I hope they’ve gone further towards the old combat style and stealth gameplay. I never liked the new one of just being an ‘assassin’ by openly running through a fort and stabbing each enemy with spastic animations until their arbitrary and chonky healthbar depletes.
Helldivers 2 uses nProtect GameGuard, which is a notorious kernel level anticheat. It is notorious for being problematic to uninstall and causing issues on systems it is installed in (such as straight up preventing some programs from running or causing them to crash and other terrible nonsense that should never happen). Combine that with the fact it’s ineffective and the game is PvE, and it’s nonsensical why it’s around.
Well, they said they would ‘discuss’ the crappy anticheat too, but so far nothing has been done about that either. I won’t hold my breath.
@surely_not_a_bot will remember that
It’s to keep design space open and to minimize developer work.
Let’s say we decide to keep an overperforming gun. It does all the things. It has all the ammo, all the damage, all fire rate, all the reload speed. Now, all future weapons have to be made with that as a consideration. Why would players choose this new weapon, when there’s the old overperformer? The design space is being controlled and minimized by the overperformer. Players will complain if new weapons aren’t on the level of the overperformer.
Now, let’s say we have ten weapons with one clear overperformer. Now, we can either nerf a single weapon to bring it in line with the others, or buff nine weapons to attempt to bring them up to the level of the overperformer. Assuming the balance adjustments of each weapon are the same amount of work, that’s 9x the effort. However, if we assume we do this extra work to satisfy players, now we have ten overperforming guns and players find the game too easy, so now we also have to buff enemies to match. However, the game isn’t designed to handle these increase in difficulty. Players complain if we just add more health to enemies, so we have to do other things like increase enemy count, but adding more enemies increases performance issues. It’s a cascading problem.
I consider nerfs a necessary evil. It’s absurd to ask developers to always buff weapons and give them so much work when they could be developing actual additions to the game. Sometimes, a weapon really does need a nerf.
Hard to pick. I would say my favorite new game is Slay the Princess. My favorite game I’ve returned to, and I returned to a lot this year, is Deep Rock Galactic. Rock and stone, brother.
Went and watched the original.
Seems like he just doesn’t like the direction and it’s a ‘different strokes for different folks’ kind of thing. I think his point about Ragnarok is fair, the writing is a bit all over the place and that can make characterization suffer.
Yes, Creation Engine 3
/s
A singleplayer open-world sandbox RPG in the vein of Skyrim, but you have powerful abilities on cooldowns like in MOBAs/Overwatch, command troops like in Mount & Blade/Blood of Steel/Conqueror’s Blade, and can go around conquering cities/developing your own nation culturally/socially/technologically/economically/etc. like Civilization but more open-ended where you can do things like decide actual religious doctrine and encourage specific aesthetics/music/social norms.
Obviously, though, such a game is incredibly ambitious and I don’t think it’ll ever be made, as it takes the most unique and hardest-to-make parts of several other games and then combines them. Still, I’d love to play it.
Warframe
Skyrim (Okay, maybe the Modding Community of Skyrim, really)
A Narrative Game (Okay, so, there's a number of games with narratives that have managed to make me really feel and really think. Whereas Skyrim and Warframe are easy to decide upon because I love Warframe's gameplay and Skyrim's modding, there's no shortage of narrative games that have impacted me in a way that makes them all irreplaceable and as equally 'top' in my own mind. Undertale, Persona 4, Bastion, very recently there was Slay the Princess… I cannot possibly say any is above the other.)
The biggest missed opportunity this century.