“Guess what! I’ve named a boil on my ass after you. It, too, bothers me every time I sit down.”

-Gheed, Diablo 2.

It’s also creating a patent minefield that stifles any game development by people who can’t afford the lawyers necessary to navigate it.

In other words, emulators are crucial for game preservation? This shows that Nintendo knows that, and when they say it’s not the case, they’re not simply wrong, they’re lying.

This is why I’m looking forward to the first few seasons of PoE2. It sounds like they’re starting out focused on making the moment to moment gameplay more interesting. They’ll cave to the zoom zoom crowd soon enough and ruin the game with power creep within a year, so I’m very much planning on treating it as a temporary game, but it’ll be fun while it lasts.

I think regardless of how realistic it is, it’s definitely interesting how the owning class really likes the idea of a future with a class of sapient beings with no legal rights.

Just in time for SSDs to be commonplace so load times are short enough not to need them.

The story is hard to grasp because you’re starting off halfway through it. The entire first half of the campaign is lost media.

Exactly. I give it 50/50 odds that this video is something people will look back on and laugh about how much effort went into bosses that were functionally removed from the game, much like PoE1 boss mechanic guides. I genuinely want to be wrong here, but the game I want PoE2 to be, and the game GGG wants to make, is something the community is viciously opposed to. The PoE community absolutely despises anything resembling gameplay.

I really hope they keep the power creep in check. Everything they’ve shown looks great, but if player power is even a fraction of what it is in PoE1, it’ll just be a neat bit of trivia that if you intentionally hold DPS and let bosses live they all do unique things.

While there’s nothing wrong with a game being declared complete and stopping updates, the way this went down doesn’t sit right. Evil Empire (the studio that split off from Motion Twin specifically to maintain Dead Cells) had longer-term plans and the resources to make them happen, but Motion Twin then ordered Evil Empire to stop development because they thought an actively developed Dead Cells would be a competitor to Windblown that they could preemptively kill off.

The irony is that without the warning to attempt to suppress discussion about that, people might have just forgotten about it.

There’s also a recurring theme in all the interviews after release, they were very open about their biggest regret being how much content had to be cut from the original plans for the first game due to budget constraints. Some things were restored in the content packs afterward, but other things were too foundational to the game’s overarching structure to make sense to be patched in after the fact. The Dreamer sanctums were going to be full fledged dungeons with a big climactic boss fight with each Dreamer, the Abyss was going to be an entire zone with multiple bosses rather than a plot only area, the Coliseum was going to be part of a much more involved sidequest, and there were several major zones that just didn’t end up in the game at all. The result was still a great game, but a shadow of the absurdly ambitious project they envisioned starting out. I assume they’re making Silksong with the intention of not leaving any “what might have been” things.

The change is if you see one, there’s an implied truce between every non-Cybertruck-owner until they’re dead, then it’s back to a free for all.

Someone who was a tech journalist rather than a games journalist, and posted the attempts as a bit of self-deprecating humor. Of course capital-G Gamers think being bad at a game is a Serious Crime and nothing to joke about, so they responded as you would expect.

Knowing how the vocal minority thinks, they’re probably deliberately ignoring the advice because they think any form of preparation or mitigation is cheating.

What definition of “actually difficult” are you using here? All difficulty in games boils down to learning things. If you exclude anything learnable, you reach absurd conclusions like the only true form of difficulty is colorblind inaccessibility.

That’s the entire AA series on Switch now with the exception of Layton vs Wright. Hopefully, this means AA7 is next?

It would have been nice to play through the entire story from beginning to end now that they’ve added the finale to the arc. But you can’t do that.

I’m cautiously optimistic. It looks like a solid core for combat, they need to keep the power creep in check. Most of PoE1’s issues stem from the fact that an optimized build just one-shots everything, and the bandaid fixes that try to fit a source of challenge into that meta.

Actual Zelda, not BotW/TotK.

For all but the most stubborn purists, that definition has sort of retreated to the more specific term “traditional roguelike”, letting the roguelike/roguelite distinction be about meta progression.

Easier but more interesting, and more of a solid foundation to build high end challenges on top of. 1.0 Gold Stake was not a fun experience, it was pushing the game to a breaking point. Now Gold Stake is a challenging but reasonably balanced feeling mode. Maybe not quite as hard as a top difficulty should be, but now the systems are in place to support extending the difficulties further.

I think the ideal way to make moral choices compelling is to make good an actual sacrifice. Declining powerful things for yourself and putting yourself in danger to help others with no gameplay reward, only narrative reward. Make evil tempting, being selfish and pragmatic will make things easier on you. Let’s say there’s a survival sequence where you’re in the wilderness with limited food and encounter someone starving. You can help them, for no inherent player power related reward, but you’ll run the risk of running out of food yourself. Let them starve and you make the sequence much more comfortable.

BotW ruined the series. Open world, despite the promise of freedom, is a crippling set of shackles on world design. No upgrade can meaningfully interact with the world because every area has to be a potential first area. There’s no mystery of “what’s past this obstacle?” because everything has to be passable as soon as you see it. Worst of all, your reward for thoroughly exploring and completing all the optional quests? Butchering the final boss, which at full power is a highlight of the game, into the worst anticlimax of the series by removing multiple entire phases and drastically nerfing the HP of the phases that remain. The only intact phase literally can’t hit you if you just run in circles around it.

All of this wouldn’t be too bad if it was a one off, but Aonuma confirmed it’s the template for the series going forward. We’ll never see another proper Zelda game.

Competitive NES Tetris exemplifies this. The game was already retro when most current top players were fetuses, which completely eliminates nostalgia as a possible factor.

The Celeste mod Strawberry Jam. It’s a lot of fun, but I’d be more than satisfied with just getting through the expert levels, which are already at the point where simply watching gameplay of them would kill a small Victorian child, but I’m at just the right level of masochism that this is a tough but satisfying grind. But I’ve seen what’s next, I’m fully aware of the horrors of the Grandmaster levels, and I know I’ll hit my upper limit well before 100% completion.

A lot of times the system is “you can learn how it works or grind until you can have no strategy and still win”, and unfortunately people tend to just take the latter option when given the choice.

The difficulty curve in Tetris has a few different possible knobs to adjust as the levels go up, generally involving how much of a delay you have on certain events. The most obvious is gravity, which is how many frames it takes to fall one space (or, to ramp that up further, how many spaces it falls per frame), but the relevant one here is lock delay. This is the amount of time between the piece landing and the player losing control over the piece. Low lock delay like you have on NES tends to make small mistakes a lot more punishing. High lock delay lets you reposition a piece shortly after it falls. Modern Tetris has a small but highly controversial change to the lock delay logic: rotating a piece resets the timer. This means you can spam the rotate button to think about where to place a piece indefinitely, a technique called infinite spin. Presumably this was done with timed and battle modes in mind, where this isn’t really an advantage because it’s always better to play quickly, but in endless it has no meaningful cost. So leaderboards started to get pretty grotesque, with top scoring games dragging on for dozens of hours. Something had to be done about it, and shifting focus entirely to timed and line limited modes was the choice they made for better or worse.

The crash was known, it’s been reached by a TAS but no human had gotten far enough to trigger it. He was intentionally trying for the crash to be the first one to do it.

Blame the Tetris Guideline. In the mid 2000s, they changed the rotation system, and under the new system, any player of intermediate skill can just play forever. Once you know the tricks to keeping a piece in play and building the stack in a way that you can always get a piece where you want it, you can’t lose until you voluntarily lose. That was, needless to say, a bit broken for leaderboard purposes. So as a bandaid solution to that, the main mode was changed from endless to 150 lines.

PF2e is a lot more approachable than 1e. It’s a lot harder to truly botch a character in 2e, while preserving variety of options. The 3 action system is also much more intuitive than action types.

Almost every AAA release has pulled the same trick for at least the last 10 years if not longer. Don’t announce the PC release until after the console release, that way some people buy the game twice.

The ending of part 1 was literally killing a manifestation of the concept of being a remake. It’s a sequel to FF7R, in which the subtitle “Remake” was a red herring, not part 2 of a remake.

Money and time are separate costs, consuming time is not, in and of itself, something of value.

I don’t see how anyone can consider the sound puzzles in the jungle, the Tetris piece puzzles in the swamp and the color theory puzzles in the greenhouse the same kind of puzzle and be arguing in good faith.

Especially if there’s head bob. That simulates the exact difference in your senses of vision and balance that triggers seasickness.

Steam forums are the absolute bottom of the barrel for game discussion, maybe tied with 4chan.

5e rules explicitly refer to spaces on a grid and had to be changed in several ways to work in a gridless setting.

They’ll also say they’re too smart to be affected by advertising.

I wouldn’t even mind that if the end result of engaging with all those systems was something more satisfying than just completely nullifying the combat, the part that’s supposed to be the core of the game. Why even have different types of enemies if as soon as your build gets up and running they’re going to die before they’re even on screen, let alone being able to attack?