Ashen44

@Ashen44@lemmy.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨To Kill a Dragon: Video Games and Addiction⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s hilarious that you say that because I literally just finished 100%ing Control the other day haha! I found it to be the perfect game for stopping and staring because of all the thought put into everything, and how many cool little details and experiences you can have by taking things slowly! I do 100% agree with you though, I wish they were way less aggressive with the enemies spawning. Thankfully when you get tired of it you can just turn on god mode and blast through them, but it’s certainly not an ideal solution.

  Unfortunately, it’s an intentional design choice. You can see it in many, many other games too. Fact of the matter is, most players need constant stimulation or they drop off quick, so game designers specifically design their games so you never go without a new event for more than 5 minutes. You can see it especially well in games like Tears of the Kingdom, another game I love that has a godawful encounter system where you can’t go five steps without another enemy ambushing you!

  It’s sadly something you aren’t going to escape from as long as you’re playing big budget games, which is doubly sad because big budget game worlds are usually extra fun to explore because they can afford to really flesh out their worlds! That’s why I appreciate games like Monster Hunter (specifically World and Wilds) which solve the issue by giving you those constanr encounters (back to back quests, running into monsters constantly out in the maps) but make it incredibly easy to just not engage and completely ignore them (most monsters not being instantly aggressive, ghillie mantle and skills that make monsters ignore you completely). This at least gives me hope that we can compromise between the stimulation bombardment and the tranquil admiration.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨To Kill a Dragon: Video Games and Addiction⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The author talks a lot about the addictiveness of the flow state, and how most players try to achieve thjs state to just stop thinking for a while. I found it interesting what the author said about the teacher trying to get their students to recognize the feeling of games, because that’s exactly what I’ve been trying to do lately to counteract that state of not really taking things in and just passing through the game.

  There’s a youtuber named “Any Austin” who really opened my eyes up to this. Now instead of doing the quests and advancing the game, I take my time with games. I actively get annoyed when games don’t give me some quiet time to not play the game, and I really appreciate the beauty of games beyind the gameplay.

  I highly recommend everyone to try this out: pick your favourite game, preferably one with an actual game world you can move around in, rather than just a board like balatro, and just sit. Don’t play the game, just find something interesting and stare at it. Think about how it was made, and what purpose does it serve in the game. Keep doing this, just walk around your world and try to appreciate its existence. Stare at the skybox, the grass, the buildings, the mountains.

  This has given me both a new appreciation for games, and a way to break free from the endless treadmill of going from one experience to the next, with no thought put into the inbetween. It’s a sort of mindfulness in a way, and something I feel has actively improved my real life rather than just distracted me from it. Now I find myself able to appreciate these small beauties and curiosities everywhere I go.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Death Stranding 2: On the Beach - Pre-Order Trailer⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  good god I am so hyped for this game. The story looks so good, the music is on point (hello woodkid?), and I’m loving the new environments we’re being shown! Ironically, the action is the part I’m least interested in since that was my least favourite part of the first game, so I’m worried that they showed so much of it, but hopefully they’ve improved it between games.

  It’s kinda funny seeing that sandstorm after Monster Hunter Wilds just released. Where’s my Rey Dau BT? (wait a Monster Hunter - Death Stranding crossover would be peak)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨11 Best Indie Games of All Time⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  While I agree with the criticisms of this list, it does have 2 of my favourite games of all time (Tunic and Crosscode) so I dub it based as hell.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨put that in your pipe and smoke it⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh my god, this brought back memories!

  I had a book as a small child about various weird plants. Pitcher plants, water lilies, stuff like that. I remember reading about a plant with no chlorophyll called the ghost plant or something and thinking it was the coolest thing ever, but I could never find that book again. This was also before I knew how to use the internet so I had no way of looking up the plant, thanks for reminding me of it!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Testing how unique you are online (web fingerprinting)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  … Apparently I am almost fully unique by my language settings alone. 0.00% of people have canadian english and japanese as their phone language. Of course this is just from their dataset but still, this was definitely very enlightening!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm thinking taffy.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Conclusion: mineral water is lava

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sir David Leafenborough⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Grant Sanderson is my personal hero! I’ve always had a deep love for maths, thanks to an absolutely stellar math teacher in school, and it’s always saddened me how negatively most people look at the subject! I fully believe Grant’s amazing style of teaching is capable of changing that for people and bringing the beauty of math to the wider world.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What type of game do you want to see?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh boy, I have so many game ideas that I would love to make, but they’re all so complex I would either need a full game studio or the determination of the dwarf fortress devs.

  • A fantasy civilization builder in a massive open world. Think stellaris, but on the ground with magic rather than in space with spaceships, where you essentially design a civilization from the ground up, with countless different options for said civilization, and with a massive world to explore full of events and discoveries and other civilizations to interact with. As an example of what I would like to see, you could play as dwarves who live fully underground and end up finding the buried body of a massive god, which they must deal with the consequences of. Or you could play a nomadic civilization that progresses from living out of horse-drawn carts to constructing massive vehicles which they build entire cities on the back of. Maybe those vehicles are actually living creatures, or magically animated constructs. I absolutely love the wildly different civilizations you can create in stellaris and the stories they create, but I always wanted something somehow even more sandboxy, plus I love magic and fantasy so I wanted to mix that in.

  • An extremely in-depth survival game with a focus on interactivity. Another genre of games I deeply enjoy is survival games that really make you survive. Two examples of this are the excellent games Stationeers and Vintage Story. The first game has a major focus on interconnected systems and full simulation, while the second involves a series of realistic and in-depth yet largely separate systems. I’ve always imagined some combination of the two, a deeply simulated world where everything interacts with everything else, and yet each individual system is extremely in-depth and meaningful. I would hope that this would enable extremely creative problem solving, such as you might find in the newest Legend of Zelda games, yet much more meaningful as now it is actually necessary to your survival. There are some more specific touches that I would personally add to such a game such as separating it from our world, and placing it in a fantasy world with radically different animals and environments, which I believe would open up more opportunities for unique and fun game mechanics when no longer restrained by realism. This is more of a pipe-dream but I would also enjoy if the in-depth systems were so in-depth that mastery of said system would require significant effort, without it getting stale. Combine this with highly intelligent NPCs that you as a player could work with and you could realistically form a village in which you as the player would fulfill a single role, such as being a farmer, or blacksmith, or scholar, without it getting boring, even if you’re playing singleplayer.

  • Lastly, I’ve been rolling around the idea of an RPG in which the classes are all so different that they feel like playing different games. This came about from frustration with Final Fantasy XIV, where it felt like the only thing that changed when I changed classes was the order in which I press my buttons. I’ve had ideas such as a summoner who plays the game like an RTS, or an alchemist who gathers ingredients and crafts various potions and tools to use in battle, or a bard who casts spells to a beat almost like a rhythm game, or a fighter who dances with his opponent with parries and dodges and counterattacks. Admittedly this game is a much looser concept than the previous two, but I’m mostly just tired of games where class choices feel more like cosmetic options than like actual meaningfully different playstyles.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Grindr be like⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  He’s just doing some colon cleansing!

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• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Let's discuss: Final Fantasy⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m a real youngster here, so my first final fantasy game was 16, but I really loved it so I picked up 14 and 7 remake. I never really got into 14 because MMOs, but 7 was an absolute blast! I’ve got rebirth and 16 lined up, but lately I’ve been getting more and more into retro RPGs so I’ve been considering going back and playing some of the older titles. I’ve heard tons of good things about 6, but I wonder if anyone else has any recommendations?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Which unplayed game in your library are you most looking forward to playing eventually?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Monster hunter mentioned!

  I really want to tell you to give rise a try because the sunbreak expansion is absolute peak monster hunter, but I agree that february 28th release date is creeping up way too fast…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Let's discuss: Monster Hunter⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s totally fair, Monster Hunter is infamous for its utterly terrible onboarding process. If you ever decide that you want to really figure out Monster Hunter, there’s two options I always recommend.

  The first is incredibly simple: get someone who knows the game to play with you. They can walk you through what does and doesn’t matter, and help you get used to the game with someone there to keep you engaged.

  The second option, if you don’t have a MH friend or don’t want to play with other people, is a simple process you can follow which I’ve found tends to work for getting people through the early game confusion:

  First, ignore the constant tutorial popups. They’ll be there in the hunter notes in your menu at any time, and most of them don’t matter until after you figured out how to literally play the game at all.

  Second, find your weapon. Every weapon type in Monster Hunter plays very differently. The weapon that sounds the best to you might not be the weapon that feels the best to you. Once you unlock the training area (I think it happens before your first quest even) just go in there and pick a weapon from your box and start slapping shit. If you don’t like that weapon, pick a different one and rinse and repeat until you’ve found the one that speaks to you.

  Finally, just start playing! I find things make way more sense when you actually experience them rather than just reading about them or watching someone else experience them. Just start playing and eventually all those complicated systems will click and you’ll wonder why you ever had a problem!

  A common joke in the Monster Hunter community is that everyone loves monster hunter, they just haven’t played it long enough to realize it yet! I hope you give the series another chance someday because it’s really something special!

  Regarding the movie, as a terrible movie fan I agree, it was a fantastic watch! As a Monster Hunter fan however, ohhhhhh boy was I screaming at my TV! WHY did they give gore magala a beard?!?!?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Let's discuss: Monster Hunter⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  lets goooooo, my favourite franchise of all time! Techbically, my first monster hunter game was tri on thr wii, when I was a wee bab. I say technically because I was a tiny idiot and I did not know how to do quests so I just spent hours wandering around moga woods in free roam, just hanging out. I still had an absolute blast doing it though!

  The game that really got me into the franchise though, and my favourite game, would be world! I just love the incredible attention to detail, and the clear love that went into designing everything! I have more hours in rise because that’s the game my friends all play, and it’s a phenomenal game no doubt, but I always find myself creeping back to World.

  The next game, Wilds, is looking like it will far surpass World for me though, the 2025 wait is killing me! The gamescom previews really showed that they have been listening to thr community, and are making the monster hunter game we’ve all dreamed of.

  That’s one of my favourite things about the monster hunter teams in fact, that they clearly know how to learn from their previous works! I would readily argue that every generation has been an overall massive improvement over the previous one. I say generation rather than game, because comparing Rise and World is rather unfair. They’re two different games made by different teams for different hardware with different goals in mind, and if you ask me they both achieved their goals spectacularly, no matter what some nerds will say about Rise… Grouping them both into 5th gen and looking at the series by generation, each one has so far been an improvement in nearly every aspect, and I think that’s an amazing track record. That is why I am willing to put my wholehearted trust in the monster hunter teams that they will absolutely deliver with Wilds and any games after that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's your favorite controller?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I used to hate playstation controllers because they always felt really weird to hold. Even the PS4 controller was terrible for me. With the Dualsense PS5 controller though they just made it an xbox controller with playstation gimmicks and that was such a great move! It doesn’t look too ugly either, since it’s just the same basic shape as an xbox controller. It doesn’t have the nice weight that an xbox controller has and I definitely prefer the joystick layout on xbox, but the haptic triggers, the hd rumble, the trackpad, and the gyro sensor are all things I don’t think I can do without anymore!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's your favorite controller?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it’s mostly nostalgia, and the fact that it was kind of the first iteration of the design all controllers use now. The 360 controller was good but it was really only the start. In my opinion each xbox controller has been a massive improvement over the last.

  The series x controller is probably the most well refined controller I’ve used, and the only reason it’s not my pick for best controller is because I’m a sucker for all the fancy tricks of the dualsense.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Doom Eternal's new official mod support includes 'the very same tools' used to create the game⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  impossible. they don’t call him mancubus for no reason 🥵

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This is a cephalopod.⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  supposedly there’s some super being that absorbs emotions, and when it absorbs extremely strong emotions it generates a new being to contain those emotions. dark matter was the result of it absorbing hate, while kirby was the result of it absorbing love.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you liked secret of mana or link to the past - Alabaster Dawn Reveal Trailer⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  seconding this! Crosscode is an insanely good game! IMPORTANTLY before you go in though! there are two main criticisms against the game, which to me are both incredibly strong positives, but it’s important to know what you’re getting in to!

  First is that the dungeons are very long. we’re talking an hour minimum, often even longer. You are spending time in these locations.

  Second is that there are a lot of puzzles, and they are not always baby easy action game puzzles. This game is an action/puzzle game and it does not slack in either regard. Expect to be utterly stumped sometimes. Also fights are puzzles too, and if you’re struggling on a fight try to see if you can figure out its puzzle, I promise it will make it a lot easier!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Statistics⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  damn that’s crazy to know. It’s wild how stuff like this is possible, I guess that means coyotes and dogs are basically the same animal already.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Statistics⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  the reason all domestic dogs are canis familiaris is because they’re all the same species. They can all have non-sterile babies with each other, which is the most commonly accepted definition of a species. A domesticated coyote would still be its own species and get its own scientific name because it would not be able to breed with dogs, at the very least without having a sterile baby.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New game announced: Orcs Must Die: Deathtrap⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Wish I had anyone to play co-op with lmao T_T

  Super excited for the improved physics though! The physics traps were always my favourite and it sucked that they were almost never the optimal choice.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New game announced: Orcs Must Die: Deathtrap⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  hell yeah! OMD is such a good series, I’m so ready for this!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Academia to Industry⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  people have been calling literal pathfinding algorithms in video games AI for decades. This is what AI is now and I think it’s going to be significantly easier to just accept this and clarify when talking about actual intelligence than trying to fight the already established language.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of June 23rd⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The Talos Principle 2 dropped an expansion out of nowhere. It hasn’t even been a year since the game released! The puzzles so far are really creative and cool, and of course it wouldn’t be The Talos Principle without a healthy dose of philosophizing about the human condition!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of June 23rd⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  absolutely! Genshin is actually a surprisingly good game as a f2p player! If you’re having a lot of fun with it, I’d highly recommend checking Honkai: Star Rail! It’s somehow even more f2p friendly, and it’s clear they learned a LOT from Genshin when making it. It is a linear turn-based RPG though, so quite a different game from Genshin.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Indie Chat & Recommendation Thread⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  AI War 1 & 2 are both great and unique space RTS games. These games place you in the role of the last vestiges of humanity attempting to fight back against a galaxy spanning AI empire. You’re tasked with covertly taking down the rogue AI without letting them realize you’re a real threat, lest they bring the full might of their fleets down upon you.

  Creeper World is a series of tower defense games with a unique twist: the enemy is a liquid! You’ll have to use a variety of weapons and tools to fight back against the literal tide of creeper. The third game is my personal favourite, though they’re all awesome.

  Mosa Lina is self described as “a hostile interpretation of the immersive sim”. This game is chaos incarnate. Every level you are given a random set of tools and must touch or destroy all fruit and make it to the goal. Some levels will not be possible. Failure is expected. You can do some prettt cool things with a spear and a phaser though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of April 14th⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  new rimworld DLC came out and that has taken up all my time. I’ve got to admit I had a few doubts about this one compared to the others, but sure enough they did it again and made an absolute banger of an expansion and now I have to sink another couple hundred hours…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New Rimworld DLC: Anomaly⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh my god I’m so excited! This is the perfect excuse to get back into Rimworld, and these new stories sound so messed up!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DEATH STRANDING 2: ON THE BEACH – State of Play Announce Trailer⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I know the first game wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea but I loved it to bits! Seeing the little snippet of actual gameplay when the bridge was destroyed makes me think this will be just the first game but better, which is my favourite type of sequel, and I can’t wait! With MH Wilds and this 2025 is looking stacked already!