Video Game Chat Thread - Pre-Alpha Experimental Version

Are videogames for children?

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I've played Rust for a few years, a sandbox survival game. It's fun, offers a lot of gameplay variety like most sandboxes, and still gets updated frequently; probably in part due to the continuous revenue from skins they get. Like many video game communities I'm sure, this one is toxic as fuck. Every time you play you can rest assured that at least once, as you lie wounded on the ground, a little kid will run up and start screaming racial expletives in your face. You dont HAVE to be autistic to get obsessed with Rust, but it helps. I love it and I hate it at the same time. I've come across troons a couple of times and what a surprise, most of them were involved in server administration or moderation in some way and it makes me sick.

I wonder if skins were an inspiration for NFT's, I feel like there's a lot of similarities. The community market in steam has to be one of the most clever and profitable business ventures ever, having people endlessly trade colored pixels and making money off every single transaction while requiring probably very little manpower to maintain. And don't get me started on skin gambling websites, every single person I know who has tried gambling skins has ended up losing all of them. I'll stop rambling.
 
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I've only just now heard of Subway Midnight after getting recommended a review
Sounds interesting, but by the gods that 2D artstyle looks like everything wrong with "Wholesome" Twitter art.
 
Something that constantly annoys me: The concept of “next-gen” is dumb and misused. No, PS5 and Xbox Series are not next-gen; they’re current gen. Next-gen means “the next generation”, as in “the one that hasn’t happened yet”. As soon as a “next-gen” system is released, it stops being next-gen and becomes current gen.
 
Two Dollars said:
Something that constantly annoys me: The concept of “next-gen” is dumb and misused. No, PS5 and Xbox Series are not next-gen; they’re current gen. Next-gen means “the next generation”, as in “the one that hasn’t happened yet”. As soon as a “next-gen” system is released, it stops being next-gen and becomes current gen.
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We're still in a transition period where both systems and their precursors are still being supported. It's just how people are differentiating it.

I mean there's still large swaths of people who refuse to believe the PS3 is "retro"
 
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Smaug's Smokey Hole said:
Not only being supported, they're the same games! Imagine if the PSX... no, please don't.
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Well the one thing that's different is that they're not manufacturing more PS4s unlike previous generations as well. After the PS2 was released you still got Playstation 1's put out, same with the PS3 and having 40 million or so PS2s sold after launch.

What's currently up in the air is the PSVR2, there's no light bar for the PS5 controllers which is how the original reads the controller movement. So you can wind up stuck in some games despite the game running on PS5.
 
Just beaten Dark Souls for the first time and...

That was it? It was unironically a bad game. I kept hoping it would get better but it never did. It's the same cheap deaths and the same boring bosses.

Gameplay:
It's nothing special. Just clunky hitboxes that miss half of the time and awkward mechanics. The 'souls' mechanic was not really that intuitive, really. Just made grinding a whole lot of pain in the ass. At one point I just stopped caring about souls and just faceplanting my way through whatever; it didn't matter, I didn't need the levels and they all fell dead eventually. The parrying only comes of once in a while and if you managed to nail the timing on the dash invincibility frames, you'll nail the parry. If you beat a Muse Dash level on difficulty 3 you should do just fine. This game doesn't seem to test your skill as it tests your patience. I spent 90% time walking back and 10% fighting. The backtracking is ridiculous and you are expected to walk a long path just so you can buy basic stuff.

Level Design:
Just bad. Sure, they're impressive in size, but they don't look anything spectacular (old buildings and caves, wow) or out of this world. Seriously, just your typical euro-fantasy and generic dragon bullshit. The layout is atrocious. They expect you to maneuver your clunky soldier guy across tight bridges and thin walkways, and every enemy has a knock-down or push mechanic that knocks you off. Even the AI had trouble maeuvering half of the time and a lot of AI guys just fell of the terrain because they made one wrong turn and fell down lol. That's amateur tier design.

Bosses:
They were all boring... Most were variations of 'soldier guy, but huge and clunky'. Most had a couple of large and clunky attacks, with one that is big, slow and deals a lot of damage. Not one was memorable; really disappointed since this was a big selling point. They were all laughably easy and maybe had one gimmick or attack that made them annoying to deal with. Mostly in the form or 'if you don't roll out of the way of this one attack, you die'.

Difficulty:
Surprisingly easy. Not one time have I felt challenged or that I need to change my strategy: Just faceplant over and over till RNG just happens that the boss uses the same attack 3 times in a row and I get to deal a large chunk of damage. Game seems to be testing your patience more than your skill; just how many times are you able to walk this same path and die because the same 3 enemies push you off of a narrow bridge?
 
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BananaSplit said:
Well I did spend way more time playing videogames and reading books/articles rather than converse with someone in japanese, so yeah I developed a better proficiency towards the written form rather than the vocal one.
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yeah, you need to have a use case for it to make it easier/faster, otherwise might as well learn esperanto or something "just because".

Kramer on the phone said:
season passes are the biggest scam
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that's why you don't buy season passes before you know what's in it, same way you don't buy a AAA before you've seen how shit it is.
 
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Gender: Xenomorph said:
Just beaten Dark Souls for the first time and...

That was it? It was unironically a bad game. I kept hoping it would get better but it never did. It's the same cheap deaths and the same boring bosses.
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Reading your whole post, legit just sounds like you got duped into believing that whole "Dark Souls is about bashing your head into a wall until it breaks" bit that people like to spout and because of that you missed out on experimenting and finding success with the game's supporting mechanics. No shade, something similar happened to me on my first time playing, too.

I don't need to spout yet another dissertation on how all of Dark Souls' elements come together to form a really cohesive game - there are more than enough people who've already done that better than I could; but a few points that you brought up specifically warrant a response.

1) You shouldn't really ever be grinding. Level-ups aren't particularly important beyond weapon prerequisites and maybe vitality and endurance, though you can get by without many levels in either. Regardless, bosses drop enough souls regularly that you can very easily finish the game with only those and killing zero enemies.

2) The strength of Dark Souls' visual design comes less from shooting for jaw-dropping visuals (although some areas like Ash Lake, Anor Londo, and the Kiln of the First Flame are still gorgeous), and more from environmental storytelling and readability. You can tell a lot about the societies whose ruins you walk through with the things left behind, and it's always very intuitive carving a path through them.

3) If you found yourself dying repeatedly on bosses or other sections of the game and brute forcing it until luck fell on your side, that should've been a sign that you needed to change your strategy, not that you found the correct one. Personally, the moment Dark Souls really clicked for me was at a part where I decided to radically alter my playstyle to reduce the challenge of a specific segment I was having trouble with, and ended up clearing it with relative ease.

Just kinda sucks, really. You probably would've come out enjoying the game a lot more if the discourse around these games wasn't such a god damned minefield.
 
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Scanline said:
Reading your whole post, legit just sounds like you got duped into believing that whole "Dark Souls is about bashing your head into a wall until it breaks" bit that people like to spout and because of that you missed out on experimenting and finding success with the game's supporting mechanics. No shade, something similar happened to me on my first time playing, too.

I don't need to spout yet another dissertation on how all of Dark Souls' elements come together to form a really cohesive game - there are more than enough people who've already done that better than I could; but a few points that you brought up specifically warrant a response.
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I think your memory is fuzzy my friend, because they don't. They play against eachother; the random animation jank, and the hard locked animations, the random and unreliable parry and dodge, they all come together and make a game that feels less about skill and building the great character, and more about having random and luck, and hoping the enemy's hitboxes glitch out and they don't hit you somehow.

I've heard so many people say that Dark Souls is deep and well thought out and all, when in reality it's not. It's just janky elements playing against each other and they all clash and create a mess of mechanics fighting against the player.
Scanline said:
1) You shouldn't really ever be grinding. Level-ups aren't particularly important beyond weapon prerequisites and maybe vitality and endurance, though you can get by without many levels in either. Regardless, bosses drop enough souls regularly that you can very easily finish the game with only those and killing zero enemies.
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Simply not. At one point you need to stop and kill some enemies. Sure you COULD fight a boss with wooden stick +1 and chip away at its health for an hour. Doesn't mean that's the way the game is intended to be played. At one point there's 2 or 3 enemies against you; if you don't make quick work of them they will stop your progress, even if bosses don't stop you. And you will get powerful weapons that need rare (read, expensive) materials that need to be grinded because they deal up to 5x damage than what you currently have.

So no, this is false.
Scanline said:
2) The strength of Dark Souls' visual design comes less from shooting for jaw-dropping visuals (although some areas like Ash Lake, Anor Londo, and the Kiln of the First Flame are still gorgeous), and more from environmental storytelling and readability. You can tell a lot about the societies whose ruins you walk through with the things left behind, and it's always very intuitive carving a path through them.
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Again, nope. There's no 'environmental storytelling' from what I've seen; just random buildings and loot scattered about. Undeadburg doesn't look like it's a castle occupied by undead; it feels just like a empty level with enemies scattered around. If you clear it of enemies there's no sense that someone lives there. In TES for example, when you enter a bandit cave, you can see sleeping bags and eating utensils, in dark souls it's just random stuff plastered around.

I was really disappointed by Anor Londo, which was supposed to be amazing. The stage doesn't make sense as a livable, inhabited fortress. I never felt that people could live in there. Nobody fucking scales the rooftop to get from the main hallway to their quarters. And the layout and ladders make 0 sense; yes I will use 2 sets of ladders to get to the 2nd floor from the 1st. Yes large empty halls with nothing inside but a few random enemies feel inhabited, sure why not?

Blight town is the best example here; didn't feel like a town at all; it just felt like the game designers took the same 3 planks and copy-pasted it all over the place. The guys there didn't feel like they were in their homes or actually living there, they were just plastered around. Even in the depths, where there were those thieves coming out of homes, if you looked inside, there was a 2x2 size room with literally nothing in it; not even a locked door that could hint there's more room in there.
Scanline said:
3) If you found yourself dying repeatedly on bosses or other sections of the game and brute forcing it until luck fell on your side, that should've been a sign that you needed to change your strategy, not that you found the correct one. Personally, the moment Dark Souls really clicked for me was at a part where I decided to radically alter my playstyle to reduce the challenge of a specific segment I was having trouble with, and ended up clearing it with relative ease.
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Completely wrong, given that the strategy worked and I made it through. Maybe it is viable in the first levels, when you can just pick a weapon and roll with it, but the more you play the harder it gets to 'change strategy'. You get these specific strong weapons that far outshine any other weapon, so it's either, do you take this weapon that kills everything in 2 hits, or do you grind for souls 30 minutes to max this weapon that kills enemies in 10 hits.

There's really no strategy beyond 'get your best weapon, and faceplant till the game lets you pass'
 
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Dom Cruise said:

I'm looking forward to this new Ghostbusters game, I do wish the art style was more realistic and less "Fortnite lite" and I do kind of wish it had another single player story mode like the 2009 game, but that had a multiplayer mode too I never got to try and the idea of bringing back Ghostbusters multiplayer plus having someone play the ghost is great.

It'll be great to hop in and get some BUSTIN' action whenever the mood hits you.
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Left 4 Dead but in the Ghostbusters universe?
 
Dude Vaccines said:
Left 4 Dead but in the Ghostbusters universe?
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Not a bad idea, is it?

As I said in the similar Evil Dead game thread it's weird that we're getting so many of these L4D type games over a decade after L4D itself, why did it take so long for others to see the potential in L4D's basic setup?

But in the case of Ghostbusters it's a great idea as it's always been about a team of characters working together, I just wish the graphics were better and not as cartoony, I want a game in the world of the movies.
 
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I modded my PSClassic and now I get to play awesome imports like this.

FPnAIOuVUAEFp32.jpg
 
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