Fenixp

Yeah, I chose my wording quite badly - since most of the article Mamoulian War linked was discussing effect of the games pricing model on its success, that's what I was trying to expand upon. Majority of those sales actually came from the console versions tho - I wonder how much do these 'internet dramas' influence sales of PC versions.

While that is true, I'd argue that all it does is to make buffs, debuffs and preparation more important. You need to get speed of characters which can prevent these afflictions (either by buffing allies or debuffing/stunning opponents) as high as possible to allow them to act first. You need to prepare for creatures that you know you'll meet in a given dungeon by taking the right trinkets (increasing key resists on key characters) Random factor is prominent in the game and I'd say it's where a lot of excitement comes from - and learning to tip the random chance in one's favor is an essential part of learning curve. Well.. I mean it might be because the first Diablo's dungeons were atmospheric, stressful, dangerous and feature packed :-P The original Diablo was kinda great that way. It's a shame that priorities shifted to dropping phat loot.

It's this sort of stuff why I believe people no longer trust the model all that much - increasing revenue on fully priced MP titles by "milking" your players. That is, after all, a belief writer of the linked article seems to agree with. I understand why do MP titles do this, need to do this even, but I also understand why would players be weary of them. Sales alone aren't the only metric by which merit of a title is measured. Additionally, I honestly don't understand the hostility I'm receiving from you since the first time you seemed to have noticed my posting. It's good that you disagree with me, that's what discussions are about for the most part after all - but please, your personal attacks are unwarranted. If you're so bothered by my posts that you can't resist attacking me, these boards contain ignore functionality (I'm not too partial to ignoring you as I actually found many of your posts quite informative and interesting to read - then again, I have no problems with you.)

I think that by gear progression, DreamWayfarer means that throughout the entire game, you can keep the weapon you started with and via upgrades, it'll remain effective until the end game. It's pointless of course as you'll find the same weapon already upgraded somewhere at some point, but after the end of Act I, you will replace weapons rarely and it'll be for their properties, not because they do more damage.

*sigh* Yeah, even releasing that game as a fully priced product was the wrong step in my opinion. Superficially there's not much which differentiates it from games like CS: GO (I know these games are entirely different, yet most people will only look at a trailer and screenshots, peek at the price and buy GO instead.) Additionally, after titles like Battlefront and Titanfall which were not very popular, people don't really trust the model all that much. It's a huge shame. Gee, there are people with differing opinions on the internet, I can imagine the shock and horror that brought :-P

"Is that Calvin Klein?"

So far the higher difficulties just look flatout more difficult than lower ones - the only real random factors are curios that you don't influence with an item (which is why I'm not doing that) and monster crits, which are quite rare even on high difficulties. You could, of course, argue that some runs will throw more difficult encounters than others at you which is completely randomized, and that's true, but good scouting chance for dungeons give you a good shot at getting valuable recon and if the game throws difficult encounters at you, you can retreat at any point. There was, of course, a situation where an opponent knocked one of my heroes down from full HP to zero and then the last active monster got an extremely lucky deathblow, but that only happened once to me trough all that time. In fact only 4 of my heroes died in those 16 hours, and 3 of them were unlucky lvl 0 runs. I'm yet to visit Darkest Dungeon tho, so that might change things up a bit.

All right, I've already poured about 16 hours into Darkest Dungeon. It's become a bit of an addiction.

I feel like the systematic solution to unique items sort of goes with more grounded approach to fantasy PoE took - unique equipment is still just equipment with some history behind it. The biggest advantage would be that you don't necessarily have to use it to be effective - you can take any old sword and forge its own story with its own powerful properties. Then again, given how RPGs trained us to perceive progression trough equipment a lot more than story and stats over the years, I can definitely see how that approach would be a problem for a lot of people. And it's not like PoE doesn't contain burning blades already.

*clap clap clap* I'm done reasoning with people, I'm just linking this every time GamerGate is brought up. Anywhere. Ever. I'll put a printed version in my wallet.

Trying out Undertale. I find the combat system endlessly irritating.

Ooh I see. Weird bugs are the best bugs (for an outside observer :-P) Thanks for the reply!

*scratches head* How does that even happen?

RetroAhoy's channel is totally worth browsing trough and watching. He has some interesting analytical videos, I especially love his various stuff on history of videogames.

Honestly I don't know why that's not a thing already.

Well actually I think that we (and I'm an arrogant arse so yes, I'll speak for us, whoever that is :-P) don't want what you think we think we want we would like to have to want in the stronghold. So why doesn't the stronghold actually work very well in a game focused on story, free character development and choice and consequence? Well because all it contains is limited development. That's it. The story is focused on Od Nua, so that doesn't have much to do with the stronghold aside from very superficial connection. We need a story that would buid itself around the stronghold - making actual decisions about the land, resolving feuds between farmers for example - even if it's all done trough a simple dialogue in the throne room it would go a long way towards making player care about the stronghold. Even better alternative would be if NPCs in the stronghold gave us quests leading towards its development, like priest of our temple telling us we need to dedicate the temple to a god and then a proper, old-school quest for teh gods. Another thing the stronghold needs are some actual choices. Choice of a god would be one - some form of customization would be another. In a game in which no two people are going to have the same experience like Pillars of Eternity, a stronghold which'll end up exactly the same for everybody is a bit of a sore point. So feel free to put less buildings in it, just make some mutually exclusive. The biggest issue here would be that these differences would have to be visible, but we're not talking about "sandbox building" - we're talking about different sprites for one building, for instance. Benefits would be, say, different resting bonuses, different merchant stock or, best case scenario, different quests. And that's the last part - giving stronghold more endings based on choices we make in the quests associated with it. Make ME, as an individual, mean something to the stronghold, give it results which stem from the choices I have made in its development and are different as opposed to "Oh so you did everything, well done" ending. These are the reasons why stronghold felt underwhelming - its focus was far too different from the rest of the game. I don't think we need new mechanics to improve the stronghold. What we do need is quite simply what the rest of the game does extremely well already.

I don't think I've seen a single one of these games to come out of development hell. Oh, sorry, I mean Early Access.

Edit: Sorry, accidentally made a multi-post, nothing to see here. Why can't I delete my own posts?

EA as in Early Access. Sorry, abbreviations are spawn of the devil. And the issue with GOG and patches is that often, it takes unnecessary amount of time for them to arrive to GOG because of their "curation process" (where they don't really curate anything at all beyong "Does it install?" and package it) - that's why, when I buy a game that which I expect will receive a lot of/frequent patches, I tend to prefer to get it off Steam as Steam users get their patches in a timely manner. Nonetheless, absolutely - if you believe GOG is pursuing "good cause", waiting a bit should not be a problem. Might be a bit of an unpopular view on the topic, but I sort of feel like the game is supposed to be a grindfest. From what I have seen from the game, it's sort of designed as one of those endless rogue-lites, with Hamlet being the persistent progression system organically included into the game. Which also means that it should take you about ten million runs to ever finish the damn thing. It even seems to be designed to progressively get more and more difficult until it kills off most of your high level heroes just for you to be able to repeat those bits with more stuff next time around. I can absolutely see why some people would find this design unappealing, but I'm really enjoying it - when all your high level people die, it's no biggie, you can hire and train new ones for essentially free. And increasing difficulty curve keeps you on your toes, rewards either your planning and party composition in case you succeed the first time around or your continuous progression if you succeed later on. As for repetition, it definitely didn't set in 10 hours after starting it for me, which is not something I could say about any other rogue-lite game in existence (with exception of Sunless Sea which ... Well, is not actually much of a rogue-lite). As far as I'm concerned, it's extremely tightly designed, smart and highly personal game. I think it's the first one which does the whole "The game tells you stories generated by gameplay" and succeeds 100%.

The choice you're forced to make at the beginning of Skyrim doesn't actually lock you into anything whatsoever and has just about not effect on the storyline. Just saying.

Exactly the same thing happened to me after the tutorial, with bloody caretaker occupying the one spot in the inn which was the only place where my bandit person was willing to go. But yes, after hearing all the crap for being completely unfair the game received when in Early Access, it seems like you can influence most of the dickery the game throws your way. I do really love that aspect - it rewards preparation and taking the right classes with the right quirks for the job. Doesn't mean the game won't screw you over whenever it feels like - but you can retreat back to hamlet while keeping the collected treasures at any point if it gets too tough. I killed my first boss this morning and the fight was positively thrilling. The poor wench who followed caretaker in dark streets of the hamlet will plague the coast no more.

Anyway, the new Hitman is going episodic and Warner Bros is no longer supporting PC as a platform, going as far as to not release any further patches for Mortal Kombat X. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/01/21/mortal-kombat-alien-dlc-pc/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1M7ANjJGwY&ab_channel=TotalBiscuit,TheCynicalBrit (warning: TotalBiscuit.)

Incorrect. Big development companies like EA fire their janitorial staff right after they're finished cleaning the building, and hire new ones the next day.

There aren't difficulty presets, sure, but you can tweak difficulty quite heavily by toggling a bunch of features in the options menu. And of course the game itself contains a mechanic which allows you to adjust difficulty on the fly. EA tend to get a lot of patches even after release, so Steam would be the place to grab the game anyway, unless you want to support GOG for their ideology.

Here's my Xpadder profile if you're interested, for 360 pad. Colored buttons are used for 1-4 abilities. RB is 5 (switching position), LB is ESC to quit out of dialogues. Right trigger for left mouse button, left trigger for right mouse button. Up arrow is Shift, left arrow ctrl. Right stick moves the mouse cursor, left stick is for WSAD. Since you can quickly select abilities using the quick keys, you never have to move your mouse too much and clicking on characters is easy enough as they're huge. The most annoying bit is dragging characters into slots and switching between dungeon map and inventory, but it's not that bad.