I like TotK but the engineering mechanic is pretty laborious. You have a lot of freedom but only a small percentage of what you try works, and because of the clunky interface it takes a LONG time to make multiple attempts.

That’s one that didn’t really vibe with me, an interesting case of my hype going down the more I actually learned about the game before it came out.

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I was feeling it until about half way through and then it fell off for me really hard. I think the building concept was cool as hell but felt like it wasn’t incorporated into the game. I feel if it had to be a Nintendo franchise maybe something like Pilot Wings could have gotten a boost with that idea, PW has usually doubled as a tech demo anyway. Have an open world with stuff you can build with, maybe some light combat for raiding materials or whatever and then make the rest of the game based around those vehicles. Have it be about racing the vehicles you make. You could even fo a multi player that’s like City Whatever from Kirby Air Ride where all the players get dropped into a space and have a certain amount of time to get a vehicle together before a series of races with that vehicle.

For totk once I built a good hover bike I never had to be resourceful again. I didn’t try a second play where I didn’t get the paraglider or auto build and that did make the game better. Just not being able to paraglide makes it so you need to build stuff and no auto build means you have to use what’s around you. There were a fee things I couldn’t so but I manages to do the main quest and most side quests with it

I really hope that they find some synthesis between the BOTW formula and the classic Zelda formula, TOTK was really disappointing on that front and I don’t want 3D and 2D Zelda to remain schism’d in terms of design the way they currently are.

It’s such a fucking shame that the discourse around TOTK is completely dominated by stupid shortsighted “70$ DLC” arguments. TOTK is one of the most exciting sequels I have ever played. It’s everything people want when they buy a new console generation, except on the same old hardware. The toolset the game gives you to solve puzzles is absolutely insane, ascend and recall alone are genius ideas and they all fit together absolutely perfectly. They could not have made that game had they also made a new map and I am so glad they didn’t.

I beat Halo 1 yet to beat 2. Used to play it at parties at my cousins house couch multiplayer.

At least they follow up with the story, Veilguard will change the game completely and kill your worldstate, meaning all your choices will be ignored, I just give up on Bioware after this.

Honestly I fucked with DA2. I liked the idea of having the whole game center around a city, and playing through vignettes of a major person in that city’s life. Where it fell short for me are the same places DA1 fell short - the writing was fine when it was building up a conflict, but fell to pieces when it came time to resolve that conflict. Oh I’m sorry did you think that this was all about how some institutions dehumanize their victims and cause the very problems they seek to resolve? Actually it’s just a demon and every single bigoted person gets totally vindicated.

the saddest, most depressing thing about the sims is that ultimately the community just… laps it up. sims 4 is eternal now because its the most lucrative and popular the sims has ever been.

the upswing is that i like paralives’ artstyle.

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Agreed. I love the world’s aesthetics and each area is peak game design but I’ve found myself not wanting to replay the game at all just because of how much of a chore it is to get through it all. I’ve played through DS3 about 30 times and I could play 30 more times and have no issue, Elden Ring I’ve only played about 7 times and that’s only to see how hard the NG+ cap is. The balance in difficulty is all over the place and I’m severely disappointed that some major bosses are weaker than others whereas Souls bosses always had a linear difficulty, if that’s the right way to put it.

Like you said about the weapon variety and skills being one of the best parts of the game, it still doesn’t get me to want to keep playing because of how huge it is and for little reward. Miyazaki said they won’t be as ambitious with further projects and I think that’s a good choice, I think they proved they could make an open world and they did but it just has many flaws. I’m kind of in a predicament between enjoying the world itself but also wanting that world to offer more in terms of enemy variety and things to explore and having been rewarded for that exploration because on one hand, you have a stellar game design that just fits perfectly with the lore, that being a world in decay for 5000 years until you reach it. From that level of discovery and detail to architecture they really did a good job. But on the other hand traversing through these areas on a new run just becomes tedious and most of my time is spent using Torrent to rush to a place I need to get to in order to progress the story which is all I want to do.

I think open worlds are a fad and give credit to FS for attempting it, they did a good job imo with every aspect of world building and design. But coming from DS3 where it’s more linear and you actually feel a solid progression I feel Elden Ring was lacking in that feeling of satisfaction. I think playing it for the first time was the best time I’ve had with the game but every other time I’ve played it I’ve just been turned off by how much traversal the game requires especially with how sparse areas are with items that don’t even fit with your build. I think the DLC being more compact helped solve this issue and brought back some of that Dark Souls-esque level design but at the detriment of again, having too many sparse areas with no reward at all. There were too many areas with little to no reward and you’re just left dissatisfied.

But it’s like I said, as a fantasy game taking in every detail and traversing the world is spectacular but when all I want to do is fight things it just becomes much more of a chore and also the difficulty spikes is just over the top. Bosses are too overpowered, weapons, spells, incantations are overpowered too which can sometimes trivialize the game entirely. It just feels like an overall unbalanced tragedy for a game with peak design. But I hope they do learn from it with future titles. I don’t want an open world souls game again but if they’ve learned from Elden Ring then I hope they improve from the mistakes they did the first time around. But all things said, it is genuinely the best open world fantasy RPG you could play right now.

A smaller Elden Ring would have been a less bad game but also a considerably less good one. When I played through that game at release I had absolutely no idea where the edges of that gameworld were, and it allowed me to be lost in it in a way no other game has managed to. I’d not trade that feeling for any amount of replayability.

I must have wasted a thousand hours on just custom games through the years.

yesssssssss there is another

I’d love to buy Reforged just for the fantastic-looking Warcraft 2 mod but I feel dirty paying any sort of money to reward that lousy attempt of a remake (and I don’t think it’s been cracked). Plus, I absolutely despise Battle dot net, so there’s that.

It’s wild that they bungled WC3 reforged when SC Remastered was such a home run. They even managed to shake up the pro meta a bit by fixing the old sprite limit bug and making Valkyries viable, and it turns out that doesn’t break the game!

“Get yer finger outta that bunghole”

And the ever popular: “I think I’ll use my human call. I’m so wasted, I’m so wasted”

I was one of the eople who bought into the hype. Not enough to buy the game luckily, but I figured if I just waited 5 years or so it would be great. Sucks what happened, but on the other hand the originial with the vast amount of mods available should be able to keep anyone entertained for a few decades.

Diablo1 had more of the rogue like roots. Diablo2 was more overtly cartoony and loot-grindy. It became no longer a question of “can you clear the game?” but “can you clear bosses quickly for good loot?”. Diablo3 went even farther in this direction. I didn’t play 4.

Pretty much nails what I came to get burnt out on in 2.

I remember. Relic saw that people generally liked the first game (and expansions) better but could not stick to a direction and came to an unsatisfying compromise between both. And because of that flop, we’re still resorting to modding DC and Soulstorm.

I’ve been holding onto hope for another shot with the successes of Space Marine 2, Darktide and Mechanicus showing that W40K has a future in games, but RTS as a genre has been mired for the past decade. Relic’s less than stellar reception with CoH3 hasn’t helped.

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The main writer of ME dropped off during the writing of ME2 and they abandoned a lot of his ideas.

I loved the ME trilogy, but after ME1 it really wasn’t about the themes and ideas, just the characters.

Also looking back they’re some of the most lib propaganda games ever like jeez

Yeah I can sign off on this. As the series went on it became clear that Bioware wasn’t interested in a lot of the things that made ME1 such a breath of fresh air for video game sci fi and rpgs, and by the time you get to ME3 it’s like you might as well be playing a Star Wars game.

I cosign this hot take 100%. All these years later ME1 is the only entry in the trilogy I can replay start to finish.

Hotter take: I’ve never even played ME3 because ME2 was such an off putting slog.

Medieval 2 was the best Total War. I have so many fond memories of trying to break the game in different ways. Making heresy the majority religion, doing opposite colonialism by only sending diplomats to the New World to gift all of Europe to the Aztecs, getting the pope to declare a crusade against himself. It was great.

Age of Empires 2 is still so good.

All total war games since shogun 2 are bad.

TW:Warhammer 2 was good, provided you pirate it and get all the factions. I feel like Total War really shines with a bunch of weird variety and radically different core mechanics for factions instead of the more historically focused titles’ “these guys with spears are 5% better at doing spearman stuff than these other guys with spears because of their brainpans being more optimized for poking people with sticks or something” gamification stuff. It’s just their model of hacking up the game into little pieces to then sell each piece individually on top of the full price of the game sucks.

Shogun 2 was peak, but it had shades of what would eventually kill the franchise, like clicking special abilities that aren’t “form infantry square”

Ooooh, I am gonna fight you over Total War Attila, but I recognize I’m like one of dozens who think that game is good.

All total war games since shogun 2 are bad.

3K isn’t fantastic but damned if I don’t absolutely love it. A good mix of historical themes and over the top gameplay in Romance mode, and the unique diplomacy system only for 3K absolutely rules