Then why did you throw him out?

It’s only 20% off, but Alpha Protocol has returned to Steam just in time for the sale!

Woot woot! Hopefully going to pick up Balatro on sale this weekend.

Spoken like someone who hasn’t touched the game.

The single biggest issue is that the high difficulty is the only thing that actually pushes you to explore the world. If you were able to just kill every boss right away, 50% of the Elden Ring’s content becomes immediately pointless busywork. It already is, but that busywork offers small, incremental rewards that allow you to last a little bit longer, or learn a little bit more about a boss’ moveset. The intended gameplay experience is to run into a brick wall, explore and discover new options and opportunities, and then returning to break the brick wall. For experienced players on their second or third playthrough, you can basically strip out the open world entirely after an initial 2-3 hours of running around to grab what you want.

I’d also like to point out that 90% of the difficulty of bosses has nothing to do with their health or how much damage they do. FromSoftware has really pushed the envelope on boss design and AI, to the point where many of the hardest bosses are difficult because of their moveset. You can especially see this in the DLC, where you’re able to collect Scadutree Fragments to increase your damage and health, but players still have difficulty with many bosses even after maxing them out. Dealing 3x more damage doesn’t mean anything if you can never get a hit in, and taking 3x less damage won’t save you from a fatal grab. You can make an argument for difficulty levels toning down boss AI and making them less aggressive, but I’ll make a different one.

If a player doesn’t want to engage in difficult boss fights, and doesn’t want to be forced to learn combat encounters, they probably don’t want to play Elden Ring. There’s a lot of people who didn’t actually want to play Elden Ring in that 20 million. Only about 27% ended up completing the game. FromSoftware is still making niche games for a niche audience, but now they’re known for their exceptionally high pedigree, which causes people to feel FOMO. It’s okay to not want to play Elden Ring, but no amount of handicap is going to change that feeling for players.

The difficulty is tied to the story and the gameplay though. A lot of things start to break down if the Tarnished is able to travel through the Lands Between unfettered. Should a successful developer who develops niche games for a niche audience be forced to capitulate to the demands of players outside of their niche just because they have a fear of missing out?

At the very least, FromSoftware continues to prove that level scaling is not a requirement. I honestly think that without their influence, we would have seen a lot more adoption of the practice. It’s the kinda brain-dead idea that comes from an MBA who’s sole focus is reaching the widest audience possible .

Yeah, that’s fair. I guess I’m hopeful that things have changed after Microsoft bought them, but they probably still suck.

Eh, it sounds to me like they’re saying “we tried to imitate D2 exactly, but people don’t want it anymore.” That’s just flat out a lie though, because they didn’t imitate D2 at all. In the article, the mention that a player could conceivably take years to drop specific “uber uniques.” While true that it would take a lot of time to drop it naturally, D2 had a pretty robust trading economy in it’s later years. Unless you were specifically going solo, you had the option to save up. It took time, but it was a goal that was accomplishable on ladder.

Unless they changed it when I wasn’t looking, uber uniques are not tradable in D4 at all. I’m not necessarily going to argue for or against that, it’s a game design choice, but it’s specifically not the choice made by D2. Obviously players aren’t going to want to grind for years for a specific item, but they never had to in the past.

I agree that an item-filter would have been a nice addition, but with Blizzard you have to take a hardline #NoChanges approach. Otherwise you’ll get something like the WC3 remaster, or every Classic WoW expansion. They did add a few small additions after the remaster was released, like Helltides and some new Runewords, but they’re all thankfully ignorable if you want to.

I mean, releasing one of the worst ARPGs of all time isn’t exactly a triumphant launch. I think D4 is fine now that it’s effectively become a sequel to D3, which is why I tried to use the past-tense as much as I could, but D4 was only received well by casuals. Every ARPG fan I know and every content creator I watched played it for like 2 days, realized there were deep systemic issues, and dipped.

Seriously, give it a go. It’s honestly a great remaster. There are some extra runewords added and some other small stuff, but it’s basically D2 with nicer graphics and prettier cutscenes. Gameplay is unchanged, warts and all. We even get ladder resets again!

It’s really sad that Blizzard has no idea what makes D2 a great game, especially considering they just released D2R so we can relive the glory for ourselves. D4 on release was nowhere close to D2, it was more like a toddler trying to make an MMO.

In D2, you can feel your character become more powerful with levels alone. In fact, gearing basically doesn’t matter for most of normal difficulty, it’s almost entirely level focused. D4 scales content to your players level, meaning every level you gained made you weaker. No shit people didn’t want to go for a long XP grind, who wants to continually grind to do less damage?

Most Americans don’t realize that the U.S. is by far the easiest developed country to immigrate to, by a country mile. It’s still an incredibly difficult feat, but our standards are really, really low. For most developed countries, you’ll need to have a specialized, useful education, a significant amount of capital on-hand, a clean bill of health, and you’ll need to learn a new language.

My “plan” for a Trump election is to try and get a student visa to complete my PhD in neuroscience, and then I’ll overstay and escape to the European wilderness as an illegal immigrant. I wouldn’t hold my breath for a promise of asylum.

God I remember the hell out of Spiderman 2. I only had it on like a demo disk, so the game ended shortly after your battle against Rhino, so I just spent ages swinging around the city.

I wonder if FromSoft would ever compromise like Ubisoft did with Exploration Mode in their Avatar open world game. Ubisoft kinda compromised the other way, by allowing you to toggle off all quest markers and automatic navigation to force you to rely on quest directions. Maybe an optional toggle to turn on those directions?

I think they’re attacking this problem from the wrong angle.

Part of what makes the release of FromSoftware games such an event is working alongside a community. You discover an item location, and tell your friend; or someone online is having a really tough time on a boss, and you share your strategy. These moments are a key part of playing the game on release IMO, and they kinda require some information to be cryptic/difficult or else the community won’t bother.

The biggest issue IMO is that none of this community stuff really happens in game. There’s the message system, which mostly gets ruined because of trolls, and you can kinda get info from phantoms of other players, but the bulk of the information exchange happens on Discord, Youtube, and Reddit.

Exactly! Gotta finish the bloodline, that’s just villainy 101

I dunno, I’m someone who was fine with the changes to combat introduced in Doom Eternal, but was honestly really turned off by how much id was kinda huffing their own farts with the story. The first game had Doomguy punch any attempts at exposition. The second turned Hayden into an Angel, the AI friend into God, the demons are extraplanar aliens that are being used for energy by the angels, and now the Doom Slayer is some destined force of cosmic balance. The little bits were of larger lore were kinda funny in the first game, it became flanderized in the second, and now for a prequel I’m worried id’s managed to fit their entire head up their own ass trying to convince everyone how cool their space marine is.

Yeah, I guess I didn’t think apart how quickly the tides would pull him out from the coast. Maybe he’s skilled enough at navigation to find his way back in open ocean? It’s not impossible to swim across seas for experienced swimmers, and I think the bubble would help with exhaustion, though if anything it would make sun burn worse.

Is this really a rescue? Is there anything inherently dangerous about going out to sea in an enclosed bubble with rations?