It’s all just bullet sponges…
Anon is looking for a new video game
Submitted 1 month ago by Early_To_Risa@sh.itjust.works to greentext@sh.itjust.works
https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/c9e8fa0d-a8c0-480d-a39a-ba0670347c85.png
Comments
TabbsTheBat@pawb.social 1 month ago
undeffeined@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
Vanilla Cyberpunk 2077 is like that on higher dificulties and it sucks. Luckily there are mods to fix that.
Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
Skyrim does this too, fortunately mods fix it. I want hard to mean I can die as easily as everyone else.
BuboScandiacus@mander.xyz 1 month ago
Like,
Not playing on a harder difficulty ? I’m sorry if I miss understood something but if you don’t like enemies having more HP don’t play on a high difficulty
dQw4w9WgXcQ@lemm.ee 1 month ago
Post game of borderlands 3 is stupid in this regard. Normal enemies becomes a question whether full ammo in all weapons deal enough damage combined, given that they are all headshots.
NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone 1 month ago
Fake. This guy has never been called “sir”.
Kusimulkku@lemm.ee 1 month ago
Anon doesn’t even get called by tech scammers
festnt@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
yeah, the odor is just too strong
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
Gay: if the cashier was male, he would’ve loved the game.
Landless2029@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Holy shit I never heard of this before but totally get why I love Valheim. It’s mechanics and not numbers!!
the_crotch@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
In a market plagued by generic survival crafting games, valheims devs wondered “what if we were the most generic of all?”
Landless2029@lemmy.world 1 month ago
In a quick comparison Valheim vs Terraria. Terraria is numbers not mechanics.
I’ve challenged myself to kill mobs way before I was supposed to in epic souls-like battle and succeeded. There were even streamers trying to clear the game in “reverse” boss order.
Can’t pull that in most games.
thelasttoot@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Valheim is absolutely numbers. Every fucking thing you do in that game is determined by your skill level in said thing. Running, attacking, crafting, even sleeping. It’s all fucking numbers.
Cruxifux@feddit.nl 1 month ago
I don’t get it. Someone explain to me Plz
Boomkop3@reddthat.com 1 month ago
Some games test your skills. Other games test your patience. Both are hard, but the latter is a lot less fun.
It’s the difference between a zombie only dying from a carefully aimed headset, vs only dying after hitting it the same way 274 times.
Comment105@lemm.ee 1 month ago
That describes the start, a bit hyperbolic but accurate.
The whole experience is more like “the zombies are always hard to kill, but you can get good at killing them” vs “the zombies are hard to kill, them you get gear or whatever, then the zombies are easy to kill”.
Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I’m looking at the headset hanging on my wall with apprehension now.
merc@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
What exactly are you doing with this headset? Are you putting it on the zombie and putting on Joe Rogan’s podcast until the Zombie’s remaining brains melt?
JayDee@lemmy.sdf.org 1 month ago
There’s precision, complexity, timing, punishment, and resource consumption.
With precision, you have to do things in a certain amount of space. To make something more difficult with precision, you shrink the spaces that the player has to fit through tighter. Think of having a smaller road with for a racing game, having a boss with bigger attack hitboxes so the player has less space to dodge to, or having a smaller keypress window in a rhythm game.
With timing, you have to do things in a certain time window. You make games more difficult timing-wise by shrinking the time window. Think shorter time frames for a race, faster attacks from a boss, or tighter keypress requirements in a rhythm game.
Precision and timing are closely tied to one another so they are often treated as the same thing. In Rhythm games, for example, they are near-inseparable.
With complexity, you have to do a certain number of things. you increase difficulty with complexity by increasing the number of things you have to do. Think More turns back-to-back on a racetrack, more unique attacks you need to memorize from a boss, or longer rhythm game courses.
With punishment, you have to do things while only failing a certain number of times. To increase difficulty with punishment, you shrink the number of times you can fail before losing. Think of racing games where your car degrades from collisions or where there’s cliffs on the track sides, where the boss attacks do more damage, or where you get fewer miss allowances in a rhythm game.
With resource consumption, you have to do things with access to a limited amount of time, energy, items, etc. to increase difficulty with resource consumption, you shrink the amount of resources available and/or how long resources last during use. Think giving a player less health, a boss more health so each attack is worth less, giving a player fewer health potions, make the player have to fight more enemies total (not necessarily more per fight).
All games shift difficulty with any number of these. a mechanics game will increase difficulty by demanding better precision and timing, increasing complexity, etc, usually a combination of all methods I mentioned. a numbers game will change difficulty almost exclusively by increasing resource consumption, usually by increasing enemy health pools and nothing else. It’s also common for difficulty to increase by just making good items more scarce.
hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
Very good and detailed explanation!
I want to also add on the last part; often the difficulty is composed of all of those elements, because each single difficulty element scales very badly.
For example game that only focused on the precision and timing has some limits where the game just breaks because it is no longer possible to move fast enough to keep up. At this point increasing the duration (adding numbers) of the ‘encounter’ becomes a better way to increasing difficulty.
Good example of this would be “Through the fire and flames” in guitar hero. It already tests your precision and timing to the extreme, then adds a long song duration (7+ minutes)
JustAnotherKay@lemmy.world 1 month ago
TL;DR: Game balance is incredibly complex, and the amount of attention to detail required is insane in order to keep all of these in check. You can do anything with anything if you know how.
Just to piggyback, it’s actually possible to do any of these with mechanics or numbers, although depending who you’d ask this breakdown is either spot on or the wildest shit they’ve ever heard because game balancing is a weird difficult concept.
Precision Numbers: Think overflow. Whoops, you missed the mark by 1 or 2 and wasted some points.
Precision Mechanics: Best example I can think of is a bullet hell or a racing game as you explained. More enemies/bullets = less space to maneuver.
Complexity Numbers: Think bloated idle games and daily quests (aka Tedium)
Complexity Mechanics: Like adds on a raid boss. Extra things to worry about.
Timing Numbers: Time attack in a racing game is a great example of this
Timing Mechanics: Quick time events, but only if they’re done well
Punishment Numbers: Less HP, more damage, etc. fairly obvious
Punishment Mechanics: Again going back to rogue likes, it’s not uncommon to have multiple types of HP which swings Punishment around depending on how those types of HP work.
Resource Consumption Numbers: Drop rates, mana, health pools
Resource Consumption Mechanics: Usually this is where layering resources occurs, gear and a skill tree or a skill tree and temporary buffs, etc. Metacurrency can be considered either mechanical or numbers based depending on how it’s handled.
Sophocles@infosec.pub 1 month ago
Man, this is why I love lemmy. There’s always some extensive and insightful info in the comments somewhere. Great explaination! I might use some of these concepts in my dnd campaign
SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Like in Elden Ring you can beat late game bosses with a low stat character if you are really good. So basically you rely on your own gaming skills rather than on big number defeats smaller number. Sure Elden Ring is a mix between mechanical and numbers difficulty, bosses are hard because of high HP (numbers difficulty) but their difficulty also comes from their attack patterns (mechanical difficulty) which you have to dodge at the right moment and attack when their is an opening, so it’s also relies on the mechanical skill level of the player.
While in turnbased RPGs like Final Fantasy 7 you rely purely on the character stats to defeat enemies. Sure there is tactics involved but it’s impossible to defeat a late stage boss with a low stat character in those type of games. Since it is purely a big number defeats smal number type of game. So that’s numbers difficulty. Of course you can defeat bosses that a low stat character shouldn’t defeat if you load up with a ridiculously amount of items like potions. But that’s still numbers difficulty. Their is no mechanical skill involved from the player.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
There is no mechanical skill involved from the player.
Right. But there is some mechanical skill, so a good player can defeat a given boss at a lower level than an unskilled player. But that highlights another aspect here: difficulty based on numbers means grinding can cover for a skill gap, whereas numbers won’t help much w/ a mechanics-based difficult.
swab148@lemm.ee 1 month ago
I’ve never heard it phrased this way, but from context I’m guessing it’s the difference between big bosses that have arbitrarily high HP, or if the game mechanics themselves are difficult.
venoft@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Tetris is difficult because you need to be good to play it, mechanics. WoW is numbers difficult because you can buy the best equipment and then pwn the noobs even if you don’t really know how to play your character.
ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
Mechanical difficulty is how difficult it is to play it
Number difficulty is how easily you die or how hard it is to kill enemies
Dark Souls is mechanically easy (just learn patterns and dodge) but it has high number difficulty because you can die in 1 hit
Mechanically difficult would be those fighting games where you have a list of 100 different button combos
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
Dark Souls is mechanically easy (just learn patterns and dodge) but it has high number difficulty because you can die in 1 hit and it takes more than 1 hit to kill enemies
I see it as the opposite.
Dark Souls is mechanically difficult because you need to get good at the mechanics to succeed in the game, gaining levels really won’t help.
In short:
- mechanics - player needs to get better
- numbers - player needs to grind
setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Is it myth of the sword or myth of the gun, tell me retail employee. Tell me!
ameancow@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I can’t stand when retail cash-register workers can’t engage with my obscure philosophical analysis of niche media details.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 1 month ago
Numbers isn’t hard. It’s just tedious.
lessthanluigi@lemmy.sdf.org 1 month ago
I read numbers as tendies lol
Kolanaki@pawb.social 1 month ago
If they were tendies, anon would prefer numbers instead of mechanics. 😎
drmoose@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Yeah but having discipline to grind and find an efficient grind method can be hard.
Some games like runescape are mechanically easy but number hard because the difference between optimal path and suboptimal is one of “never getting this within realistic time frame” which essentially is equivalent to a mechanic defeat.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
It’s really not.
If the “optimal path” still sucks, it’s just poorly designed. Runescape sucks because even the optimal path sucks. I did the math and found the optimal way to grind mining, for example, but I gave up around level 50 or so because it was clearly a game of diminishing returns and I hadn’t been having fun for months.
Turret3857@infosec.pub 1 month ago
this is just the gym is based or cringe text with GameStop
ThatGuy46475@lemmy.world 1 month ago
So which type is balatro
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
Luck.
There are plenty of mechanics, but whether you win is determined more by what cards you see than your actual strategy, at least after a point.
GissaMittJobb@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
Largely mechanics, apart from the need to unlock jokers.
Fun for a game so centered around numbers to not actually be numbers
Tracaine@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Unlock jokers? It has an “unlock all” button in the collection section.
ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
At least a woman laughed at him. That’s worth good money to some people.
starman2112@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Remnant vs Sekiro
Kolanaki@pawb.social 1 month ago
Remnant 2 is all just numbers until the final boss, who is a bigger load of bullshit than Promised Consort Radahn.
Piemanding@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Have you tried shooting it in the head and dodging the red lasers?
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
Better yet: Pokemon vs Dark Souls.
In Pokemon, if you lose, you grind. In Dark Souls, if you lose, you try over and over until you win (or give up).
AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Still a hard game though.
dechnically@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
nah i get it.
arin@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Anon is Sanraku from Shangri-la Frontier.
jqubed@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I feel like anon could’ve researched this online ahead of time
Comment105@lemm.ee 1 month ago
Yeah, nobody should ask clerks about their product anymore, that time is over. Most chains don’t give a fuck about returning happy customers.
deaf_fish@lemm.ee 1 month ago
They also don’t pay the clerks enough to give a shit.
lessthanluigi@lemmy.sdf.org 5 weeks ago
Sometimes, I wanna pretend it is 2005 again, and aak the clerk aboit something. Of course, it won’t be at GameStop and more at a local mom & pop shop, and I get most of my games online these days, but yaknow…