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Oh yeah, I wouldn’t say that Nintendo are paragons of virtue or anything. But they are far, FAR better at making games that offer a wide variety of experiences (edit: when compared to Sony/MS. Indies are king). Similarly, sure the Switch control scheme isn’t something nobody had ever conceived of before, but it’s very distinctly different from the Xbox/Playstation controllers.
They’ve got like… what, 7 or 8 IPs that they actively maintain, right? And about 10 more derelict but still iconic IPs. Plus some stuff made by other companies that’s exclusive to their hardware.
-Mario -Zelda -Pikmin -Splatoon (Hey look a gun game) -Fire Emblem -Donkey Kong Country -Super Smash Bros
Dedicated 3rd party: -Xenoblade -Pokemon
All these games have really different themes and gameplay styles and aesthetics, and that is the reason why I’m convinced that the Switch 2 is perfectly positioned to just completely take over the market the way the Wii did- Nintendo is large and competent enough to avoid the issues that plagued the PS5 launch and later life, and fresh enough to get people interested, unlike the Xbox.
Where Sony/MS have uhhh… Looks at the PS5 exclusive games… Looks at Halo/Call of Duty/Fortnite…
Pffff. The AAA industry is notorious for being about as stale as a three week old french baguette. If it isn’t a Gun Game made for chasing the most recent trends, then chances are they don’t even want to sniff at it. To say nothing of the absolutely egregious thirst for Profit that plagues a lot of titles. It’s one thing to be a $70 game, and another thing entirely to be a $70 game with a subscription, ingame puchases, and day 1 DLC.
Sony and Microsoft can have their pathetic little ‘arms race’ about processing power and framerates and 150GB+ games.
In the meantime, Nintendo is likely going to step right up with something that has a nice fresh, intuitive control scheme like the Wii or the Switch, with a solid release library that covers a variety of styles and appeals, and promptly curbstomp the living shit out of the competitors. The market is absolutely wide open for a smash hit console in the near future, coming off the backs of the PS5’s no-games failure and the fact I haven’t even heard about the Xbox in about 3 years.
Thank god for that. There might be scummier companies than Blizzard out there, but I wholeheartedly believe the only reason that Blizzard aren’t on the same level of scum as Nestle and BP Oil is because they make games, and there are only limited opportunities to sell human lives to authoritarian regimes when you just make games.
This! I’m on one of the lategame bosses in the v6 expansion; they’re a lot tougher than the rest of the game so it’ll probably take me all weekend to get good enough to beat them
Here’s a really good browser game that should last you a good few hours
https://www.kongregate.com/games/innocuousgames/amorphous
Otherwise I guess I still play some Heroes of the Storm for old times’ sake. I really, really don’t like Blizzard as a company anymore, but the game is in maintenance and is basically just coasting out the last of the playerbase before it shuts down, so hopefully I’m not helping them succeed while I enjoy the game for its last few years.
Megaman 8-bit Deathmatch!
Nevermind I just noticed that you don’t have a mouse. Uhhhhhhhhh. You could always grab a gameboy-advance emulator and enjoy some pokemon or Pacman Collection or Beyblade V-Force or Sonic Advance 3. Loads of classics that don’t have overly complicated buttons. I bet you could emulate other old consoles too, the Sega genesis had a phenomenal library that should all be easy enough to play on a keyboard.
I feel he’s right. Youtube alone completely exhausted my patience to be advertised to in 2021, and when you’re fed up with something and it keeps getting shoved down your throat at every corner then you get annoyed at first, and then you really start to actively despise it, and then it becomes completely unbearable. I absolutely cannot stand adverts anymore, including video sponsors. If I see a particularly obnoxious advert I’ll go out of my way to AVOID the products in question, if I couldn’t avoid paying attention to it. I’d like to go on record and say, absolutely fuck the electronic billboard outside my workplace, that piece of shit makes it dangerous to drive at night because it’s so bright and I hope to god it gets vandalized beyond repair.
Most games that I try these days were recommended to me by people who I know personally. BG3 was one of very few exceptions, and honestly? You know what sold me on BG3 and made me think ‘this is going to be a really high-quality game?’ It was when there was a news article discussing the controversies after they confirmed that you could get railed by a druid. Not even something I’m interested in, but that design choice actively showed they were including niche options that not many people would pick into their RPG. That was what made me go ‘Oh shit, if you can do that, you can probably do a lot of other things! It’s an RPG with actual impactful dialog choices! They weren’t just throwing that out as an advertising buzz!’
Well, it’s set in DnD; I tried to keep expectations in check for the whole thing but they did a legitimately good job with presenting you with a varied set of options for how you can approach and resolve dungeons in Act 1 and 2. So I did tentatively allow my expectations to be raised.
In any case, I was looking forwards to seeing how they’d handle their dragon encounter. The one I’d been looking forwards to all game. And BOY did they fall flat on their face. The dungeon is one of the most frustrating and unrewarding ones in the game, and the encounter with the dragon (a highly intelligent and charismatic creature within DnD where the conversation with them is half the fun) won’t even talk to you, only to a complete dickhead NPC that’s a mandatory tagalong with your party. There is NO variance in how you approach or resolve the dragon, there is no way you can influence their storyline for better or worse, and you can’t even kill Dickhead NPC. For high hopes to be met with by far the hardest failure to meet expectations… yeah, it just killed my enjoyment.
(For contrast, compare how they handled their dragon to how they handled their Hag, Devil, the entire Thorm family, the Gith Creche, and Grymforge. Look at how much your choices can influence those. Look at how much they will talk to you.)
Yeah, he was one of the last heroes to get added. The devs knew the writing was on the wall so they focused on adding fan-favourites before the game went into ‘maintenance mode’ and wouldn’t get new content, so we have Deathwing and Hogger (and they’re both great)
Also yeah there’s no level cap on heroes anymore, I have Brightwing over level 200, she’s absolutely great
Ironically I found the game had the opposite balance issues before going Maintenance Mode- too much focus on high level competitive play which was getting super ultra hard stomped by Genji and Tracer plus a support. The day our competitive leagues were officially canned, then we got what I vividly recall was the best balance patch ever that made QM and draft league games so much more open-ended and fun to play.
Surprisingly, yeah. It even gets a once-year balance and bugfix patch. Mostly play Brightwing, Dehaka, Deathwing myself, although Kael’thas is fun too
It may not be the biggest game out there these days, but it’s got a good enough playerbase for matchmaking to work consistently, and it’s still fun to play
Shoutout to Brutal Critical being the worst feature in the entire game for having minimal mechanical impact (sure it hits hard when you crit, but you have no way to boost crit rate outside Reckless Attack and the chances are still dreadful) and taking up no less than THREE levels on the core barbarian template.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eFc2qQTY9P3ym9fyMNYHC_mIogpt9kNrOdm5n_yj1cs/edit
Anyway, try this on for size! It’s a pretty big homebrew, but so long as you take it one step at a time it should all be balanced and make good sense
Tbh I didn’t truly realize how deeply fucked the class balance was until I started making a really really big homebrew that required me to build and balance eight classes (operating on the personal principle that since it’s a team game, all the classes should have roughly equal impact).
This philosophy right here is the fucking devil when it comes to designing co-op games
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LinearWarriorsQuadraticWizards
(I can link you my big homebrew if you like to play DnD 5e, by the way)
Heroes of the Storm: Alexstrasza in dragon form actually isn’t any tankier at all (even if she looks it) and wins fights by aggressively backlining no matter what
DnD (yeah the tabletop): The game really gets broken by Spellcasters once you understand that even if their damage is better than martial characters, the most powerful spells are generally AoE crowd control (Entangle, Web and Hypnotic Pattern) or story-warping RP spells. Also of note: the martial builds for Bard and Warlock are full casters that can still do almost everything a regular martial can do. An important part of mastering the game is realising how horrendously imbalanced it is
Dwarf Fortress: This is literally the core gameplay loop for the first 200 hours
Yes, but I was under the entirely reasonable expectation that I would indeed get my niche thing (that being three or four lines of dialog), given the game’s overall setup, mechanics, advertising and franchise. It wasn’t just not included, it was actively averted as hard as possible.
Would you not be disappointed in the same circumstances?
I feel you. I REALLY feel you. I’d say more to commiserate, but everything I’ve got to say on the matter is already up there, and while I’m upset, I don’t want to rant everyone else into being frustrated. Best of luck to you finding someone you can save in your games?
I could, but after getting burned so badly in BG3, I’m very much feeling cautious about touching anything else this studio’s made.
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Even as a dedicated pokemon fan that hasn’t played Palworld (the butchering mechanics don’t really appeal to me)…
I really hope Nintendo loses this, and loses it HARD. I think that some actual competition would be really healthy for the pokemon franchise, giving them an actual impetus to make sure their games are high-quality and well-supported and don’t pursue serious anti-consumer practices.
Godspeed, Palworld. Counting on you.