Interesting. The inability to pan and walk around makes it very different. I liked “walking” around in geoguesser until I found a landmark or something, but I never played competitively or obsessively.

Bg1 and 2, Dragon age, and mass effect famously had save imports, so “the only way” doesn’t check out.

The dark souls games are so far removed in time that the previous game is legend, so that’s an option.

For the tv show they also could have, as I said, just set it somewhere and somewhen else. They can have rumors about what’s happening in Vegas, but it’s 20 years ago and you’re in Chicago, so who knows what’s true.

So, yeah, they could’ve done something else and still made a TV show.

What made new Vegas interesting was that it’s not just another kitschy wasteland romp. It’s post-post-apocalypse, and it asks who rebuilds after.

My limited understanding is the TV show nuked the NCR so they could do more wasteland theme park, and not continue that train of thought. But also didn’t just set it somewhere else.

But admittedly I haven’t actually watched it.

But also, again, trying to make a TV show intersect with a video game with multiple endings is a foolish idea. You won’t make everyone happy, and it’s an entirely avoidable problem. They could’ve just set the show in a different part of the world that hasn’t had a game.

I found a pizza place near me that still has like 2010 prices. It’s like a large pie with 5 toppings for $20. Most places are more like $30 now, here (NYC)

I kind of refuse to watch Fallout. Partly because I read they fucked up the NCR. But also Amazon sucks , and Bethesda is kind of creatively bankrupt.

Spoiler for Shadowheart’s story

And for the main plot in act 3, with a certain bhaalspawn.

Annoying, but I get why they didn’t do like a save import from an ancient game.

Related, if they ever make another game in the franchise this show will probably be canon, so it’s not entirely ignorable.

Technically I don’t have to watch it. I don’t have to play any more games in the franchise either. But if I do want to play more games in the franchise, I’ll probably have to deal with the show.

Can we just not do this?

One, not every thing needs to be a whole franchise universe.

Two, the game had a lot of decisions players could make. Collapsing that into a single canon is going to be unsatisfying. It was annoying enough that bg3 made some big decisions about choices from bg2.

Related, if they ever make another game in the franchise this show will probably be canon, so it’s not entirely ignorable.

Three, it’s not even that interesting a setting. It’s pretty Standard Fantasy.

Yeah I don’t really like the model where it starts basic and hard, and each failure makes it a little easier.

Feels like it would be more interesting if you started with high stats, and each successful run you had to remove or lower something. Sure, you won with 200 health but can you win with 100? Hades kind of had this alongside the upgrades as you go.

I didn’t like dead cells or rogue legacy that much because it felt like I would’ve won if I had grinded more, and that’s not what I want.

I feel like games are usually a mix of execution challenges and numbers challenges. In a pure action game or other games without progression (eg: chess) you win or lose from your decisions and input. But in numbers games, you win or lose based on the stats. There’s really no way cloud from the start of the original ff7 can defeat disc 3 bosses. The numbers just aren’t there.

Some rogue-lites feel like they’re trying to be execution games but have a less clear numbers check on top. Doesn’t always work for me.

I do really like the traditional rogue like Crawl: Stone Soup, though. No meta game aside from the occasional player ghost.

Is it like the other ones where it takes several hours until you start finding interesting guns and get cool powers?

Capitalism. The rich owner types don’t like this sort of thing, and they have a lot of power. They don’t really have coherent values except “in-group to protect, out-group to bind” and “no one tells me what to do. i tell you what to do.”

I bought a couple things on epic early on because I thought competition would be good. But epic kind of sucks and has no Linux support, so I stopped.

That’s why I did it too, but let’s be fair, dice are supposed to be random.

Yeah, I realized in my older age that I don’t actually like a lot of random. I liked new Vegas where you either had the skill or you didn’t. In tabletop games I like dice pools to make the results less evenly distributed among all possible outcomes, and then options like fate points and “succeed at a cost” on top of that.

Some people I guess really like the random dice effects, but usually it just makes me grumpy. To each their own.

Most of my save scumming comes from being annoyed at the random factor. Like I have a +8 on Skill and it rolled me a 3, failing? Nah that’s stupid. Reload.

Less random, less save scumming. You can have good systems with low random factors.

Inspiration helped in bg3, but it’s a pretty limited resource and can still fail.

I did save scum once in a fight where I rolled four natural 1s in a row. The odds of that are too low for me to believe that was legitimately random.

I didn’t get one because it’s too expensive.

Steam deck was a little pricey but it has a backlog of games going back like 50 years, and I already have a large library. Plus the games are cheaper.

Uh… What?

Game A has 100 recommends, 300 not-recommend

Game B has 90 recommends, 10 not-recommends.

Is A more highly recommended? In a meaningful way?

Sometimes I think they’d make more money for the shareholders if they did a good job.

Like all these shareholder driven decisions might ruin Microsoft’s brand and lose money long term. Many shareholders are long term and will be left holding the bag if the company goes down the shitter

Business Idiots. The people in charge are too far removed from real users, their products, and any real consequences.

Really should break Microsoft up into tiny pieces.

Apparently there’s a couple free games. Never played 100% Orange Juice myself but a friend was super into it when it came out.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/282800/100_Orange_Juice/

I think part of it is a lot of stuff goes on deep discount repeatedly. Like Overcooked is $2. That’s a steal. But I already have it. If this was my first steam sale, I’d be super excited about that.

The data center haters are the strangest, to me. Because there’s this default assumption that data centers can never be powered by renewable energy

Opportunity costs

There’s a single mod that purports to convert the game to pathfinder 2e. I’m not sure if the balance isn’t to my taste or if I was doing something wrong, but my characters all had very low hit chances on their first attack. Missing isn’t fun for me

I believe it was this one: https://mod.io/g/baldursgate3/m/pathfinder2ndedition#description

I tried a Pathfinder mod, but it wasn’t quite doing it for me. I’m not sure what would do it for me exactly. I’m being a stereotypical customer where I don’t know what I want, but I can tell you what I don’t like, heh.

I don’t think it was a slog, but I do find DND 5e an unsatisfying system. You spend a long time waiting to get to the cool parts of your character, and unlimited resting breaks dnd’s already dubious balance.

Played for a while, a few times, but there’s not much challenge so I don’t stick around that long. Got strong enough to kill all the sentinels easily. Got a freighter and billions of credits. Lots of resources.

I can imagine deeper stuff they could do, and maybe they will one day.

Switched to linux (popos - so far so good) this month because fuck microsoft. yeah, some things aren’t perfect or require extra steps (modding, usually) but fuck microsoft. Fuck their AI shit, fuck their “recall” spyware, fuck their CEO that babbles about AI while laying off thousands of workers.

A friend of mine had a similar thought. He was sitting down to do some work on an open source game, and then was like “Wait. What am I doing?” and he made his own game from scratch. ( This one: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1271280/Rift_Wizard/ - It’s good, but kind of too hard for my brain )

It helped that he a had a lot of xp in game development. I imagine some of the boring, difficult, stuff doesn’t have as many people readily available. There’s a lot of “Why does the game crash if I push the up arrow key when I’m in my inventory, sometimes?” stuff you have to worry about when you’re doing the whole thing.

If those Internet duds that get mad about black people in video games spent like half that energy being mad about, like, wage theft, we’d be so much better off.

I had a thought earlier in the bathroom about AI. It’s like building a fancy indoor toilet when you don’t have plumbing.

If people’s basic needs were met, housing food health care all that, then it wouldn’t really matter as much if people want to fuck around with AI. People who do things for passion could still do so.

But we live in a capitalist hell, this AI stuff will primarily benefit the ownership class while everyone else suffers.

I don’t need a fancy toilet. I need clean running water.

I find it kind of funny how games are becoming more mainstream, but every once in a while I still meet people that are like “games are a waste of time”. But then again I guess people said that about movies and tv and still do sometimes.

Also I’ve been playing guild wars 2 again. Base game is like 10 years old but it’s still fun

I posted in another thread about this somewhere, but the original’s D&D 3.x ruleset was bizarre and, frankly, awful. I don’t want to play that again.

A larian-style turn based RPG could be interesting, if the system was solid. But I feel like there’s still this lingering idea that players don’t want complexity, despite the continuous success of Larian. But maybe disney is looking to aim higher? Meh.

Are they remaking it with the same bizarre D&D 3.x rules system? I think I’d pass. Those rules were bad.

It’s like some eternal September shit. Of course a private for profit entity like discord is going to eventually turn to shit*. It’s like the scorpion and the frog fable**. People should know that. But there are just so many people who this is their first time ever encountering these ideas.

And some people just don’t care about things. I had that galaxy brain realization a couple months ago. Imagine if everyone cared just a little more. So many problems would just go away.

*Valve arguably being an exception so far, but that could change on a whim

** https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog

Oh yeah I got a cheap wireless mouse and keyboard for it, worked fine. One or two crashes, but mostly just fine.

How I feel about mana depends largely on how quickly it regenerates. It can be just a reskin of spells-per-day or spells-per-encounter, or it could be something more interesting.

DA:O had unlimited mana potions, which meant essentially you spend a small amount of time to refresh mid fight. Not very deep tactically, but more or less fine.

I don’t think resource management is really a thing most people actually enjoy. Most people don’t like timed missions, so you probably don’t want to use that to prevent people from resting a lot. You don’t want to soft-lock players by letting them blow their resources too soon, so they can’t win the fight but don’t have a way to restore. The dark souls style “you reset at the checkpoint but so do the monsters. Keep trying until you get it right” works for me, but a lot of people hate that.

There are so many ways you could do magic, and it’s a bummer that vancian magic takes up so much space.

DND just isn’t as good and universal as people think it is, but it’s hugely influential anyway.

Side note: DND is balanced around like 6 “medium” encounters per day. You’re supposed to slowly trickle down your resources. Turns out most groups do one encounter per day on average, and then the system doesn’t work very well at all. There’s lot of patches (eg: gritty realism) but the problem remains people don’t seem to want to do that kind of cadence.

I meant how in poe1 and 2 might (the stat) is 3% more damage per point, so it’s hard to feel the difference between might 10 and might 15. Does +15% of 10 damage make a meaningful difference? It’s probably the same as +12%, right, or is there decimal damage too? I guess when multiplied by power levels it’s a bigger deal, but that’s kind of opaque.

Also “like proficiency bonuses on crack” is deeply funny to me as someone who played DND 3e. Base attack bonus every level, skill ranks up every level, oh so many memories and not all of them good.

I really liked poe2 and would play a third one.

I really liked that they made powers per-encounter instead of per-rest. Per-rest really doesn’t work well despite DND trying really hard. It especially doesn’t work well without a human steering to prevent things like “you killed everyone in the castle, now go rest for 8 hours before opening the final door to the boss”. Or you can programmatically enforce that, but players don’t like that. Mostly because it sucks to do like an hour of stuff and realize you’re too low on resources to win, and have to reload.

I’d probably prefer the stats to be coarser or more meaningful. It’s hard to get a feel for “3% more damage”. Especially when the base damage is like 5-15.

Remember when all those internet duds were mad that Dragon Age 2 was “sHoVinG tHe gAy aGeNdA dOwN oUr tHroAts!!!” because the NPCs would romance the PC regardless of gender? And they absolutely lost their shit that Anders might express interest and, if you’re not interested, you’d have to politely turn him down once?

Those are the worst sort of people and I frankly wish them ill.

I dunno. problems, mysteries, and war aren’t usually portrayed realistically in video games, either.

I never got far in stardew, so maybe?