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.
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
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’m not sure what you mean. There aren’t really a lot of “quests” in gw2.
There’s the main story, which is a green marker on your map. That’s always there (unless you turn it off or finish it)
There’s orange markers for nearby events. That’s like “zombies are attacking! Save the town!” or “help these kids pick apples” or whatever. They’re just things that happen in the world and, to a limited degree, change the world state. Like an area might be full of toxic vines until an event finishes successfully, or a merchant might only sell items after his mission succeeds.
There’s red markers, which are basically the same as orange, except they tend to be world events and not local.
And then there are collections, which are kind of like quests. They’re not super advertised. They’re kind of of “get these achievements for a special reward”. Sometimes NPCs will give you one- like “go find all my favorite fish” or whatever. They’re optional, but sometimes fun and sometimes have good rewards. Like if you finish the one where you get most of the achievements for one chunk of the game, you get a max-stats accessory that all your characters can share.
Anyway. Long reply. Nothing is really beamed into your head, no.
I think guild wars 1 you didn’t just pop on any clothing you found. One of the NPCs was even like “you think you can just pick up a jacket after you set the poor bastard on fire and stab him, and it’ll fit nice and snug? No. It won’t. Bring me materials and I’ll make armor that fits you”
Then gw2 was like "fuck it people like when items with cool colors pop out of monsters "
I thought the game was pretty okay. The romance with the detective lady was a little disappointing. The difficulty fell off a cliff pretty early on as a mage with life drain.
The arc with whatstheirface and their mother not accepting them seemed pretty plausible to me. I’ve got a friend going through something like that now. Seeing something like that in media is meaningful to people.
The loyalty mission prompt was kind of meh. I can see that they wanted loyalty missions, but it felt like they struggled to fit them in.
Overall it wasn’t quite the game I wanted, but it wasn’t bad.
I feel like how big I want the game to be is a weird quantum unstable value. When I’m interested in the game I want it to keep going. But at some point I lose interest, and I want it to wrap up. But usually I don’t want to skip content that’s at least okay, especially if it affects endings and other choices.
Like I enjoyed Veilguard, but there were bits near the end where I was losing focus and kind of wanted it to pick up the pace. There have been other games where I finished all the side quests but was like “that’s it? I want more”
Not sure how to square this circle. I don’t think procedural generated or AI content is quite up to the task yet.
I do think we’ll see a game that has AI content in the critical path in the next couple years though. You’ll go to camp and talk to Shadowheart, and it’ll try to just make up new dialogue. I don’t know if it’ll be good. There will probably be at some weird ass hallucinations that’ll become memes.
I mean… right now I’m using windows on my desktop computer because when I installed mint I encountered a bunch of problems (no Ethernet, no wifi, no HDMI out, crashes on steam games…)
I really wanted to use Linux, but the out of the box support just isn’t always there. I’m not using windows because I like or prefer it.
You’re almost certainly joking but also like … yeah everything has political subtext. A lot of Internet duds are just too stupid to read it.
I think most of the people mad on the Internet about this kind of thing couldn’t pass 12th grade English, and certainly not like a 200 level English Literature course.
I feel like as games and technology get more complex, the question of “Are we a company that makes an engine or a company that makes a game? Because doing both is hard” becomes more relevant.
I guess they have microsoft money now so they could probably hire a whole team and build a really nice engine to rival unreal, but they probably won’t. They can shovel whatever garbage out the door with “The sequel to skyrim” on it, and it’ll sell.
Also they’re kind of competing with themselves by also making Avowed.
… we should be breaking up these big companies.
Morrowind. Every once in a while I reinstall it, but I can’t get over the “it looks like an action game but it’s a stats game” thing anymore. And I never liked Oblivion or Skyrim. But when I was a kid, Morrowind was so full of wonder and stuff to discover. I also wasn’t playing with a guide, so discovering stuff like “You can enchant an item to have 1-100 strength, duration permanent. It picks the bonus when you put the item on, and it stays that until you take it off. So put it on and off until you get a big number. Much cheaper than trying to enchant it to +100 straight out” felt more personal.
Crawl: Stone Soup. Classic rogue like. You can play it in the browser so it’s very fast to get going. Minotaur Berserker is a nice semi brainless flow.
I think having areas with weaker or stronger enemies is fine. Good, even. So long as you can tell by looking at them what you’re getting into.
Dark Souls generally does this. A rotting skeleton is a low threat. A giant knight in black armor and man sized sword is a bigger threat.
Oblivion will often have dudes that visually and behaviorally are the same, but hit way differently because of the numbers assigned to them. You can’t really look at a scene and understand what you’re getting into.
Other games also do a bad job here. Borderlands for example will have identical looking bandits, but in this area they’re indestructible level 100, and that one they’re push over level 5. The ass-creed Viking one did the same thing. Archers on one side of the river you could ignore, but the far side would one hit you.
I think a lot of studios don’t want to invest in the extra art assets and stuff when it’s cheaper to just use the same monster model and assign it different numbers.
I feel like trying to combine
all together is just fundamentally at odds with itself.
Personally I’d prefer to see less vertical power growth. I’d rather have the numbers stay somewhat constrained.
Like, let’s say the most damage you can ever do with a lightning spell is 100. Work backwards from that to figure out how much health things should have. We want a master mage to be able to blow mooks up in one zap, mid tier in 3, and big scary shit in 6.
A novice mage zaps for 20. We want mooks to take 3 hits, mid tier stuff maybe 10, and big scary stuff a lot.
Mooks: ~60hp Mid tier: ~210 Bosses: 600
If your gameplay is then deeper than a simple stat check, a novice can persevere and win against a big challenge.
I really super dislike it when you have stuff that looks like a mook or a boss, but is statted otherwise. I remember in Oblivion some witch lady was oddly high level, and she kept fighting despite having like 50 arrows in her face.
Something like that, but with more thought put into it than a Lemmy post from the couch.
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.