Yeah, I was watching Potato McWhiskey and this is his take. They have metrics that show most people don’t actually finish a game and that indicates a pretty big flaw in game design.

One interesting thing the devs brought up was the ability to pivot from one civ to another based on new information. Like if you discover your continent is mostly plains and horses, then maybe your next iteration looks more like the Mongols, with bonuses to cavalry. If your early conquest didn’t go off, maybe you pivot to a more science or culture oriented civ.

I don’t hate these ideas, it just depends on how it actually feels in game.

I enjoyed D3 and D4, I think they both do difficulty well (at this point, D3 was stupid at launch). In both there are now hundreds of fine grained tiers you can shift up or down to find the right difficulty for your gear/build/skill.

That said, holding down a button to win is more of a build issue unless you’re running embarrassingly low difficulty. There will always be easy builds and more challenging, technical, timing based builds. Finding a fun build is part of the fun of ARPGs.

I have a few hundred, but 5500? Sheeeit. The game is definitely evergreen though.

Can’t wait for the expansion, 10/21. I’ve been putting off a new play through for it, and Wube always puts in so much polish (as the FFFs show).

Perfect headline.

Already happens on streaming, at least with TV. Watched a few episodes of House a while back and they changed the great Massive Attack theme to some generic sound-alike. Honestly put me off a rewatch more than some of the other parts of the show that didn’t age well.

I think there are some exceptions. Like Kitfox publishing Dwarf Fortress. Taking weird little indies and giving them an art / usability budget to become more accessible and, in turn, make the OG devs a bunch of money. Nobody loses.

Seriously. I remember first getting into Deity and realizing it’s basically just exploiting intimate knowledge of how the AI works. The actual max difficulty is Prince, where the AI doesn’t get bonuses, and it’s so terrible at actually pursuing an agenda it’s not very challenging.

I am a bit hopeful that VII’s decoupling leaders and civs will force the AI to be a bit more generally good. At least make it so you don’t know exactly what sort of tactics to use from the first turn you meet it.

The most recent Hitman games are best in class. Three games worth of levels, rogue-like mode to string them together randomly with random objectives if doing the story again isn’t your thing.

I’m excited to see what IO does with the James Bond franchise too. Even if it’s just a reskinned Hitman, it’d be worth it.

Surprised to see the opinions on V/VI not being as good. I’ve played every interation of this game and they all brought something to the table. VI and the districting gameplay added a lot to the game. One unit per tile in V also made combat more tactical than doom stacking around.

The big thing I’d like in a new one is less cheaty AI. It’s just so boring that winning on Deity is basically exploiting AI foibles instead of… you know, building a stronger nation on an even keel. At the highest difficulty AI should get no bonuses but still be really good at playing the game.

It’s easier to release tools for a map based game with no real story. Devs have tools to create content, of course, but making something (tools, APIs) safe and logical enough for the public to consume is a task that can easily get backburnered on the way to release.

That review is bullshit. It’s not going to tax your machine, but that’s a good thing. The unit type thing is also missing that not the entire game takes place on the battlefield, there’s multiple layers to it and you almost never win through pure domination.

EDIT: Also, ground vehicles? This is Dune, you can’t cross sand in a vehicle, and they couldn’t go up cliffs. No, instead you airdrop, which is way more flexible.

Yeah, you’re totally right. I’ve leaned into the “rather chill than sweat” gaming camp in the last few years. It’s nice to play games that are friendly and non-violent. SDV and Talos Principle 2 have been my gotos recently.

Nah, my friends don’t actually care, this is tongue in cheek for all the times I’m playing SDV and they’re all masochistically playing From Soft games. That’s why I said “imaginary” judgement.

Everybody up in here talking about porn games… I just want to be able to hide Stardew Valley so I can avoid the imaginary judgment of my friends playing much harder or competitive games.

Fixes space junk, but not the case where a whole settlement is attached to your ship? I keep reading these hoping there will be some overhaul to the anemic factions and quests but every patch just reveals another layer of Bethesdajank.

Really surprised to see Diablo IV so high. I think it’s a fine game (minus the laughable MTX), but considering you can’t transfer a license from Battle.net to Steam, that represents a fraction of the total player base that has apparently gotten smaller since launch.

Honestly the looks didn’t bother me, but playing with a controller is just so awkward compared to KB+M.

I am hyped, Urist. Long time Fortress Mode player, but have been waiting to play Adventure Mode until the official graphics come out.

This has “shitty boss discovers Yelp for the first time” energy

For me this game is about getting murdered by invincible tortoises. Great roguelike.

From ProtonDB it seems it plays well, but like most ARPGs it has tiny text. The game fully supports controllers though, so I wouldn’t expect too much trouble.

That’s a hell of a changelog. Grim Dawn is low key one of the best ARPGs of the last decade. Not as cluttered as PoE, not as arcadey as D3.