gusgalarnyk

@gusgalarnyk@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Titan Quest II released in Early Access⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s on my to do list. It seems like it’s lacking the playstyle customization that I’m interested in but I look forward to playing through it.

  PoE2 promised engaging, methodical combat but as of right now has failed to reach that mark. The end game is that of PoE1 which the developers claim they don’t want but I’m not seeing the design choices to slow things down in a meaningful way. Let’s hope they figure it out, I have no doubt the first ARPG to figure this out will bring in larger numbers than most have seen to date.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Titan Quest II released in Early Access⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m arguing some of the developers know it’s broken (including arguably all PoE leads and No Rest for the Wicked leads)(I would extend this to an even larger group but I won’t to keep it verifiable).

  I don’t think all isometric ARPGs copy D2 because they think it’s not broken, I think they do it because it was an innovative genre defining game for its time, most of the devs look back to it with nostalgia, and it was a blockbuster hit. And I wouldn’t minimize the innovations in the scene to just QoL. I think what PoE1 and 2 and LE are doing around their systems is very innovative, including their financing model and tech. I would argue that they’re still fundamentally maintaining the moment to moment loop while expanding all the subsystems that give the game as a whole massive complexity and content - and that’s great but will inevitably pale in comparison to a game that innovates the moment to moment gameplay. I think most genres have innovated their core moment to moment gameplay compared to their genre defining counterparts 25 years ago, but that ARPGs haven’t.

  And I completely disagree on my expectations being “unrealistic, unknown to the genre, or incompatible”. That’s laughable imo and something only a player incapable of imagining change would say.

  • to be self-insert character or at least one of many characters as a form of self expression
    • Diablo 4, LE, and PoE2 (going forward “the big 3”) all do this well to extremely well. Diablos transmog system is peak, PoE2 has unbelievably good cosmetics and they’ve just started, LE is a small studio but I still feel like I’m playing my wizard when I play a wizard.
  • I want mechanical self expression ideally in the form of dozens or hundreds of skills and their customization along with a skill tree that enables further customization on how your character plays. My load out of 10 abilities should look and feel and play very differently than your load out of 10 abilities.
    • the big three all do this but do it poorly. Diablo has low variability in abilities, poor customization, and my load out consists of mostly number go up choices. But importantly the bones are there, this makes it neither non-compatible nor unknown to the genre, it just means these devs did a poor job implementing it. PoE has a ton of this but fails to provide a meaningful load out or mechanical skill expression because nearly all builds converge to press a single button to blow up the screen and a second button to move around the screen fast. Again, they have all of the bones and far more customization than I’d ever expect from a game, and yet a lot of it is meaningless the second you close Path builder and actually start playing because it trivializes the game.
  • I want to fight monsters and bosses that are varied, challenging, and uniquely rewarding ideally. Challenging and varied are putting in a lot of work in that sentence so I want to further expound and say combat should feel like a dance, a puzzle, high octane, and skill rewarding (not simply build skill or farming skill, but actual play skill).
    • the big three have varied down, and arguably uniquely rewarding down (D4 sucks at this imo) but they all falter on challenging or good moment to moment gameplay. I would argue PoE2 campaign is pretty good for this, but mid-end game is pretty awful and it really only ever shines in the boss arenas. They seem incapable of further innovating the mob combat because they seem to differentiate good combat in a boss arena (engaging) from good combat while mapping (mindless). LE’s Pinnacle boss is fantastic for this (and I like it better than all PoE bosses at this moment). Even as I heap praise in these areas, I’m rarely using reactive abilities, I’m rarely using multiple skills in a fight that aren’t just buff my one damage skill. Again, none of this is incompatible, none of this is unknown to the genre, all of this is achievable, and in a lot of places already in place just used poorly from a design perspective.
  • I want the pacing around playing to be focused on fighting and clearing encounters more so than exploration and discovery.
    • the big three do this perfectly, as that’s essentially one of the ARPG innovations - fight fight fight and then plan/craft/prepare then fight fight fight. I think poe has some work with their towers and LE has some work with the size and rewards of their maps, but it’s hard to tease out changes here when this is typically the most mindless portion of all the games. They keep me clicking blow up screen at the right pace, I just wish I didn’t have to. Again, this quality is completely inline with the genre and done well.
  • I want an additional system of collectibles that further modify the way I play and look, most consistently this looks like loot or crafting (this however should not be primarily satisfied with #'s go up).
    • again, the big 3 all do this well. I wish the qualities on items were more impactful and not just number go slightly up, but generally they’re doing okay. The uniques being added to PoE2 have been awesome to see, like the song crossbow and stuff, so I’m hopeful. Diablo let’s you collect transmogs. Again, totally typical of this genre.
  • I want to do this with friends in a multiplayer format, ideally at times requiring multiplayer because that opens up a lot of unused design space (looking at you remnant 2 which was awesome or only theoretically Diablo world bosses and black dungeon).
    • multiplayer is possible and rewarded in all of the big 3. Only Diablo has content designed for multiplayer. I think PoE has a ways to go on making this experience more multiplayer friendly, in fact it’s my least favorite to play with friends despite it being my favorite of the three by miles. I wish they’d design more multiplayer content but I understand why they don’t. If the combat wasn’t so screen explosion based it would probably be a decent enough experience. Again, another quality entirely a part of this genre already just not fully implemented well.

  So what exactly is incompatible here? I think the answer you’d give is engaging combat, because that’s what I always get when I have this conversation. “All changes that have already been made to the genre are great but no more changes to the genre would be good.” That’s the sentiment I always get. “I want to mindlessly grind mobs while watching a show I can only partially pay attention to on my second screen.” Is something I get a lot as well. Which just feels like a mobile game, an idle clicker, but not what most people want when they go to play a video game including in the ARPG genre. Even if we said there’s room for idle clickers in the genre, why are our stand out examples all idle clickers, that to me feels like a clear sign of stagnation in a genre. Dota, rainbow six, BG3, BioShock, portal 2 - none of these games would be better if they were less engaging such that we could watch TV on the side, so why is it okay when talking about the genre defining games of our Gen in isometric Diablo-like ARPGs?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Titan Quest II released in Early Access⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I think you’re getting the wrong impression.

  I absolutely like isometric ARPGs, I just like them exponentially more in theory. Most of them have barely innovated on Diablo 2’s core moment to moment loop and it’s something that seemingly everyone is aware of but no studio has yet to be able to fix. I’m looking for good combat, which was what PoE2 pitched in all of their videos, in most of their dev interviews (although as of late it feels like they’re pulling back on this), and has so far failed to deliver outside of the boss arena (and sometimes in the boss arena too).

  I want:

  • to be self-insert character or at least one of many characters as a form of self expression
  • I want mechanical self expression ideally in the form of dozens or hundreds of skills and their customization along with a skill tree that enables further customization on how your character plays. My load out of 10 abilities should look and feel and play very differently than your load out of 10 abilities.
  • I want to fight monsters and bosses that are varied, challenging, and uniquely rewarding ideally. Challenging and varied are putting in a lot of work in that sentence so I want to further expound and say combat should feel like a dance, a puzzle, high octane, and skill rewarding (not simply build skill or farming skill, but actual play skill).
  • I want the pacing around playing to be focused on fighting and clearing encounters more so than exploration and discovery. Elden Ring is fantastic but it’s slow between clearing mobs and escalating the stakes/rewards - relying on the underlying exploration to be meaningful (and it is and it’s a 10/10 but not what I’m talking about in this post).
  • I want an additional system of collectibles that further modify the way I play and look, most consistently this looks like loot or crafting (this however should not be primarily satisfied with #'s go up).
  • I want to do this with friends in a multiplayer format, ideally at times requiring multiplayer because that opens up a lot of unused design space (looking at you remnant 2 which was awesome or only theoretically Diablo world bosses and black dungeon).

  In theory this describes games like Diablo/LE/PoE as well as remnant 2/destiny/borderlands. But classic ARPG’s have so much of these needs theoretically covered that if they’d just tweak the moment to moment gameplay they’d have a perfect game for me. Where as games like Borderlands barely has a dozen skills in the entire game and they barely change how you play (coming from B3 and B4), the combat by the nature of being an fps is more engaging but it’s not much past that - it’s very repetitive and the number of mobs that are interesting or good is low imo. If each quality I’m looking for is scored 1-10 borderlands may have some of them but they score lower than most ARPGs. Remnant 2 was fantastic but it didn’t have the hundreds of hours of content and systems to do that wasn’t grinding story paths (I’d still rate this experience at 10/10). Hades and Enter the Gungeon and most roguelites have fantastic moment to moment gameplay but lack most of the other qualities I’m looking for. Wo Long and DS and all of those are fantastic games with good moment to moment gameplay but similarly lack multiple qualities I’m looking for.

  I honestly think I want an open world Diablo where it’s designed more like a Gauntlet and DND-esque groups in mind, with better combat and better loot and more skills. I want exactly what PoE2 was promising and delivers in their campaign (by and large, some things would still need to improve to score highly in my desired qualities) but which they completely abandon in the mid-to-late game. I want something in between No Rest for the Wicked or Hades or Remnant 2 and PoE 2 or LE or Diablo. And listening to the developers in this space on various podcasts and dev interviews, they know that is what’s missing but seem unable to get there quite yet. I think PoE2, if it doesn’t fix combat, will be an innovation on PoE1 but will be remembered as PoE1.5 and lumped into the age of ARPGS that were still Diablo 2 successors or the age after of innovators instead of the next generation of ARPGs i think we’re on the cusp of.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Titan Quest II released in Early Access⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I think an ARPG without meaningful combat would require a significantly good story for it to be worth it for me. At least at the 20-25 hours of depth level. PoE 1/2 at thousands of hours of depth are struggling to hold me because their combat isn’t very good, and I really like the PoE2 campaign so far.

  I guess as someone who loved Titanquest when I was a kid, I’m a bit disappointed in Titanquest 2 as of right now. And there are other great slot machine ARPG’s and I don’t have much desire for them as is, so it’s hard to justify this games asking price when the reviews are saying a play through is 4 hours at act 1. Maybe when the story is complete I’ll pick it up, but can you imagine it being €50 instead of €30. I mean even €30 with no crafting and minimal legendaries… Idk, not trying to be a downer but ya - those are my honest thoughts.

  I generally agree with you, a fun short game is worth more money than a forever game to me right now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Titan Quest II released in Early Access⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It looks like it falls very short of the engaging combat I’m still looking for in an ARPG. €30 for less than 10 hours of an incomplete ARPG at that makes this a wait to buy if ever for me. I’m not certain I have the faith it’ll ever have 30 hours of content, this release feels like a “we’re running out of money” situation more than a “we’re confident in our product” scenario.

  I burned out of Last Epoch in their last patch I think for good, because the combat is so bad. And PoE2 is approaching that for me as well - at least they have an engaging story and a long guaranteed road ahead of content - so maybe this is the slot machine ARPG I keep on hand (but I wish they’d just fix their combat). And I’m waiting for multiplayer to play No Rest for the Wicked, but I suspect it’s not ARPG enough to be a long term game.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it safe to assume the guy i went out on a date with, just wants to sleep with me?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Then you know what to do, what to be clear about, and what topics to avoid. I wish you luck.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it safe to assume the guy i went out on a date with, just wants to sleep with me?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I would have taken the eye compliment as a yellow flag and appreciated it as a genuine compliment with no ulterior motives. I think the shoulder massage offer is where I’d draw the line and say, yes that’s clearly someone looking to escalate things physically with you rather quickly.

  At least in my culture that would be seen as strange between acquaintances and still pretty strange between friends. I don’t think Japan is different in this regard so I would recommend clarifying your intentions sooner rather than later.

  You originally brought up your virginity and your long term desires for sharing that with a long term partner. I would not bring that up with anyone you didn’t want to convince you out of that belief. That might not be anyone’s individual intention but that’s the worst case scenario so you should consider it. That means telling a best friend is probably great and would be recommended. Telling an acquaintance or a friend who is also sexually attracted to you - and therefore may not be the best councilor to you for purely your benefit - would probably be an unwise thing to do. Unless of course you want them to convince you out of that belief so that you can more casually have sex, which is fine as long as you’re being honest with yourself on who is really responsible for that change.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it safe to assume the guy i went out on a date with, just wants to sleep with me?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not certain you provided any signs that he viewed it as a date or even that he liked you. I’m not sure you characterized any motivation on his part that made me think he was into you, except for that part of your conversation was around marriage and it read like you brought that up not him which I guess would be a signal that material was on their mind (but that’s irrelevant if you brought it up I’d say).

  I generally assume all men want to sleep with all women regardless of any other concept or notion, simply because sex is fun and men in my experience seem on average far more willing to do that with just about anyone. That’s not really true, and it’s not really a fair assumption, but I don’t think it causes harm if you don’t act irrationally on it.

  It sounds like he:

  • likes talking to you because he invited you on two outings (both of which you assumed were dates)
  • is rich and therefore when he pays for the food it lessens the implication that it’s a date (although I think that’s fair to keep in mind. To provide a counter example, I pay for friends meals semi-frequently and have always paid for every 1v1 meal with a woman (and most of the men 1v1s among peers or younger) as a thank you for the company. This is not attached to romantic or sexual expectations or desires, it’s just how I was raised and have decided to maintain that practice because I like it).
  • is attractive (by your own admission)

  I’m not certain I can gleam any more information about him out of your text.

  Did he only want to talk to you about relationships and physicality? Was he physically distant or was he escalating touches? Did you catch him giving you signals like checking you out or anything else that might point to a purely carnal thinking?

  Otherwise I’d say right now, it’s safe to assume he wants to have sex with you. It’s also probably unfair to assume that’s all he wants and doubly unfair to assume that that’s his motive for hanging out with you.

  I believe men and women can have platonic relationships, which I think based on some comments you made in this thread you also believe.

  So I’d recommend a couple possibilities:

  • Your gut says he just wants to sleep with you, it’s heavy on your mind, or you just like being very communicative. In this case, communicate clearly and honestly something like "hey, just to get this off my chest I’m enjoying our conversations and 1v1s but as I explain to all men early on, I’m not interested in dating or anything physical right now. If that’s why you wanted to hangout, I understand and you’ve done nothing wrong, but that’s not why I was enjoying hanging out. If that’s not what you were looking for, and you’re okay with just being platonic friends, I can’t wait for our 1v1."
  • If you don’t think he was actually pursuing you, you feel like he was pretty normal hanging out with you, or you just don’t want to broach this subject until you’re certain you both have misaligned intentions I’d recommend continuing as normal, and mentally defining your boundaries while preparing to communicate them when you need to. This would look like (as a random kinda silly example) “he grabs your shoulder once while telling a story or something”, maybe no big deal for you and you move along, “he grabs your shoulder constantly and it’s now abnormal behavior”, you tell him you don’t like this and ask them to stop and then clarify your intentions with him (probably after that event/gathering).

  Please know this is coming from a man’s perspective and it’s as brief as I could make it. Please consider the normal woman wisdom (even if it sucks that it’s required) that you should focus on your immediate physical safety first and emotional/mental safety next at all times. If you get the feeling that clear communication would put you in danger, don’t do it until you’re safe.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ARC Raiders | Release Date Reveal Trailer⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The technical alpha slapped and I’m fuckin dying to get back in. I was really hoping for them to open up a beta but now I’m just sad I have to wait till October to play this.

  I understand the delay to get things right, but there’s almost half a year where no game is satisfying this itch which is a shame. Marathon hasn’t been delayed yet and I know Hell Let Loose guys are making an extraction shooter that looks sick as hell that’s due to release this year as well.

  All I’m saying is I would have paid €40 for that alpha it was so good, October will be a slam dunk, but the genre will be more crowded by that time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Big Plans For ‘Love, Death & Robots’ Volume 5, But Viewership Drops 50% and Ratings Plummet⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  We bought a month of Netflix just to support this and black mirror but we were disappointed in this season of LD+R. Upon finishing we sat on the couch and calculated the hit to miss ratio of previous seasons compared to this one and found that for us the average hit to miss was more than half, like 60%. But for this season it was like 25%.

  It feels especially bad when you’ve got multiple episodes that are just “wouldn’t celebrity cameos be cool” or literal music vids. The misses felt both like lower lows or more commercialized. I’ll continue to support LD+R for one more season but if they continue to slide I don’t think we’ll go through the hassle of resubscribing past that.

  That being said, we need more animation, so if they were able to produce 3x the episodes a year or something, even at the worst hit to miss ratio they’ve had, I’d pay more for that. I think largely because the misses tend to be very short compared to like a bad episode of TV and the hits tend to be on the medium to long side of their episodes (although rarely ever hitting the 30 min mark). If they’d sell the physical/digital copies I’d also happily pay for that. But my willingness to subscribe to things not almost exclusively applies to FOSS or individual artists.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lies of P is getting difficulty options to make the Soulslike more accessible⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I appreciate difficulty options for other people and I think everyone should agree it’s a good thing to make games more accessible or more challenging depending on what a player is seeking.

  My only caution is maintaining the vision for the expected experience. I imagine we’ve all played games where the normal difficulty or the default experience feels bad or improperly tuned. Multiple difficulty options can, I imagine, lead to less tuning on the default experience. I have no doubt I disliked games I would have liked if they’d encouraged me to play at a different difficulty or spent more time tuning their preferred difficulty. I have no doubt I liked games that if they’d provided difficulty options I may have changed the default experience to my detriment without realizing it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ori Studio Head Says Review Bombing Might Force Studio Closure, Then Takes It All Back⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I assumed pretty immediately upon hearing him in a couple of interviews that he was exactly this right winger camoflaughing as a centralist. I gave the game the benefit of the doubt because I hadn’t seen any hard evidence but I’ll stop talking kindly about the game based on this info.

  Politics is how we organize our society. Most of everything is political. When society starts organizing movements against groups of people, stripping away rights, and generally being Nazis you have to get more political to stop them. Taking no position is taking a position. Join the rebellion or support the empire, there is no in-between.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ori studio in crisis: No Rest For The Wicked could be their final game⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Unfortunately, the snippet from the Wikipedia article you quoted exactly exemplifies my understanding of the genre tags and how I’ve seen them used since I was old enough to get on the Internet and read such things.

  Zelda has, for me, always been an action adventure game. I don’t think I’d called Zelda breath of the wild an RPG game or an ARPG game but that’s because the item portion of the game felt incomparable to a game like Witcher or Diablo where every piece of your character is an item that can be upgraded.

  That being said, I’m not exactly the biggest Zelda fan and BotW was like 10 years ago for me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ori studio in crisis: No Rest For The Wicked could be their final game⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I guess I haven’t heard Souls-Like or games like Zelda or Witcher 3 (what I’d call Action Adventure I guess or RPG) called an ARPG although they fit the name well enough that maybe I have and today I’m falling on the other side of a fuzzy line.

  Yes, I was referring to Diablo, PoE, Last Epoch, and the rest of the “looter” ARPG’s or what I’d just call ARPG’s. Maybe this is why the Diablo-like meme came up? To further drill in to the genre.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ori studio in crisis: No Rest For The Wicked could be their final game⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m waiting for their multiplayer patch to play the game in full but I enjoyed the combat in the first 10 minutes and an excited to play it. ARPGs need to evolve past the idle games most of the current popular ones devolve into.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Marathon vs. Arc Raiders - Discussion of the games' opposite opinions⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m struggling a bit with what you’re asking for but here’s what I think you’re asking for. You brought up two worries with Arc

  • longterm gunplay
  • meta progression

  I think gunplay is at a really good point systems-wise in Arc. I think at this point the important long term factors are balance and variety. Balance is anyone’s guess in any single game or with any single company, sometimes they get close at the start and just make nothing but bad calls from then on like in Helldivers 2. So no comment on Arc’s long term balance but I’d give them no worse odds than Bungie to fuck that up - and based off the technical alpha feedback Arc is in a great place in terms of balance and Marathon is most definitely not.

  Variety is an easy solve with extraction shooters in my opinion because you can control so many variables. You can have a busted gun but it’s ammo or durability decay is so large you only use it one run per find, you can make it a legendary drop, you can make it only good against players or only good against bots, etc. There’s a lot of factors in what makes a gun good when an economy and RPG elements are brought in. I imagine if they released a new gun every season or every 6 months or released a set of consumables and legendaries the variety would be maintained for a decade. Again, because there’s a bigger PvE emphasis in Arc than in Marathon from what we’ve seen, I’d bet Arc is able to keep things fresh for longer. Imagine a Javelin in Arc - it sucks against players but it crippled the Queen, that’s cool as hell and reasonably feasible. Marathon screams Apex gun design and I think Apex didn’t do a good job with their gun pool - every expansion felt like it hurt the pool instead of making it more diverse IMHO but that could have also come down to balance - I suspect marathon will be the same.

  Meta progression is easy. Arc has a skill tree that I like (although it’s missing details which I think is important) and bench upgrades (and maybe vendor levels?). They also have battlepasses but this is actually a negative for me, I think current battlepass design sucks even if they’re going with the friendlier Helldivers style passes. They’re just boring. Still, more little “achievement” targets and rewards.

  Those have been very compelling. Marathon has quests for a half a dozen vendors. I believe that’s it. I don’t recall a skill system, I don’t recall bench upgrades, just quests. I like the aesthetic, and I don’t really mind it all being just quests but between the lack of personalization in meta progression AND the fact it’s a hero shooter the game lacks the golden itch of individuality that I love when games have. I think marathon has significantly worse meta progression today AND I don’t think they’ve promised to make it better. That’s super important to me. Hunt Showdown is a great game but it’s lack of meta progression has made it feel shallow for me. Marathon, I imagine, will feel the same way.

  Again, this comes down to Arc being good to go today with systems I can dream about them expanding. Marathon isn’t accessible outside the US right now and I imagine even if I could play it it wouldn’t feel even close to a finished project - and with a bunch of corpos making promises to the cameras my gut says if the game is good it’ll be in a year or two and even then it’ll be corporate good and not artist good.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Marathon vs. Arc Raiders - Discussion of the games' opposite opinions⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  To be as specific as I’m feeling right now, feel free to tell me to dial in further, and coming from having only played Arc Raiders and only watched Marathon vods here is the main difference - Marathon’s devs are making a lot of promises vs Arc Raiders delivering on those same promised plans.

  • For instance marathon is promising to launch with 3 maps, arc has 3 maps today.
  • Marathon is promising tense extractor gunplay with high stakes loot, everything I heard from multiple streamers/reviewers say the tension isn’t there and the loot isn’t there. Arc has tension and definitely has loot. Their guns have clean 1-4 ranking and the weapons are rarity binned. I’ve yet to use most of the weapons available in Arc because I haven’t focused on crafting them and haven’t found them, theres already a ton of width to the pool.
  • Marathon is promising strong PvE encounters with raid boss like content (or maybe the raid boss promise was actually people just speculating on where they could take this). Arc has boss like encounters with the Queen (and honestly fuck the Rocketeer and the Bastion those guys are tough little bastards that will punish you if you make a mistake).
  • Marathon is promising dynamic events during the match. Arc Raiders already has dynamic events on a per map basis, night raids, and in server events like rocket landings, middle barages, etc.

  I would pay $60 bucks today for Arc Raiders as it is now. My friends and I would play the fuck our of it. And if they would do DLC instead of battle passes we’d continue to financially support the game.

  Based on what I heard and saw of marathons identical closed alpha, I don’t know if there’s enough content there for more than 10 hours and none of it excited me because it seemed like 20% of what they promised.

  I think people are hyped by the concept of Marathon and the hope for an old Bungie game. But I think right now the reality is they’re not the same Bungie as the one that gave us Halo, I personally never got into Destiny, and they’ve only gotten more corporate not less.

  If in 6 months they can spin up what seems to be 80% of a game, then I’ll be there and interested. But if Arc released next week, or spent the next 6 months adding content and I had to pick one, I’d be playing Arc without question.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please suggest good progression based multiplayer games⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  R.E.P.O is a better Lethal Company in almost every way. I would highly recommend it.

  Lethal Company is also great and they’re both worth anyone’s time but I would recommend playing them LC -> Repo because I struggle to imagine going back to LC after Repo.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hollywood Execs Fear Ryan Coogler’s Sinners Deal ‘Could End the Studio System’⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This sounds like workers working towards owning the fruit of their labor. I think this is a universal good thing. You should own your house and your work and your future.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Path of Exile 2's disastrous new update reveals the core tension at the heart of its design: How do you make a game with meaningful combat when everyone just wants to blast monsters?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s totally cool by me, it’s a fun game. PoE2 is probably the best ARPG on the market, it’s just falling short of what they sold me (and the community at large) on. But for now, it’s definitely an idle game during mapping with the right build (and the wrong build will see you roadblocked progression-wise).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Path of Exile 2's disastrous new update reveals the core tension at the heart of its design: How do you make a game with meaningful combat when everyone just wants to blast monsters?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean to say “idol” as in… Oh fuck. Omg I’ve been misspelling idle in literally weeks worth of comments. Woooooow. Okay. Feeling a bit dumb.

  I meant idle mechanics. Hopefully that makes a bit more sense but just in case - I’m making the argument that most modern ARPGs since Diablo 2 have not innovated on the gameplay directly but have innovated on the systems of the genre. This behavior has led to what I consider to be a stale endgame game to game that often or exclusively boils down to trivializing the content such that it’s comparable to a slot machine, an idle game like Eggs Inc., or a “phone” game.

  I think PoE2 is working hard to evolve the genre to what id consider to be a “next gen” ARPG, where most or all previous games fall into a large “Diablo 2 inspired” bucket. I think No Rest for the Wicked is similarly attempting to evolve the genre. A counter example for the genre is Titans Quest 2 which seems to be falling squarely in the “Diablo 2 inspired” bucket.

  I’d like to see more “No Rest for the Wicked” level of swings regardless of if you consider that EA game a hit or miss in its current state.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Path of Exile 2's disastrous new update reveals the core tension at the heart of its design: How do you make a game with meaningful combat when everyone just wants to blast monsters?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think you did a great job of talking about the various issues and I haven’t played noita yet but I appreciate the example. I think there is a way to create a game with a baseline power level of 1x and give the player a range of 0.8 - 1.6x power creep based on their build and 0.8 - 1.6x power creep based on their mechanical skill. Capping the possible player power range from something like 0.6 (a game twice as difficult as it was designed) to 2.5 (a game that’s a slightly more than twice as easy as it was designed) seems feasible to me - a none game dev. I believe this would allow me to have build expression from a power perspective and not reduce the game to a slot machine’s level of engagement. I think the problem is the lower range is closer to 0.1 or worse in the end game maps and the upper end is 100x+ even on the hardest content in the game. That to me is the core issues.

  I think part of the fun in ARPGs, something almost all of them do better than say Dark Souls or Hades, is that the individual abilities are way different per character or per class/weapon/etc. I can play a magma barbarian in PoE2 in a way I just couldn’t in Elden Ring in a satisfactory way. I can play a lightning Amazon and a poison archer and a frost monk and the builds are visually (and in the best cases mechanically) diverse enough to make experience a new power fantasy that in itself is super cool. There are items and powers I can’t or wouldn’t experience on one play through that I could in another, and the best games in the genre provide me a ton of variation. That to me is more important to build expression than the power of my build, at least it’s more important than the share it gets in normal conversation. A build for me becomes bland and identical the moment combat is trivialized, but ideally before it trivializes things it can feel expressive if the moment to moment gameplay is unique compared to other builds.

  So personally I’m confident to the extent “the needle has to be threaded (lol)” it’s not critically hard or critically important that it’s gotten perfectly right. I think it just has to be choice from the developers on what the power range is and how much of that is mechanical vs itemization based.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Path of Exile 2's disastrous new update reveals the core tension at the heart of its design: How do you make a game with meaningful combat when everyone just wants to blast monsters?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I disagree completely. I think you can have a game that is “about the builds” when engaging in meaningful combat. I think you’re right to hint that people may play these two kinds of games for two different reasons, but I think there’s a massive untapped market for the overlap.

  I want the build creation and fantasy expression of typical ARPG’s but I want to use them to do more than just idol click monsters into loot. I don’t like the phone game playstyle of modern ARPGs. It’s not compelling to me to trivialize the gameplay loop in order to get slightly more powerful gear to further trivialize another tier of difficulty.

  I think if GGG took their boss combat design philosophy and extended it out to their monsters - mimicking genres like roguelikes or action games - they’d have a lot more success than the hybrid game they’ve produced. I think they’re moving towards that but haven’t quite yet committed publicly to reworking the monsters.

  Imagine Hades or Dead Cells or Enter the Gungeon but in Raeclast. I don’t think they’re far off on the player side, a few more abilities per weapon type, especially interactive defensive options, and monsters re crafted to roles in an encounter and they could mimic the compelling gameplay of a rogue-like but give you far more expression than the four guns you have on you or the two weapons and two items or the boons you pick during a run.

  I think the genres are wholly compatible. I don’t think the idol vs engaging mindset are and that’s where all the friction seems to be coming from.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Path of Exile 2's disastrous new update reveals the core tension at the heart of its design: How do you make a game with meaningful combat when everyone just wants to blast monsters?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I do not believe “everyone” wants to zoom. I like the engaging combat they’re going for. I think the loudest people in the community like the idol game mechanics of most modern ARPGs but I think the genre is ripe for innovation.

  Everyone praises their boss design and enjoy that aspect of the game, which to me reads “we like engaging combat with balanced rewards” but when that logic is theoretically applied to monsters we get people throwing online temper tantrums which tells me they don’t know what they want except for the thing they’ve already been given.

  They’re missing the mark with the monster design, getting closer than anyone else in the genre (besides maybe No Rest for the Wicked). They need to look at roguelikes such as Hades and make each monster have a “role” when building encounters. Give each monster abilities like the bosses in the game and don’t make it about being auto-hit to death and they’ll have a truly next-gen ARPG.

  I’m positive the first team to crack the infinite loot/immense player expression of ARPGs and engaging combat loop of action games (or really all other genres besides idol click farmers) will make the next genre defining game akin to Diablo 2.

  I think PoE2 is on the road to doing that but the immense pushback they’re getting online seems to be wearing them thin. Which they asked for, for releasing an unfinished game and not having a clear line in the sand.

  I’m still having fun. Pushing T4 maps today.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨6* months away now. If you're on 10, do you plan to upgrade? Make the jump to Linux?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It wasn’t a silver bullet. I’ll keep working on this. HL-L2400DW. Freaking nightmare printers are.

  Thanks for trying.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨6* months away now. If you're on 10, do you plan to upgrade? Make the jump to Linux?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Swapped to Arch Linux! I wouldn’t say it’s been a bug free swap but it’s been extremely doable and everything I needed to work worked like a charm. Gaming was uninterrupted and nothing hasn’t worked yet.

  I need to figure out how to connect my stupid printer but I couldn’t do that on windows either, which is sad cause I thought printers were gonna be easier on Linux but I guess this brother model is a pain in the ass or something. Oh and connecting to network drives while on a VPN. That’s my list of pending problems and I’ve been on Linux for two months. Not bad really.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why dont more people live in smaller communities , appart from economic opportunity (WFH is making it possible if not prefferable too)⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think you’re misattributing things here that I think can and should be explained by wealth inequality. Big box stores don’t kill small towns because they destroy competition, they kill small towns because some percentage of money spent at a big box store leaves that small town. It’s not the lack of competition that kills small towns it’s the fact that after those small town businesses close less wealth exists in the hands of people in that small town. There’s less money moving around in that town because a portion of it is being siphoned off to big box store profits which go to shareholders and out of state C-suites and the likes.

  Yes, higher density means more taxes are raised per area which means it’s easier to spend on infrastructure in high density areas but you’re missing the point. If wealth was distributed properly we’d have enough money to build all the infrastructure we want comparatively almost regardless of the density of the population. As wealth inequality grows less taxes are being paid to the government in high density and low density scenarios. As wealth inequality grows the more the government is in debt to the wealthy and the less it can spend on vital services. There’s enough money in the system to pay for Internet and hospitals and rail and school to service every person in the US but the money isn’t held by everyone, it’s held by people who have those services covered where they are and so they don’t care if they drain the rest of the country of those things. Wealth inequality explains why small towns are dying because it explains why they can’t afford to stay open, stay profitable, stay connected, stay healthy.

  And to circle back around to your original paragraphs, I don’t care how much people like living in big cities they can’t live there on vibes alone. They have to go where the money is, and you best believe when Boeing opens up a new plant in a city they put a whole lot of money into that city (ignoring city special contracts for a moment). I like living in a big city, I want to move to an even bigger city, I’m not because I don’t have a job there right now. I live where the work is. And yes, denser cities means more jobs and more opportunities but that only gets less true and less meaningful the more wealth inequality grows. If I can’t afford to rent a flat in 10 years, the same way I can’t afford to rent a house today then what’s the point? If my job doesn’t pay me meaningfully more in 10 years because stocks have to go up (please read that as wealth inequality) then what’s the point? Cities don’t create jobs or high paying jobs because money moves fast, it’s because that’s where the wealth is. Look at any major city in the US (at least) and you can find the increasingly small list of increasingly massive companies that have offices there and you can trace the money. If Kansas city lost Garmin or Hallmark they’d feel it, if the government went further into debt and had to slash services Kansas City would feel it, if one of the massive freight companies left KC would feel it. The point is cities are built on wealth and the movement of wealth, but if it increasingly is drained out of those cities it will be harder and harder to sustain those cities. It won’t matter where people like living, they’ll have to move to where the money is.

  I really do think looking at where money comes from and where it’s going is critical to understanding why the standard of living is declining while there’s never been more wealth or productivity in history. We could all own homes, all have healthcare, have highspeed rail, higher education, if only the rich didn’t exist. We have to tax them out of existence and build a system that works for the overwhelming majority of people instead of the 1%.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why dont more people live in smaller communities , appart from economic opportunity (WFH is making it possible if not prefferable too)⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  “Not as consumers, no. The 1% doesn’t consume more than the 90th percentile.”

  But that’s the thing, as the wages of workers goes down their ability to consume goes down as well. Sure they’ll never stop needing food and clothes but new cars, sushi, new TVs, vacations, preventative healthcare, higher education, etc - these things become impossible. Debt will surely be the next step to keep the engine running but that will only accelerate the transfer of wealth because debt is paid to those who have assets. And quite frankly we’re already there - university (in the US), the rise of buy now and pay later programs, healthcare the moment you need to use it - these things require massive debt today. It’ll only get worse.

  As wealth gets drained from the working class into the owning class, the only meaningful consumers for the majority of goods and services will be the owning class. Services will increasingly be focused on the wealthy or on methods of serving the poor via borrowing from the rich (which only exasperates their poverty).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why dont more people live in smaller communities , appart from economic opportunity (WFH is making it possible if not prefferable too)⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think I am being over dramatic, I’d love to know what specifically you think isn’t grounded or reasonable.

  Plenty of businesses do thrive off of the lower 90% of wage earners but those businesses are increasingly owned by the 0.1% and I’m talking about a slope here - a velocity. “Increasingly…” means there is a trend. When all wealth is increasingly owned by the wealthy 1% then we’ll see all possible wealth be within their immediate vicinity, within serving their needs. When there’s 50 businesses offering a service or product you can expect to see the wealth of those 50 companies spread out over many locations, but when all products and services are produced by 1 company you can expect most of their wealth to be situated in fewer places. Less competition means lower wages which means everywhere those workers are there is less wealth circulating. More wealth in fewer hands means less money flowing around to enliven cities, towns, villages.

  More restaurants in cities because there’s more money in cities because there’s more people - but small towns used to have good restaurants too, with variety. But as wealth drains from the hands of the many into the hands of the few more corners have to be cut. More quality goes away. Another restaurant closes because people have to eat out less. It’s all a matter of how much wealth is in your community and owned by your community.

  Things to do is facilitated by that same factor, but additionally by infrastructure. If the US had high speed rail connecting every major city and town, everyone would have a lot harder time justifying being within 30 minutes of city center by car when a train could take them into city center for cheaper, less hassle, and quicker from a much farther distance. We can’t build that infrastructure because… of a lot of reasons, but I’d argue most of them come back to too much money in the hands of too few people and that it’s only getting worse.

  It’s why populism is so popular right now. It’s why the US is sliding rapidly into fascism. It’s why most European countries score as better places to live in nearly every metric, and it’s why if they’re not careful they’ll be in exactly the same situation in a few years time.

  Wealth inequality is everything.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why dont more people live in smaller communities , appart from economic opportunity (WFH is making it possible if not prefferable too)⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The more wealth inequality grows the less important 99% of the population is as consumers and the more important the 1% becomes. As our governments go increasingly into debt to the benefit of only the rich, infrastructure will continue to suffer. As wealth inequality grows the standard of living for the 99% will continue to decline, making the ability to own assets like housing an impossibility.

  Add these factors together and you can see why people are forced to move to where the rich are, because that’s where the business is, because they’re the only people with enough money to constitute a customer, and because everyone else doesn’t have the money or infrastructure to go where they’d like to regardless of business smaller communities get choked out.

  The only way to get the life you deserve, a better life for everyone in your country regardless of where you are in the world, is to tax the rich out of existence. Remove the possibility of becoming a threat to organized society, to democracy. Remove the threat of amassing wealth beyond reason and watch as your country becomes profitable, your job pays you more, the price of goods and services go down, and the quality of life for everyone begins to rise instead of plateau or decline.