Like I mentioned before, “tutorial pulls” are part of that hyper-generosity that gachas will commonly have for new players

I don’t feel it’s “hyper”, it’s only 8 crystals instead of 10 for guaranteed Noelle. Other (non-tutorial) pull categories have something guaranteed for 10 crystals, what exactly they guarantee changes depending on current events and such. Classic pulls category is 10 crystals for guaranteed 4+ star something, which can be character or weapon.

to give them enough of a dopamine rush to hang around and be more likely to spend more later

“Dopamine rush” sounds like a bit of a stretch, because normal gameplay here with tons of randomized minibosses, minigames and puzzles, all of which reward you fancy chests with random loot in open-world, gives way more dopamine every few minutes, and the whole gacha thing feels quite underwhelming compared to that in terms of neurochemistry.

Give it another week and you will find that the supposed good luck runs out, as well as the free currency offered for things like logging in, and then it will start requiring a ton of grinding or real world money to acquire the necessary currency to get to the “pity” in order to ensure you get a top-rarity item. That’s how gacha systems work.

Sure, I will be looking carefully at this dynamics as I progress. I find it quite surprising what you’re describing is still not there.

and can’t last or elee the game will not make nearly as much money

Who knows, maybe it makes enough money even without being that pushy? For me it’s too early to say.

(2) Also, I’m personally more interested in “no money” challenge. I like “gambling elements” tbh and enjoy all kinds of RNG in games: starting from randomized items stats in Diablo and procgen in roguelikes and ending with randomized perks in roguelites and stuff like pulls in Genshin. So for me “gambling elements” themselves aren’t something inherently bad and definitely not something I would want to avoid. For me, it’s social implications of gambling mechanics that are sometimes bad (in context of people who can’t control their spending), but not randomness or mechanics themselves.

(1) Well, all I can say for now is that my week of playing wasn’t enough to be able to say whether this is even possible at all. Maybe there will be more unlocked characters from regular questing later in the game, but so far I only got a single dendro character (Collei) from a random pull. And I think there were some open world mini-puzzles activated by dendro. I don’t think there were a lot of them though. Also they are definitely optional and not a big deal. Could also be possible it was intended for later game players going back with their dendro characters unlocked organically in the later questlines.

vulnerable people are paying more than they can afford to finance the game for everyone

Well said. I think a lot of things in the world work like this, unfortunately. Like, some people have to work long hours or hard jobs because they didn’t choose a career path that would allow them to work less and earn more. I mean, it sounds very different, but it’s also kinda similar in a way. There are people suffering for the benefit of other people. Saying they could choose another job is the same as saying vulnerable people could choose to not be vulnerable.

Legislation that effectively adds an upper limit to unlock the entire game with a sensible maximum monthly cost for new content, is needed in my opinion.

Agree, this is a great idea.

The only “pity” I dealt with at this point is guaranteed 4star for every 10 pulls. It can be anything though, not necessarily a character. But there are sometimes special offers (like tutorial pull) that indeed guarantee that you get a particular character or item for 10 pulls.

With a gacha, if they’re promoting some super-strong character, weapon, etc. that you want and you buy currency to spend in the gacha, you are not guaranteed to get that item or anything of the same quality/rarity in any of those pulls you make

I have only basic understanding of those systems, but it seems, there are “pity” systems which do give some guarantees that you get something if you fail rolling for it for long enough. I do agree it’s all very gamblish at its core though.

No money challenge so far sounds very realistic to me, but no gatcha at all? I’m not sure you can get characters except early game ones any other way. And those starter characters don’t even cover full list of elemental powers meaning you won’t even be able to solve some open-world puzzles that require certain elementals to interact with stuff. And I’m not sure those crystals can be used for much more than wishes (aka pulls aka gatcha? do I understand correctly it’s all synonyms?).

PS: also the tutorial pull isn’t forced I think? it’s just -20% meaning it’s 8 crystals for 10 wishes, but you’re free to not use it at all

brain

RPG enjoyers have talked like this since before computer games existed. I think D&D terminology for all their kinds of dice rolls and internal math would sound similar, but even more gibberish.

What I’m trying to figure out is exactly how pushy they are. Because I’m playing Genshin for a week already and there wasn’t a single moment I considered spending real money. Even a week worth of this kind of content (open world, quests, parkour, puzzles, minigames, bosses, mini bosses, multiple types of craft, randomized encounters, etc), is quite something and there’s still no sign of anything P2W on the horizon. Should I even expect some extra beefy bosses that are impossible to beat without buying crystals for tons of wishes? If not, then how is it morally different from any game that has any paid extra content at all? Like, you definitely can buy some optional cosmetics in almost any MMORPG game. People who can’t live without buying all the unnecessary cosmetics will proceed to spend a lot of money there as well.

Honestly it was pretty good

Yeah, I have never seen anyone talking about benefits of gacha model online. People only ever talk about it like it’s pure evil in its most refined form. Yet to hear anyone say how this model allows developers to fund basically F2P “Breath of the Wild” tier games with 100x more content.

Anyone into Genshin here? When do you think the urge to spend a lot starts? I’m AR19 now, I rolled 2 characters from 20 basic wishes (Noelle and Collei), and I think I have enough crystals and primos for maybe 10-20 wishes more which is likely to yield yet another 2 characters (or more if I’m lucky). At this point, I still have no clue when I should start wanting to spend real money. There seems to be so much content to earn primos and everything else I need organically.

Good response. A bit offtopic but:

Earlier this month our Jim called upon Bethesda to remake Morrowind rather than Oblivion. “You cowards,” Jim wrote, calling Morrowind a “special game, where a beautifully unique fantasy setting is locked away behind technology and interface design that has aged particularly badly”.

I prefer Morrowind’s UI to Skyrim’s, even with SkyUI mod:

• It’s more fun to have individual item icons than just text or generic icon just for item type
• Those classic brass borders are beautiful
• Choosing one of multiple reply options work more reliable in Morrowind, in Skyrim when playing on PC you often click one option and it still picks the wrong one because you didn’t scroll enough

Overall, this whole system was obviously designed for consoles and it doesn’t really work well on PC even with mods. I don’t really remember Oblivion’s interface, but the one in Morrowind’s is something that I think definitely needs less “fixing” than Skyrim’s for example. And I don’t think it aged bad at all. Also hotkey system was great, I really miss it in Skyrim, potions are way less fun when you need to go through a bunch of menus every time you want to drink one.

Skyblivion is almost there btw, should release this year. Idk why Bethesda would waste their time competing with it.

Japanese schoolgirls is a big NO-NO in Australia 😅 Jokes aside, this is the first time I hear about this game, watching trailer I immediately thought about “When They Cry”, and then I read this from article: “Silent Hill f is being developed by Neobards Entertainment (which has previously served as a support studio for Capcom’s Resident Evil games), with creature and character design by Kera, and a script by When They Cry writer Ryukishi07.” So now I’m hyped!

Any recs for person who enjoyed HL Alyx (+ community mapsets) and Ancient Dungeon VR?

Currently 100% of my time is spent on games that are “six or more years old”, and a lot of that is spent on games that are more than 30 years old. But! I’m playing newly-made community content for 30 y/o games. This kind of retrogaming is something that evades Steam statistics entirely because it usually means playing custom sourceports of old games which rarely are on Steam. One old game I play on Steam to contribute to this statistics is Skyrim.

• https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/151300-dbp70-forgotten-psychedelics
• https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/151602-dbp71-grief-arbiter

There are still people so powerful they manage to use Windows XP in this day and age. My intuition says most people will be able to use Windows 10 for at least one more decade with minimal issues, after that it will gradually become trickier, but it will still be usable even in 20-30 years with advanced hacks if humanity doesn’t go extinct by then.

Oh man I love how much I have to manage my inventory in this game.

I’m currently playing Skyrim and I kinda dislike fast travel after Morrowind. It felt more interesting to figure out the best way to quickly travel from point A to point B because that involved mark/recall, mage guild teleports, propylons, silt striders, boats, etc. It was interesting logistics mini puzzle, and some of it you had to plan before traveling somewhere, (like the best place to cast “mark” spell). I guess inventory management can be like that too, it can come in different forms like having to play tetris with inventory slots in systems like Diablo, or balancing carry burden between companions in your party in games like Skyrim, or deciding between extended herbalism bags vs smaller general purpose bags in games like World of Warcraft.

Sure, I sometimes prefer simpler systems too. It depends on what I want to play currently. I’m more trying to say we need all kinds of games. Imo, complexity and flexibility of all those systems, like character stats, perks, inventory, etc - is what makes “RPG” an “RPG”. If you take a bit of it away it becomes an “ARPG” like “soulslikes” and other similar games. If you take even more of it away you get “slasher”, “3d platformer”, etc. I’m a big fan of ARPG and 3d platformers like Spyro or Soul Reaver, but it’s totally different kind of games.

Interface looks very similar to SkyUI 🧐

Those features though, I hope other RPGs consider them carefully:

• You can send items from inventory to your home base with a single click
• Consumables don’t weight anything so you can carry infinite potions

This is just way too casual/reductionist imo. At least make some mechanic that justifies sending items. Like an item teleportation spell or something. Imo it’s okay if some RPGs will be as convenient as this, but asking for every RPG to be like this is just too much.

Don’t underestimate what hobbyists want in their games. It’s actually AAA games that don’t want to risk and do fairly standard stuff while indies/hobbyists like to experiment and implement unorthodox mechanics and visuals. I think that, for example, writing your own 3rd person character controller (with stuff like snappy raw input movement, walljumps and also properly handling moving/rotating platforms) and cartoonish NPR rendering requires going through a lot more irrelevant systems in UE5 than doing the same in many other engines including Unity, Godot, and UPBGE. In Unity there actually is a similar kind of bloat (like URP), but it’s optional and you can just hack “good old” built-in render pipeline (also has tons of ready-to-use snippets and shaders open-sourced by community through years). In other words for me UE5 vs other engines is more like Java EE vs Python (or NodeJS) than Java EE vs Wordpress. UE5’s complexity is more of too many abstraction layers and lengthy workflows rather than being too low-level and flexible. Lightweight and flexible engines are great for hobbyists, game constructors are fine too for those who really want something very basic.

Arguing about UE5 feels just as bloated and convoluted as using the engine itself! Sorry, I couldn’t resist 😅

If a slow startup of the editor the first time

By “one-time learning cost” I meant that to learn how to do a thing in UE5 you will have to spend 95% of time learning things you won’t ever need to understand that 5% that you actually want. Yes, it’s also a one-time cost, but it’s not one-time cost most developers want to pay unless they really need all that compexity.

It is a philosophical difference.

It’s a personal productivity difference. If you are able to allocate N hours to make a game and you don’t need most of those features, you will be much more likely to finish that game in time in a simpler engine.

one time cost

Maybe stuff like shaders compiling isn’t a big deal in the long run, but one-time cost in terms of learning may be too much. If you’re going to use 5% of its features, having to go through the rest 95% when learning how to do things is a big distraction and productivity killer. Also, there is a surge of AAA games made in UE5 that have critical performance issues that developers struggle to fix for extended periods of time after release, killing performance even on the most top-notch hardware that most gamers could never afford.

an indicator that you probably shouldn’t be developing medium fidelity 3d games on a potato

Why though? Just use other engine and you’re good.

For “hobbyist” 3d games, Unity is still the king.

I’m doing a hobbyist 3d game and I’m using UPBGE. It’s terrible in a lot of ways, depsgraph kills performance, but it’s very convenient to just hit P and play during 3d modelling of the scene. This is what I would call an engine for “hobbyist”. Unity is a decent engine for professionals, for indies, for AAA, for AA, for a lot of things. At least, technically it’s there. Its management is a big issue though.

I checked some random game, which should have assets worth few gb minimum, got redirected to shady mediafire link with 10mb archive. I don’t even have to download it to tell it’s a virus.

Unreal is easy to pick up for 3D.

Unreal Engine 1.5 - yeah, maybe. Definitely not UE5. It’s one of the most complicated, convoluted and heavyweight systems in existence. Just engine itself is 100gb+ download, opening it the first time takes 30m to compile shaders. Just reading briefly through gtlf import dialog took me like 10minutes.

There are plenty of “zoomers” playing “boomer shooters”, old TES games, retrogaming on emulators, etc. In my opinion, retrogaming increased significantly during the last decade. It’s kinda a part of mainstream gaming now, it was more niche before.

Doom … mod-friendly

If it’s non-standard engine (“sourceport” in Doom terminology) with its own scripting infrastructure (like GZDoom) then sure. Vanilla and Boom compatible engines are kinda tricky, DeHackEd isn’t exactly the easiest modding approach. Mapping-friendly - for sure, but modding - less so.

And this 24$ thing runs games from 21 consoles (including PSX). Here is 13$ thing that plays 7 consoles.

Exactly my thoughts. I can buy real PS1 for 50$ where I live, and there are 25$ chinese retroconsoles that are able to run SNES+GBA+SEGA+Dendy+PS1 games (with bad PS1 performance though).

Last time I played Fortnite it was also like this. It was bots + other weak players like you. It felt quite okay, early in the match you got some easy bot kills and later you had some challenge dealing with actual players of your skill level.

I’m also using the same system as you. Currently I’m playing Skyrim as a story/ambiance game and Doom 2 (community maps/mapsets, which are releasing every day) as forever playable game. I have time to play more, but I somehow settled on this as I find it very comfortable and enjoyable. Before current Skyrim playthrough I played Steins;Gate and before that original Silent Hill 1 and so on. As infinite games I also sometimes play Quake (community maps/mapsets) and modded Minecraft.

Good job writing this up! When I picked UPBGE I expected the only big performance concern to be highpoly deformations in rig animations, so I thought it’s a no issue for me as I’m doing a very lowpoly thing. Eventually depsgraph turned out a massive problem and at this point every new dozen of objects added to scene hits FPS in mysterious ways, even when there are no constraints or anything like that on those particular objects. Overall I’m using maybe a two dozens of constraints and one simple geonodes setup in the scene, and being able to use those was one the biggest motivations to use UPBGE at all. Turned out they’re really problematic due to depsgraph. I’m sticking with UPBGE for my current project, but I’m really considering moving on afterwards, the way I choose to organise everything in separate composable components hopefully going to make porting it simple. I actually ported enemy ai state machine from my other Godot project to UPGBE, and now it seems I’m going to port evolved version of it either back to Godot or maybe even Unity 😅 Anyway, it’s very fun and productive working with UPBGE, but performance is surprisingly too bad even for very simple lowpoly games, when they require a lot of dynamic objects in the scene.

Not only nightmare, it’s also -fast. Click how it works in the bottom of the page.

One fun and moderately easy strategy is running into forward tunnel all the way down into the pit, killing a sergeant for a shotgun, running through acid into the room with health and pickups on the left, and then killing 2 more imps. PS: I’m doing it with strafe through (< and > or alt + arrows).

Reposting from my other reply: There is strafe actually, even two ways of doing it, using original DOS bindings: < and > or alt + left/right arrow. For me the easiest way to do it without strafe is just to move forward a bit, then go back and wait for dudes to come in from the right. Dealing with imps is really hard since their fireballs are sped up significantly. I tried a bit more and it seems it’s possible to actually beat this level properly. You can get other weapons and powerups. It’s just really hard with speed mode and nightmare difficulty.

It’s a bit of a secret feature, but there is strafe actually, even two ways of doing it, using original DOS bindings: < and > or alt + left/right arrow.

Played some Doom 2 (halfway through Deck the Underhalls) today, gonna play Skyrim now (started new playthrough few weeks ago). After finishing Underhalls I’m gonna proceed to play even more Doom, and after finishing Skyrim I definitely wanna play more Morrowind, some big things released recently [1] [2].

I personally mostly watch gaming streams as a background for work, never as focus activity. As a main activity I definitely prefer to play myself rather than watch others playing, with a rare exception when I’m just interested to see a few minutes of gameplay of some new game to see if I’m interested in it.

There are so many things that look goofy yet you choose to post a perfectly fine dragonish character. This one looks good to me.