missingno
- 9 Posts
- 611 Comments
Doormaker is the best thing that happened to Act 3. Right now Act 3 suffers from being too much of a victory lap, there’s not much you have to do to prepare for the other bosses. The most fun runs I’ve had were when I had to scramble through the Act looking for solutions to get ready for Doormaker, picking cards and Ancient boons I rarely took before.
Unfortunately, we can’t have nice things because too many players want a power fantasy rather than a difficult strategy game. I’ve even heard people whine that A10 is too hard, not that the game as a whole is too hard, but that hard mode specifically is too hard and it would hurt their ego to just play a difficulty they’re more comfortable with.
Then it sounds like the real issue here isn’t that the narrative-driven games you talk about in the OP don’t exist at all, but that these games just aren’t being laser-targeted at whatever specific and narrow set of tastes you have.
And honestly, to an extent I do get where this kind of frustration comes from. I’ve felt like my tastes have narrowed with age too, and I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about certain genres that have completely faded from relevance. But I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that this isn’t an industry problem, it’s a me problem. Just because my kind of specific niche favorites don’t get catered to doesn’t mean that good games don’t exist at all.
My argument is there are fewer and fewer year in and year out.
When there are far more games being made in the first place, good and bad, I do not think you are correct at all. There are still tons of great games coming out, but you don’t seem to want to look for them as you’ve already shot down previous comments bringing up critically acclaimed modern hits.
I think nostalgia has you remembering the best games of the past, forgetting about all the slop that used to come out back then too, and losing perspective of the actual time scale in between those hits. If you compare the very best games from a full decade to just the average game that came out last year, that comparison will be very misleading.
CrossCode is my favorite RPG of all time, and that’s a high bar. Excited for what comes next, but I dunno if I wanna start on a story-driven RPG in Early Access and then by the time it’s done I’ll have forgotten the first half of the story. I don’t mind Early Access for games that aren’t story-driven, but I think I’ll just wait until this one’s complete.
All I really care about is native Linux support. Nearly every major engine can support Linux these days and if the dev provided a build I should hope it works. But I know some engines are better/more consistent at it. If it’s something like Godot or Ren’Py I can pretty much expect the port to be perfect.
Simple, I can’t play Kirby Air Riders or Splatoon 3 on PC. And while I still prefer the form factor of Nintendo’s old smaller dedicated handhelds, I think the Switch (2) is still at least a little bit better at being a handheld than the much bulkier Steam Deck.
(Don’t say emulation, because even then I still can’t play online on official servers.)
In theory, if the technology worked very differently from the way it does now, I could envision a world in which AI NPCs could have potential. But knowing how LLMs actually work, knowing that a lot of the hype behind them is smoke and mirrors, I can’t see it being viable. And with the trajectory that the LLM bubble is going, I just don’t think it will ever reach a point where I’d trust it.
Highly recommend Mega Knockdown. It perfectly encapsulates the best part of fighting games: getting into your opponent’s head by throwing rock four times in a row.
Games can be a lot harder to localize than any other piece of media since they’re nonlinear. In many cases the localization team is just handed a raw text dump with no context of what line is from what part of the game, or even what character is speaking. Then it becomes a scavenger hunt to play through the game and find each line, but in something like a long JRPG that kind of scavenger hunt can miss a lot. It’s not like how you can just read the book or watch the anime and fully cover everything.
But these days a lot of developers have started working closely with localization teams during development to help make their job easier. As they write the script, annotate it with detailed notes providing context and commentary, explanations of wordplay, cultural references, even advice directing the localizers on what you think they should do. And then stay in communication with the localization team, let them ask you questions as needed.
Good localization is hard, but I don’t agree with Horii saying a loss of flavor is inevitable. Not when done right.
Some of my favorites: Disarm, Rampage, Double Tap, Immolate, Wraith Form, Boot Sequence, Self Repair, Meteor Strike, Protect, Fasting, Nirvana, Sands of Time, Study, Tantrum, Scrawl, Panic Button, Apparition
In Slay the Spire 1, clearing the True Ending with each character unlocks beta art for their card pool, and then clearing it with all characters unlocks beta art for all the colorless cards too. You can freely toggle each card individually, pick and choose your favorites. This was especially fun for Watcher, because during her development period they got the community involved to submit their own beta art.
I’m a little sad that StS2 doesn’t have this, but maybe that’s just because we don’t have the True Ending yet (and we do know that one is coming).
Co-op is the major new selling point. Beyond that, the core formula hasn’t changed too much, they’ve mostly just expanded on it with new characters, cards, enemies, etc.
But for anyone who’s put a lot of time into the original, I think you’ll really appreciate all the littler elements that really add up. They’ve had a lot of time to rethink some nitpicks with the original and learn some lessons from it.
For example, a lot of events in the first game were a binary choice of either taking something or taking nothing, in which case the event becomes an empty floor. Act 1 events in particular were often a trap. MegaCrit has talked about how StS2’s events are being designed so that simply doing nothing is never an option, and I really really really like this! Just exploring all the new events is great, I’m suddenly prioritizing ?s on my paths just to see them all.
Boss relics have been replaced by a new system called Ancients. Part of me is still not sure how I feel about this, part of me is kind of excited by the fact that I don’t know how to feel. The game feels very different without energy relics (mostly, there actually are a few but many runs will not see them), and that’s definitely something that makes for a new and different challenge to get used to.
There’s also a new mechanic where cards can receive Enchantments, either permanently or just for the duration of combat. You can come up with some very cool combos to experiment with using this system, and on the flipside the enemies that are able to negatively mess with your cards are super interesting to me.
When Slay the Spire 2 was announced, I was honestly skeptical of how they’d top the original. StS is the game that ruined all other roguelikes for me just for how damn polished it is.
I can confidently say StS2 has raised the bar. It’s actually the smaller details that have impressed me most, like the way doing nothing is never an option at events. And enchantments are such a cool mechanic, gears are spinning in my head looking for fun things I can do with them. Equally cool when enemies can negatively enchant my cards too, new kinds of combat challenges.
I still don’t know how I feel about Ancients, it’s weird not having energy relics anymore. But part of me kind of likes that this is weird and different, it is by far the biggest change that makes for a totally new meta to explore. I can already tell that mastering this game will be a journey.
As polished as Zero is, it is kinda just another Mega Man platformer. Some variations on the formula to set this subseries apart, but if you’ve played other subseries you know the core formula.
Whereas what made Battle Network so special is that it was a completely unique kind of game that was never seen before, and we still haven’t really seen anything like it since.
If you respond to tell me that you were never gonna buy it, you prove my point.
It’s just kind of tiring how every post about anything Nintendo does ever has the exactly same whining every time, especially when you’re not actually whining about FRLG here at all, you’re just whining to whine. You just want something to be mad at.
Do you have any actual evidence, or are you just pointing fingers?