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Poll of the Day   »   Oh jeez my phone won't charge
adjl
12/04/2024
01:28 PM
#30
Being able to afford one $400 phone doesn't necessarily translate into being able to afford another one. Also of note is the very high likelihood that the phone predates being homeless, given that Mead only started being homeless a year or two ago and it's pretty easy to bring along a phone when heading out onto the streets.
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Poll of the Day   »   United Health Group CEO murdered in apparent targeted attack in NYC
adjl
12/04/2024
01:24 PM
#7
Far-Queue posted...
It's more likely some disgruntled dude whose wife died after United Healthcare denied their claims.

Which I'm sure investigators have thought of, but I expect that's still a very long list of potential suspects.
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Poll of the Day   »   Musk:too many giant corps. own game studios, so he wants to...make a game studio
adjl
12/04/2024
11:50 AM
#87
willythemailboy posted...
If so, what possible reason would Nintendo have for including such an obvious loophole in their patent?

My guess would be that a broader patent was denied, presumably because not a single person in the world believes that Nintendo was the first one to invent riding mounts in games in 2021. They wanted to do something to lock down the idea of mounting Pokemon, and given that "this bird just grabs you and carries you around" is a completely suitable interpretation of riding a mount within the Pokemon universe (I'm pretty sure exactly that has happened to Ash on numerous occasions), they felt that was worth securing.

shadowsword87 posted...
They're also patents that haven't gone through any prosecution, so maybe they're just throwing stuff around

This is a good point. This is what's going to try those patents by fire, and I could believe that previously they just had them for the sake of "maybe we'll be able to use them someday" and/or "this keeps other people from using a patent like this against us." Now, they get to test it, and either have it shot down as being a patent that should never have existed, or they get some money for it.
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Poll of the Day   »   Well it finally happened. RIP my middle mouse button.
adjl
12/04/2024
10:16 AM
#4
The middle button always seems to be what goes first for me on mice. On my current one, the middle button doesn't work at all anymore after a couple years of being really inconsistent, the scroll wheel occasionally doesn't register or even goes the wrong way, and the left button often registers multiple clicks while I'm trying to drag, all of which mostly means I just need to get a new mouse.
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Poll of the Day   »   Musk:too many giant corps. own game studios, so he wants to...make a game studio
adjl
12/04/2024
10:12 AM
#83
shadowsword87 posted...
"6. wherein the visual object is displayed in a miniature form compared to the displayed boarding object and/or the displayed air boarding object."

There are icons for your mounts that are used to trigger them from your action bars, and IIRC as of WotLK (2008) there's a menu for looking through your collection of mounts that displays a miniature model of them. Unless that's specifically saying "the visual object appears in miniature form in the field, then grows when you want to ride it," that one's 100% already covered by WoW (among other games before and since, WoW's just the one I can most readily think of off-hand).

shadowsword87 posted...
and "12. The system of claim 9, wherein the player character boarding the boarding object includes a state where the player character dangles from the boarding object."?

That, I'm less sure of, but I'd be surprised if there wasn't a mount at some point in WoW's history where players hang from it instead of sitting on top. I'm also 99% sure that some of the flight path mounts show the characters hanging underneath, though they're separate from regular mounts (they're effectively just a fast travel cutscene) and probably would not fall within the scope of a patent looking at player-controlled mounts. WoW aside, Nintendo also did not invent dangling from a flying creature while it carries you, so even if it's technically unique when combined with every other claim, that's a pretty dubious thing to try patenting in the first place.

shadowsword87 posted...
The office declared that it's reasonable enough for a patent.

The office declared that it's legally distinct enough for a patent. "Reasonable" in a layperson's sense is another matter entirely, and given the timing I can't help but suspect that this was a matter of Nintendo just throwing things at the wall to see what would stick and might head off creative decisions Palworld and other Pokemon-inspired games might make.

More than reasonableness or legality, though, it doesn't seem to have any value except to spite other people trying to make games. Nintendo stands to gain absolutely nothing if Pokemon is the only game in which players can ride NPC creatures and sometimes dangle underneath them instead of sitting on top. That's not going to make or break even a single person's purchasing decision, whether for Pokemon or for any hypothetical Pokemon competitor. Meanwhile, those developing other games where mounting creatures is a feature are going to have to arbitrarily avoid mount designs where the player can be said to dangle, which is just petty and annoying.
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Poll of the Day   »   Musk:too many giant corps. own game studios, so he wants to...make a game studio
adjl
12/03/2024
11:01 PM
#74
willythemailboy posted...
The short version is "aiming a character at a NPC in a specific area, throwing an object to capture that NPC, being able to improve the odds of a successful capture by weakening the NPC, and being able to release that captured NPC to fight other NPCs at a later time".

That's about what I was getting, which seems like a ridiculous patent to grant given that such a mechanic exists in other games already (off-hand, the Pixelmon mod for Minecraft did it already with the Pokemon IP long before 2021, and IIRC that's not far off of how capturing pets worked for Hunters in WoW as far back as 2004), but I guess the devil's in the details and the specifics of the implementation they've patented managed to come across as unique.

Somehow, though, that seems simultaneously unreasonably broad because Nintendo did not invent the idea of capturing things by throwing a net at them, but also uselessly narrow because it leaves out any instances of launching a capture device, placing a capture device on the ground, or any other non-thrown implementation of using an item or ability to capture an NPC. Like it manages to hit both "why did you even bother patenting this?" and "this patent does so much to stifle the medium" at the same time, which is an accomplishment.

Of course, I'm guessing the actual extent and value of the patents would be buried in the detailed wording, which is where professionally analyzing them to form a full legal opinion comes in. As far as a layperson trying to get the basic gist from a short summary goes, I think I've got all I reasonably can.

shadowsword87 posted...
There are three patents that are you trying to summarize, could you be more specific?

At a glance, the latter two of the three you linked both seemed to be saying something to that effect, just with different specific implementations. The first one seemed to be more about riding creatures, specifically outlining a method for selecting which mount to use (which, again, WoW did 20 years ago in a broad sense and I don't think there's a ton of room to claim that Nintendo invented anything in that regard).

shadowsword87 posted...
You could read the abstract and make a judgement call, but I wouldn't recommend telling a judge or an attorney that.

That's the thing: I'm not planning on telling a judge or attorney anything, nor making any meaningful judgement call. I'm just trying to get a high-level understanding of what case they're trying to make to pass judgement on how reasonable or unreasonable they are (which is a very distinct concept from how legal their case is). I fully expect that the actual verdict will come down to technicalities that no layperson is likely to suss out beforehand, since that's just the nature of patent law.
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Poll of the Day   »   Musk:too many giant corps. own game studios, so he wants to...make a game studio
adjl
12/03/2024
09:47 PM
#71
shadowsword87 posted...
You're right, all of the words is a lot.
You cannot summarize the full legal documentation and word of a claim.

Sure you can. The specifics of "X happens after pushing a third button and then Y happens and then you can choose to make Z happen by pressing a fourth button" form the actual legal nuance of any given claim, and you need every single one of those words to pass an actual legal judgement, but you can absolutely summarize at least the broad concept of what the patent is meant to cover. I'm not looking for a full legal opinion on the extent of the patents, I'm just wondering what ideas they're focusing on.
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Poll of the Day   »   Meme 38: Maybe the reaI meme has been our lives this entire time
adjl
12/03/2024
06:22 PM
#122
https://imgur.com/Zggyacs

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Poll of the Day   »   Musk:too many giant corps. own game studios, so he wants to...make a game studio
adjl
12/03/2024
12:15 PM
#59
shadowsword87 posted...
These are the equivalent USPTO patents from the JPO.
https://patents.google.com/patent/JP7528390B2/en
https://patents.google.com/patent/JP7493117B2/en
https://patents.google.com/patent/JP7545191B1/en

Note: you need to read the claims, not the abstract. All of the claims too, not just the first one. And all of the words, you can't just ignore a few of them.

All of the words is a lot, so I just skimmed, but the rough gist seems to be trying to patent mechanics that have been around for a very long time (selecting a variety of mounts and throwing an item to capture things in a field), and it looks like the first filing date for all three are after Palworld came out (January 2024, earliest filing date was February 2024). Am I missing something more?
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Poll of the Day   »   Musk:too many giant corps. own game studios, so he wants to...make a game studio
adjl
12/03/2024
10:54 AM
#55
What patents are they actually claiming? Capturing creatures and doing battle with them? That existed long before even the first Pokemon games.
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Poll of the Day   »   Musk:too many giant corps. own game studios, so he wants to...make a game studio
adjl
12/02/2024
11:27 PM
#46
Most of what Hasbro (or, more specifically, WotC) has done wrong around D&D has been efforts to exert pretty typical corporate strangleholds over the IP, which really only stand out because of how much creative freedom D&D offers. I have very, very little faith that Musk wouldn't be worse in that regard, particularly when the purchase would be pretty much entirely an ego move either way (and therefore whatever decisions he made would be for the sake of stroking his ego).
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Poll of the Day   »   How much does the average streamer make?
adjl
12/01/2024
09:37 PM
#11
willythemailboy posted...
The average streamer is not monetized at all. The numbers I just found indicate 72.8% of Twitch streamers make nothing at all, and a further 15.2% make $25 a month or less. Presumably other services have similar breakdowns.

Which means that even if you only use the monetized ones to determine the average, the median is <$25 a month (15.2% is more than half of the 27.2% that make more than nothing). Now, those figures don't indicate how much time each of those people spend streaming in a given month, so they don't necessarily give an indication of how much you get per viewer or per hour, but they still pretty unambiguously indicate that you shouldn't bank on streaming being a significant income source.
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Poll of the Day   »   Musk:too many giant corps. own game studios, so he wants to...make a game studio
adjl
12/01/2024
09:32 PM
#37
Indeed, though there's the tiny issue with that idea that there are already plenty of studios churning out indie and AA games that fit his criteria without his help, which kind of muddies the whole "the industry is overrun by whatever I've decided 'woke' means today and I'm the only one that can save it" narrative he's pushing and therefore isn't something he'd necessarily want to admit to by offering additional support. That route also wouldn't let him take as much credit as if he makes them "himself," and he does rather like being able to take credit for stuff.
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Poll of the Day   »   Musk:too many giant corps. own game studios, so he wants to...make a game studio
adjl
12/01/2024
08:27 PM
#35
willythemailboy posted...
For anyone looking at those numbers, there's only two real options. Either make a game that is guaranteed to sell 10 million copies - good luck with that - or find a way to make similar quality games for under 100 million dollars. Short of AI doing a lot of the work, it's hard to see any other way to make a modern AAA game on that budget.

Plenty of studios do just fine working with more modest budgets and/or making games that are just straight up better than those. Concord's budget got bloated by how long it spent in development hell, and it was doomed from before it even launched by poor marketing and a failure to do anything to stand out in a crowded genre. Star Wars Outlaws managed to hit a double whammy of consumer apathy in that everyone's been inundated with both too much Star Wars and too much Ubisoft open-world. Skull & Bones also spent too long in development hell, mostly because they didn't actually have a solid idea for the game and just had to string along the grant they had from Singapore's government for as long as they could (then eventually released the half-baked product they had when the government's patience ran out). All of these high-profile failures have very obvious reasons for their failure, not simply that the whole idea of making expensive AAA games isn't commercially viable.

There's also the super-secret third option of just not making AAA games if you don't have an idea that can reasonably be expected to sell well enough to justify a AAA budget. Not every game has to be a photorealistic cinematic extravaganza with a budget bigger than some countries' GDP, and in fact many of the best games of the last couple decades haven't been.
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Poll of the Day   »   Musk:too many giant corps. own game studios, so he wants to...make a game studio
adjl
12/01/2024
04:49 PM
#29
Muscles posted...
Why does he want to use AI to make a game? AI should be limited to non creative/not desirable ventures

Because he's a tech bro, and tech bros are convinced that any opportunity to replace actual people with robots is a good idea.
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Poll of the Day   »   How much does the average streamer make?
adjl
12/01/2024
04:45 PM
#7
TheFalseDeity posted...
Im not good enough at anything to just stream without interacting with people and still pull an audience.

By and large, even people that are really good at the games they stream don't attract much of an audience if they don't interact with them. Most of the appeal of streaming is the parasocial relationship with the streamer: feeling like you're hanging out with a friend who's playing the game and chatting with you while they do it. Without that chat, you might as well just watch clips of the interesting parts on Youtube instead of sitting through the whole stream.
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Poll of the Day   »   How much does the average streamer make?
adjl
12/01/2024
01:08 PM
#2
"Average"? Functionally nothing. The vast, vast majority of people that try streaming never grab enough of an audience to make a meaningful amount of money. Unless you already have some degree of celebrity status going in, it's ferociously unlikely that you'll be able to take off.
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Poll of the Day   »   Musk:too many giant corps. own game studios, so he wants to...make a game studio
adjl
12/01/2024
12:50 PM
#3
I'm sure the usual suspects will eat this up regardless of whether or not the studio's output is even playable, as they are wont to do whenever they hear anything is "anti-woke" in any capacity, but the rest of us can just keep enjoying the large number of excellent games that keep coming out without having to check a guide beforehand to see if the "anti-woke" authorities say we're allowed to like it.
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Poll of the Day   »   $40000 but all liquid tastes like Diet Pepsi
adjl
11/30/2024
11:31 PM
#5
dragon504 posted...
Not nearly enough to deny me the taste broth and other delicious liquids.

Yeah, that's where I stand. If it were just drinks, I might consider it (it'd suck and I don't think I'd actually go for it, but I'd have to think about it), but all liquids? Like you bite into a nice, juicy piece of meat and Pepsi comes out? All sauces are now Pepsi? Soups are swimming in a bowl of Pepsi? Heck, everything ends up Pepsi-flavoured because saliva is also a liquid? $40,000 is a nice chunk of change, but not nearly enough to ruin every savoury dish for the rest of my life.
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Poll of the Day   »   Do you think Mr. Feeny is a great teacher?
adjl
11/30/2024
11:03 PM
#8
I think he's a great portrayal of a good teacher. By and large, he does a good job, but the character is very believably human and makes mistakes along the way accordingly.
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Poll of the Day   »   $100000 but gamefaqs gets shut down for a month
adjl
11/30/2024
11:01 PM
#16
Can I do it more than once?
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Poll of the Day   »   It feels like millennials still overpower youth culture...
adjl
11/30/2024
10:53 PM
#33
VioletZer0 posted...
I spend most of my time on bluesky these days which is not algorithmic.

Even so, you're following things that line up with your interests, which have been influenced by the culture of your generation. Spending time immersed in a sea of stuff that interests you, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that that sea is only a tiny fraction of the social media that's out there, and any cultural trends you observe in it have been artificially curated (whether that's by you or by an algorithm).
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Poll of the Day   »   Which scheduled December release are you most looking forward to?
adjl
11/30/2024
10:42 PM
#12
The main games I'm looking forward to now are Fantasy Life i and Xenoblade X DE, both of which are spring 2025 releases (if Fantasy Life doesn't get delayed again).

Mystic_Myotis posted...
Path of Exile 2 might be good, I'm not sure.

The vibe I'm getting is that it's shaping up to be meaningfully different from 1, but similarly high-quality. I would say I'm looking forward to it, though it'll be a while before I actually play it because I'm a little ARPG'd out from playing PoE1 for a few months last year, plus when I do feel like more ARPG I'm probably going to pick up Last Epoch or the new Grim Dawn expansion first for variety's sake. I'll get to it eventually, though, and I expect by then it'll have been refined into something enjoyable.

If nothing else, the beta went well enough that some higher-up at Blizzard felt compelled to make a tweet suggesting that the term "Diablo-like" should replace "ARPG," seemingly unaware that ARPG's were called "Diablo clones" for a very long time and that the term has fallen out of favour because Diablo's done such a poor job of representing the genre since D3. That was kind of funny. Unfortunately, "good enough to make Blizzard to feel insecure about Diablo's reputation" is actually a pretty low bar, so that doesn't necessarily mean a while lot.
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Poll of the Day   »   What is a game you love that you do not recommend to others?
adjl
11/30/2024
11:23 AM
#33
I don't recommend Factorio to everyone, since it takes a pretty specific type of person to enjoy it, but I do recommend it to everyone that seems to be that type of person.
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Poll of the Day   »   It feels like millennials still overpower youth culture...
adjl
11/30/2024
11:19 AM
#7
Social media and the digitization of entertainment media have done weird things to generational lines. Generations now intermingle constantly and influence each other's cultures much more strongly than they historically have, thanks to everyone having ready access to everyone they know and to a significant amount of the formative media from every extant generation.

Saying that, though, social media and the ready availability of entertainment from a wide variety of eras can also create a distorted view of which generational cultures are dominant. You're constantly being fed content that appeals to you as a millennial because that's what you've shown an interest in, so algorithms try to feed that interest (also your choice of less alghorithmic social media, like hanging out on a video game message board that's populated almost exclusively by people that started coming here as teenagers/young adults in the 90's and 00's), and you're pretty consistently able to access entertainment that's either nostalgic or lines up with tastes that were influenced by your generational culture. You could be forgiven for thinking that means millennial culture is dominant, but in fact everybody has that same experience for their own generation to some extent because there's just that much media out there that everyone can have their own personally-curated slice of it.
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Poll of the Day   »   Xenoblade 3 is pretty good so far.
adjl
11/30/2024
11:03 AM
#11
2 does a piss-poor job of explaining pretty much everything, made even worse by the fact that its combat system is probably the most complex of the four (though Overdrive in X is also pretty unintuitive and not explained very well in-game). Grasping 3 more easily than 2 is not remotely surprising.

While the combat announcements are missing, the voice actor that did those announcements does play a character you'll encounter later (chapter 5, iirc). He's pretty great in his own right.
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Poll of the Day   »   Tariffs
adjl
11/29/2024
10:22 PM
#10
VioletZer0 posted...
The answer is all of the above.

Tariffs are a tax and when you tax everyone pays.

Republicans are usually the first to point this out, but because of the cult of Trump they conveniently forgot this.

Pretty much this. On paper, you can try to say only one person or the other will pay, but in practice any price adjustment has an impact on demand that prompts further adjustments to balance out the increased costs among all involved parties.

That said, tariffs will make the affected products more expensive for consumers, especially if the end goal is to discourage all outsourcing and force companies to manufacture domestically (which they don't currently do because outsourcing is significantly cheaper), rather than just targeting a couple of countries to promote companies buying from their competitors. The entire cost won't be borne by them, but anyone that thinks enacting tariffs on every imported product will make things cheaper has absolutely no understanding of pretty much anything to do with commerce.
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Poll of the Day   »   Tears of the Kingdom is not just the best Zelda game but maybe the best game eve
adjl
11/29/2024
10:14 PM
#15
DrYuya posted...
It had the same map as BOTW

Was Link Between Worlds DLC for Link to the Past?
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Poll of the Day   »   Healthcare
adjl
11/29/2024
10:08 PM
#31
Periodic reminder that the US currently pays more than twice as many tax dollars per capita on health care as any other country in the world, yet doesn't have a formal health care system to show for it. The notion that providing tax-funded health care to everyone would require tax hikes quite flagrantly flies in the face of empirical reality. Even if the US just lifted Canada's system wholesale (and Canada's not without its own problems and gross inefficiencies) that would slash health care spending in half and create an opportunity for tax cuts, not hikes.
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Poll of the Day   »   Xenoblade 3 is pretty good so far.
adjl
11/28/2024
11:14 PM
#8
Also, don't be surprised if you struggle to get long chain attacks at first. Doing so with only six party members is pretty tricky; once you add a hero into the mix for a 7th, that helps things tremendously. Early on, you also probably don't have a full palette of Fusion Arts (since you need to unlock arts from multiple classes to do that), and Fusion Arts give significantly more TP than regular ones do.
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Poll of the Day   »   Meme 38: Maybe the reaI meme has been our lives this entire time
adjl
11/28/2024
05:59 PM
#90
https://imgur.com/C1og6Hn

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Poll of the Day   »   Gamers are more skilled than ever, so why are video games still so easy?
adjl
11/28/2024
02:52 PM
#12
VioletZer0 posted...
Games today are designed to be finished by everyone where as back in the day seeing the ending was an achievement.

Depends a lot on the style of the game. For a story-driven game, of course they're designed to be finished. They're trying to tell a story, not to tell 2/3 of a story. To some extent or another, this has been true for as long as there have been story-driven games. Even back on the NES, RPGs and other story-heavy games did not follow the arcade-style structure of readily killing you and making you start all over again, recognizing that that's a terrible way to tell a story.

There are still plenty of games today, though, that are hard enough that fully beating them is unusual. They just tend not to be ones that get significant mainstream attention because cinematic, story-driven games (also multiplayer, which can't be "beaten") tend to be more popular. Broadly, though, the popularity of rogueli(k/t)es is based on the core idea that dying repeatedly and never actually beating the game can still be fun, provided the game is designed such that you can have fun never beating it. That's actually very similar to the arcade model, just usually with some variation from run to run so it's less a matter of trying to learn the same pattern every time.
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Poll of the Day   »   Meme 38: Maybe the reaI meme has been our lives this entire time
adjl
11/28/2024
01:55 PM
#85
I don't know why the algorithm decided to give me this today, but I'm not complaining:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-dODO6yRAI
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Poll of the Day   »   borderlands 4 is gonna suck
adjl
11/28/2024
09:51 AM
#26
And even if you did a whole Zer0 build around melee damage, it hinged on doing enough melee damage to one-shot everything you attacked, which meant it fell off hard when you got into UVHM and OP levels and enemy health started scaling past what the very limited melee scaling options could handle. That there was nowhere to go with it once you got a +150% Melee Damage weapon was restrictive to every melee build.
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Poll of the Day   »   Xenoblade 3 is pretty good so far.
adjl
11/28/2024
09:43 AM
#6
CyborgSage00x0 posted...
I was hoping age and adjl would show up.

I never pass up a chance to fanboy about Xenoblade 3.

CyborgSage00x0 posted...
So, I only started chapter 2...the whole point of class switching is to permanently get class skills more or less, yeah?

Yep. It's very similar to X's class system. You'll unlock passive skills and arts from each class to be used with other classes, which forms the backbone of the character building system. Levelling up a class also gives some stat boosts, but those only apply while using that class (this does, however, mean that if a boss fight's coming up, you might want to switch to a class you've got at a higher rank).

CyborgSage00x0 posted...
Also, during chain attacks, what is the point of the healers preventing damage above 99%?

TP isn't directly a measure of damage. It dictates when the round ends and what bonuses you get when it does. When you hit 100 TP or more, the round ends with that turn and you perform the round finisher, but there are bonuses for finishing the round with higher amounts of TP. Most significantly, if you only break 100 TP, you only get back one character for the next round, but if you hit 150+, you get two, and hitting 200+ gives you three. The chain attack ends when you run out of characters, so getting more in there helps get more rounds. Higher TP also gets you a bigger damage bonus from each round (capping at the bonus that 200+ gives you, IIRC), so you're incentivized to stack it as high as you can each round.

Effectively, the strategy boils down to:
-Start with an attacker to get a big initial TP boost
-Use a healer to cap it at 99
-Use a defender to guarantee that the next round gives you back whoever's TP is highest, hopefully pushing past 150 (this often doesn't happen on round 1 unless you've built for it)

The next round, repeat that, but instead of the defender, use the attacker you used in the first round (whose TP will likely be in the 50-80 range, depending on their starting value and what bonuses you got) to push yourself into 150+ or 200+ territory and get more characters back for the third round. The third round will be the last one (for now), so then you can squeeze a bit more damage/buff opportunities out by using every remaining healer before going over 100 with the final character and triggering the finisher.

It's not the most intuitive system, but once you get a handle on how TP works it turns into a very satisfying puzzle to maximize the damage you get out of it. A few more extra mechanics end up in there (notably, once you get Heroes, they provide their own unique bonuses instead of whatever their role suggests they will), but that's the basic gist of it.
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Poll of the Day   »   Gamers are more skilled than ever, so why are video games still so easy?
adjl
11/28/2024
09:16 AM
#7
VioletZer0 posted...
And yet video games released today are still silly levels of easy by default.

Key words. Plenty of exceptional challenges exist, they're just usually something you have to look for instead of the default setting. Generally speaking, people that are looking for a challenge are more willing to go out of their way to find it than people that are looking for a relaxing time are to find that, so defaulting to being easier helps prevent the majority of players from bouncing off a game and feeling like they wasted their purchase (or even refunding it, when that's an option).

VioletZer0 posted...
Additionally, difficulty was the ultimate way to pad out games in this time.

That's also a factor. When the industry was smaller, mostly trying to market to kids (who have more free time), and games were relatively more expensive, making a game take longer by killing you repeatedly was fair game because that was the only game you had. You either overcame that or you stopped playing games for a while.

Now, there are so many other options, many of them are cheap enough to pick up impulsively and/or not worry about getting your money's worth out of them, and there's a significant adult audience whose free time is limited enough to not want to spend it being bored/frustrated by their chosen leisure activity. That means that while you can still put a failure state in your games, you need to avoid letting that failure feel like it was a complete waste of time. That lends itself to design choices like generous checkpoints, infinite lives, and the entire concept of a roguelite (that is, a roguelike with metaprogression, since there's some debate over exactly what the term means).

DeathMagnetic80 posted...
Because it takes like 5 years and $300 million to make everything these days it seems and developers want people to see all the content. Old games were hard as hell because you could beat them in like 30 minutes once you mastered them.

That too. There's some artistic merit to be enjoyed in creating something so hard as to be exclusionary, but at the end of the day more people playing a game tends to both feel better and pay the bills better than fewer people playing it. Given that significantly more people will bounce off of a game for being too hard than will for having to turn on a hard mode or even for being too easy (particularly where you usually have to get pretty far into a game to conclude that it won't challenge you at all, thanks to difficulty curves, and by that point the sunk cost fallacy is a motivator to finish), it just makes sense to prioritize accessibility.
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Poll of the Day   »   borderlands 4 is gonna suck
adjl
11/27/2024
10:04 PM
#24
dragon504 posted...
Yep, and that's why it was horrible. Non slagged enemies were ridiculous bullet sponges.

You could conceivably say the same thing about armour, shields, and flesh having different elemental weaknesses, since you slow yourself down considerably if you ignore those, but that's at least dynamic. Having to swap weapons to adjust to what you're fighting is an interesting mechanic (it does kind of end up punishing builds that focus primarily on one element, but that's in exchange for eviscerating the enemies that element is strong against, so that balances it), since it requires you to react to the situation. Having every single enemy take 3 times longer to kill if you don't slag it is exactly the same challenge in every situation, which means it's just tedious to deal with.
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Poll of the Day   »   borderlands 4 is gonna suck
adjl
11/27/2024
08:18 PM
#21
Salrite posted...
slag was just a defense debuff, right? I generally don't care for applying debuffs to enemies when I can just shoot them in the face more.

It tripled the damage they take, iirc. Slagging was virtually mandatory when you started dealing with the higher difficulties and their massively inflated health pools, and that's just not great design. Fortunately, some of the classes had options for applying it without having to switch weapons, like Axel's turret, Maya's ability, and using a slag weapon in one hand while Gunzerking (bonus points if it's Rubi and you get slag *and* 15% lifesteal on the other one). Unfortunately, that wasn't true for everyone.
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Poll of the Day   »   borderlands 4 is gonna suck
adjl
11/27/2024
12:52 PM
#13
That's kind of the problem: Abilities that are just "more gun" are boring. Abilities that do damage in interesting ways (like Krieg's fireballs and explosions, or anything melee-based) are fun, but fall behind because their damage doesn't scale the way that weapons (and enemy health) do. That really just leaves utility skills being useful, but there are only so many ideas for utility skills, and you can't really build a whole talent tree around that.

Now, saying this, I did like all of the classes conceptually in 1 and especially 2 (I drifted away from PS having only tried Athena and Claptrap and not getting far enough into TVHM to experience full builds, and I haven't played 3 yet). There were some neat ideas that I would have liked to dig further into, but I'm also not going to pretend that Gunzerking with Rubi+DPUH wasn't significantly stronger than anything else available, and scaling issues mean a lot of builds really struggled to be viable enough to be enjoyable (especially into OP levels). Some scaling adjustments would go a long way to improving the build variety.
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Poll of the Day   »   skullduggery is a weird word
adjl
11/27/2024
12:35 PM
#7
ParanoidObsessive posted...
That usually happens when someone says a word too many times in quick succession.

The phenomenon is called "semantic priming," and it mostly boils down to the fact that after hearing it so many times, your brain stops having to think about what the word means and is free to wander and start looking for other meaning/patterns in it (which often is hard to find because there aren't any, which is where the sense of weirdness comes from). A similar thing happens if you play a random voice clip repeatedly in quick succession, in that it starts to sound musical because your brain wanders and finds rhythmic/tonal patterns to focus on instead of having to think about the words.

Happening spontaneously, though, is just a brain fart.
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Poll of the Day   »   borderlands 4 is gonna suck
adjl
11/27/2024
09:18 AM
#11
That doesn't even need a massive reimagining. It just means ability damage needs to scale with your weapons.
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Poll of the Day   »   Meme 38: Maybe the reaI meme has been our lives this entire time
adjl
11/26/2024
12:55 AM
#66
https://imgur.com/D02kavV

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Poll of the Day   »   Meme 38: Maybe the reaI meme has been our lives this entire time
adjl
11/25/2024
02:49 PM
#59
Meme reuse? Maybe sort of, but I choose not to care.

https://imgur.com/ZZfcuab

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Poll of the Day   »   Xenoblade 3 is pretty good so far.
adjl
11/25/2024
02:13 PM
#3
agesboy posted...
main complaint I have is the chain attack theme overwriting almost everything, you might not even realize most boss themes have a low HP version

Yep. This and CP gain scaling based on level differences (at least with the level-down option locked behind postgame), which is particularly bothersome in a game that has some of the best sidequesting in all of gaming.
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Poll of the Day   »   People joke about TV loicenses BUT
adjl
11/25/2024
08:03 AM
#22
And there are some weird loopholes, like watching the Tyson-Paul fight on Netflix as it aired counted as watching live TV and you could therefore be fined if you watched it without a license.
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Poll of the Day   »   What's the weirdest game you've ever played?
adjl
11/24/2024
10:57 PM
#30
Salrite posted...
It's all just standard cartoonish video game stuff.

It's all what we *now* consider to be standard cartoonish video game stuff. Without the benefit of 40 years of similar stuff (much of which was at least partially inspired by Mario) to establish that as normal, it's a lot more off-the-wall.
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Poll of the Day   »   Have you ever seen a dead body?
adjl
11/24/2024
10:31 PM
#21
Watched my dad die after he came off life support, then saw his body again when I verified that it was him prior to his cremation because my mother couldn't stand to do it. I've also seen a few cadavers in the context of anatomy labs, though that's a little different. Also two pets.
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Poll of the Day   »   What's the weirdest game you've ever played?
adjl
11/24/2024
01:37 PM
#25
Blightzkrieg posted...
Super Mario Bros was effortlessly weird

That tends to get glossed over because Mario's become such a household name, but it really is.
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Poll of the Day   »   People joke about TV loicenses BUT
adjl
11/24/2024
01:11 PM
#17
willythemailboy posted...
The whole streaming situation would be far better had competitors stuck to making content for Netflix and Netflix stuck to being a distribution service rather than a content creator.

I think Netflix took a sensible route in that they saw the writing on the wall and got into making their own stuff instead of relying on buying distribution licenses that IP holders were either jacking up prices on (once they realized that this streaming thing was here to stay and there was potential for real money in it) or outright refusing to sell (whether just to hamstring Netflix or to stockpile for their own upcoming service). It would have been nice if they'd kept going with the status quo, but the reality was that that relied on other companies allowing them to, and that just wasn't happening. If they hadn't pivoted into content creation, I don't think Netflix would have survived the fragmentation of the market.

willythemailboy posted...
I get why that would be a bad idea in reality, but in an ideal world that would have been better for everyone.

Yep. Unfortunately, corporations don't just want some of the money, they want all of the money. Companies said "if Netflix is making $100 million off of people watching stuff that we licensed to them for $20 million, we should just keep our stuff and then we'll make the $100 million," seemingly failing to realize that the reason people spent $100 million on Netflix was because it had a significantly broader library than just that one company's stuff. A sustainable, consumer-friendly streaming market was never going to be an option long-term, because that relies on major media corporations accepting a modest, consistent revenue stream instead of chasing after a giant payday, and major media corporations aren't about that.

I'm not sure how much it happened elsewhere, but here in Canada, there was a while where we also had issues with Bell and Rogers (the two largest telecom companies) buying up distribution rights for movies and shows not because they had their own streaming services, but because they saw the threat Netflix posed to all the money they were making from cable and wanted to make Netflix worse. Eventually, they accepted that they weren't stopping the rise of streaming and started their own streaming services with the stuff they've hoarded, but for a while there quite a lot of stuff just wasn't available for streaming in Canada specifically because Bell/Rogers wanted cable to look more attractive by comparison.
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Poll of the Day   »   Has Ubisoft ever seen someone actually try to play one of their games?
adjl
11/24/2024
12:54 PM
#11
ParanoidObsessive posted...
I'd rather go back to the games where the modern day character is an Ubisoft employee and we're discovering that the company was secretly evil.

I'm guessing they'd rather distance themselves from that idea since it came out that they're pulling a Vatican in that they've been shuffling people around to try and cover up issues of sexual abuse. Given that nothing has been done since then to actually address those faults and the company is just trying to coast along hoping to stay under the radar of the media, I can understand that "hey maybe Ubisoft is secretly evil lol" isn't an idea they want to shine a spotlight on.

Periodic reminder that Ubisoft harbours sex criminals and that when you buy their games, that's what you're funding.
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