just love this studio. They’ve basically replaced Bethesda in my mind and I have far more hope for Avowed than Elder Scrolls 6 at this point

That’s some harsh criticism for CDPR who otherwise has a really good track record for games not released during the height of COVID.

If you want an actual bad studio to paid with Bethesda, I’d argue Ubisoft is a much more apt pairing.

That was my impression. Not only was it shorter but I also didn’t feel like playing it twice so it just felt like I missed out on the story with Roche. I enjoy branching paths the way that W3 does it where you get different dialog and occasionally different events but having it be split down the middle is just annoying.

That is true and I played for a bit on the deck. People should be aware though that even when configured right it doesn’t play similarly to 2&3 though

You really should. Like I said play the first hour and if you aren’t into it that’s probably a sign. But it’s very funny, I hope you have fun with it!

Who wrote this? Like just this paragraph:

This shutdown doesn’t just affect Ryujinx

Nintendo is rumored to be looking at other emulators like Yuzu, eyeing them with the same scrutiny.

How does anyone covering this exact story not know about Yuzu? Did I travel back in time?

I actually didn’t know this but I did play through that recently and I actually have really good things about how that game looks even to this day. I know they did some touching up and I’m assuming updated textures for the enhanced version but it aged a lot better than many other games from that era did

What’s really crazy is to compare Bethesda with CDPR. I’ve been replaying the Witcher 3 and it just struck me how I won’t have to wait 15+ years for the next entry. And to look at how much more efficient they’ve been in the past.

For a timeline, Witcher 2 released in May 2011 and then the Witcher 3 released in May 2015. Took 3.5 years to develop. Cyberpunk released December 2020, only 4.5 years after W3 had its last major DLC. Then in 2023 they released a very large update for Cyberpunk, about 2/3rds the runtime of the main game. And then in 2025 we’ll probably get the next Witcher game. They have like 3 games in active development now.

So what’s the difference with Bethesda? Well Skyrim sold 30 million units and Witcher 2 sold about 8 million. Less than a third the income. Yet if you compare CDPRs staff to Bethesdas at time of their next games, CDPR had doubled Bethesda’s work force. And guess what happened? Witcher 3 sold 40 million while fallout 4 sold 25 million. Thats despite Witcher 3 costing an estimated $81 million while Fallout 4 sits closer to 1.5x that at $125 million.

Then you talk about engines and it gets even worse. CDPR arguably started with a worse engine and I shouldn’t need to explain how much they’ve destroyed BS in that regard as well. Witcher 2 looks worse than Skyrim by a lot imo. But by the time their next game rolled around, it was an industry leader in graphics. And cyberpunk 2077 is like the next Crysis now while starfield is… oh boy. And guess what? After all that work on their engine, they abandoned it. Why? Because their resources are better spent making games and systems in an engine someone else updates for them. Bethesda meanwhile not only can’t juggle the ball of updating an engine and game dev, but they’re not even smart enough to swap engines.

Bethesda has all the signs of a dying studio and Microsoft is the sucker for buying them. And it’s a waste of talent more than anything. Talented people exist at Bethesda whose resources and career development would be far better off being applied on UE4.

Not if they keep on their BS. Let’s look at Fallout 4. The engine is absolutely the weakest part of the game. Can’t even keep 60fps in the city on any settings or on consoles. Frame times are all over the place. And the game isn’t even that pretty, it’s very ugly and textures are real bad. The story was pretty awful and boring, the writing in every way was forgettable.

So that’s why ES6 is screwed. It’s been downhill since Skyrim and even releasing a better looking Skyrim in 2028 on the PS6 isn’t going to cut it. It’ll be the most expensive budget title out there.

They use a hybrid system now and only use peer to peer when dedicated servers aren’t enough, so they could just swap to purely dedicated servers.

However ignoring that, even a peer to peer system can do similar tricks if you don’t isolate the host peer to just one machine. That can even be done by spot checking with a company owned server. You use the server as a verification peer and have it as a backup host to the assigned peer. If your verification peer gets different ram values or what not, you shut the server down at the very least and place that peer on a suspicion list.

But even if they went the cheap route, just distribute the peer network. Let’s say that you have a game of 12 people. You could make it so that each peer is only assigned a certain part of the simulation and players (with overlap on assignments) and cannot track the entire simulation. It’s more complicated than a single server hiding info from you, but they could at least make it to where you’d need multiple infected peers to take over a lobby.

I don’t mean individual servers. What I more meant was let’s say a game uses a standardized anti-cheat. Like EasyAntiCheat or Battleye or similar. And whoever runs your game service (Steam, PSN, Xbox) can vet these anti cheat programs and allow them to create a record on your account of cheating.

And obviously these things get false flags so you can account for that, give people strikes and allow appeals. And games would have the option of banning you for: having too many strikes total, violating only a specific anti-cheat X times, or ignoring this system except to place extra suspicion and resources on those already having strikes.

Also having an account tied to hardware is a no brainer and I’m surprised that this doesn’t get employed often. I know IDs can be spoofed but that’s another barrier potentially.

I think the best thing I’ve heard for long term solutions is to fix a lot of the cheating using server side solutions. In a game like CoD, that means the server doesn’t send you player positions unless you absolutely need to know them.

The other thing honestly is just increasing the investment required to cheat. That could mean that in order to play competitive game modes, you need to have signed in at least once for 4 weeks straight and played the game. Or you need to be a certain level. Issue hardware bans and IP bans to people. Require phone number verification.

What those things do as barriers is actually increase the potency of current detection methods. This should also carry over to accounts. I’m not sure why steams VAC ban system isn’t more popular. As in accounts need to be flagged as a whole when cheating in just one game is found.

There are many solutions but it’s just not a big deal for companies as the prior person said. Plenty could be done to at least make cheating harder and cost more time/money. But that won’t happen

That’s what makes it so great lol

Sly cooper 1, crash twinsanity, Witcher 3, Banjo-Kazooie, Hi-Fi Rush, Nier Automata

Looks like they use Easy Anti Cheat services which run at the kernel level on windows but not on Linux, that leaves a huge loophole available for Linux which I actually believe will increase cheating dramatically.

As for the software development, that’s on EAC to fix. And in fairness it doesn’t make sense for them financially to do so. Cheating already costs these companies a ton of money to fix as is.

You say that but Arcane didn’t deserve this fate. I’d be rooting for a Bethesda game to fail but BioWare and Arcane? That’s just sad. They were both amazing studios ruined by BS. And the AAA space is large enough these days that actual big budget games can indeed innovate.

Like say though, I won’t exactly shed a tear for failing studios like Ubisoft or Bethesda that have been churning out the same crap for awhile now.

Also not every game needs to innovate and it’s not like you lose a lot by having average selling games come out. But even in games packed with AAA bangers, indies still sell incredibly well. It isn’t a zero sum game.

The idea with cross posts should be that large and general communities like the “Gaming” community or whatever is where cross posts from niche communities go. And if you browse there, expect duplicates.

What that does is allow everyone to browse the larger communities, especially when they join, and see it as a sort of hub for their topic of interest.

And it works out because if I can go to the main topic community and see content from retro gaming communities, patient gamers, gaming news, and maybe gaming hardware releases then we have a more cohesive community instead of fractured ones. It’s easier to engage that way and also prevents the large communities from becoming just spam with no OC in it. But I do agree, a way to eliminate multiple notifications or placements of my posts would be great to make it a topic instead.

It’s never been a mod issue for me, I think it always ends up being a CPU problem. Though you’re correct that it could also be mods but I’ve had this problem throughout the years on every rig I’ve tried it on. Even consoles have that problem unfortunately. It’s not as noticeable, but it’s still there and can’t hold 60.

Power armor is weird and I actually ended up hating it by the time I was done. With the hard mods, it was kind of required in order to venture out into the atomic crater. So I’d inevitably go out there and within a handful of minutes a piece would break off. Cool, what do I do about that? Well not much, you’re just screwed.

Now it’s great and all that they put repair stations all around but I often wasn’t carry the resources to repair and they weren’t in the station. So add 5-10 minutes of walking around picking up steel and circuits to fix my armor.

In my opinion they could have had mobile repair kits craftable, the repair stations could have just repaired for no cost, and each piece of the armor really didn’t need to be its own part. Just makes them tedious to deal with honestly and unless you really need the armor, it’s just better not to use it imo.

I think my feelings are mixed in that aspect. I used to really love Bethesda games but after playing 1500+ hours of Skyrim and many hundreds of hours of fallout now, I think I see it for its limitations as well. And the mods end up highlighting shortcomings. The vanilla games are still a fun time I think.

Also other games have just come in and created much better story arcs and characters that highlight how bad their writing tends to be. Skyrim was written okay but even then it never did anything that felt like plot development. Instead everything there goes as expected, you’re just wowed by the scenes and dragons.

And yeah I think Bethesda continues to lack polish in what they do and it’s really showing. Even when fallout 4 came out all those years ago, every piece about it felt dated. It felt more like it dated back to Skyrim in ways, so I can see why Starfield failed even if I plan on playing it. I just hope Bethesda fix their issues because Elder Scrolls 6 can’t have this many loading screens, this many bugs, or this flat of a story. Sadly they have a trajectory on all of those things.

I’m not too knowledgeable on that front but I will say that this mod pack kind of sidelines the main story content a lot. You’ll still end up doing it but I think the issue is having to do all of the story all at once and going out of your way to do it. Here I pretty much got to the point where I was just doing main quest stuff whenever I was nearby and skipping through the dialog. I put the main story off until the very end mostly. The mods create so many quests (pretty good ones btw) that I was way more interested in those anyways. You could play through this pack and barely ever touch the main story and leave plenty satisfied.

Not to mention the DLCs are actually really good and Far Harbor itself is very long. The mods also make good use of the DLCs and add to them. So yeah the main story here is a total side quest you can basically ignore if you want to. If you end it with the Fens, you only end up doing 75% of the story and skip almost all of the institute BS

That’s what I did. Played it once with no DLCs on release, then ignored it. But with mods it’s actually much better. And if you like the difficulty of New Vegas, the extended mod pack I used helped a lot with that.

I really missed the grit and dark tone of new Vegas and while it doesn’t live up to that, mods get it much closer.

I’m very mixed on the voiced MC. In FO4 in some ways it prevents roleplaying but also never actually tells you who your character even is. They end up a boring blank slate you ignore.

They just needed to pick a lane. Either have a voiced MC and have them be a character themselves that we aren’t free to define everything about or have them be silent to give us freedom.

They chose to leave it in the middle and gave our character a voice so we could… hear the dialog we picked be said incorrectly worded and out loud? I like seeing my character in cutscenes but really we need personality options next time at the very least.

This isn’t a review of the vanilla game, but I get your point. I was mostly just debriefing after the long playthrough after going back to it all these years later.

Apologies, I do that with some thought behind it but I’m sure it annoys people.

The general thing is that you can post in a niche community, get limited engagement and only the niche benefits.

Or you can post in a large community, then the niche community suffers and appears inactive.

Or you can do what I did and cross post it, annoying people that exist in all 3 places but making the niche community active while engaging the larger community.

Is that bad? Judging by your comment, yes. I’m concerned Lemmy has an issue though with niches not appearing in those larger communities though specifically because no one cross posts. Thoughts?

That’s pretty much how I feel, they should have made the scrap very light weight or zero weight to begin with.

The Sim Settlements stuff kind of redeemed the systems, it appears to add a lot of that autonomy and you just place plots and people start working. That and it actually had an amazing set of quests to go with it, like hours of content. I was quite surprised.

That mod also adds in the ability to go to war with people and have your settlement do battle which is neat. I didn’t get that far into it but it’s an option. I just didn’t see what the ultimate goal of it was and since it doesn’t factor into the story, I didn’t really care much.

I agree with the overall sentiment but also in case you’re wondering, I finished this at over double that level. I think I was close to level 130 when I stopped, which is insane for that game. Did let me make use of the perks though which was nice.

That’s why I turned to mods and was pleasantly surprised. Those complaints are exactly what they address and fixed for me.