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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: September 28th, 2023

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  • Lmao, enjoy missing out on the nier titles, the devil may cry series, every fable game, kingdom hearts, the whole god of war franchise, asura’s wrath, and the new final fantasies. Hell, even skyrim has more committal animations. You’re talking about a lenient and forgiving version of animation mechanics that are present in basically every action RPG.

    In the fighting game community at large, we have terms for people who blame the mechanics when they can’t come to grips with them, Scrub being the main one (as new players wildly hitting buttons at random on an arcade cabinet looks akin to “scrubbing them clean”). This is you. Your refusal to treat the game as it is, and expectation that it behave a way it doesn’t, is confounding to anyone who has put any effort into the title. The rules will not change just because you refuse to learn them. Stay furious though, I guess.




  • You sound like everyone who has ever seen me menu spells in a KH speedrun. You sound like someone who turns weapons off in ULTRAKILL. Neither of these are explicitly bad things, but the system in place (a scrollable selection menu in real-time) can be utilized at the same level of efficiency as a spell wheel; you just need to exercise your memory when you set up and when you use your belt items.

    There’s a lot of titles that allow you to pause and utilize your menu. Dragon’s Dogma 2, for instance, allows you to pause at 0 HP and still use healing items, so long as you haven’t finished your dying animation or been knocked flat.

    Dark Souls and similar games make a deliberate choice in keeping the game in real time when you menu, and there’s a lot of truly functional items you can keep on your belt to help those weapons: status items can help you finish applying a status when an enemy leaps back, the physick, stamina regeneration, many extremely powerful effects that they want a small execution and collection barrier on. Alone in the Dark (5) had a real-time menu like this too far before it was popular, and people complained bitterly about it, so I get where the complaint comes from.

    Without dramatically reducing your available options or developing a completely different system of menus, the controls can’t really be less “clunky”. If horizon’s wheel and DaS’s menu aren’t for you, you may just not like how action RPGs control. If it’s about needing time for the menu, these specific titles may not really be up your alley. There’s a TON of games that operate the way you’re expecting, and at this point the community and developer alike are committed to sustaining this experience that provides friction. Friction is basically how you talk, from a design standpoint, about the difficulty of the game and why it’s present and what it does functionally.

    If you don’t understand how friction and fun are related, the game was unironically not made for you, and misunderstanding that or not being eloquent enough to explain that has led to the “git gud” divide. The menus are meant to provide friction. The combat animations and the period you must wait before acting again provide friction. Being a relatively heavy RPG, you can overcome friction multiple ways, either through developed personal skill or overleveling or picking tools that the boss isn’t equipped to handle or statuses it’s weak to.

    TL;DR of course the menus are clunky dude they’re based on a decades-long tradition of interfaces that provide gameplay fun. The fun is there for a grand majority of people, if you’re not having fun with the ball-crusher, nobody is making you use it.





  • While it was the complaint, the game did mention a required PSN account on all storefronts. This was disabled when auth/login was unplayably bad on launch week, then not re-enabled until a while later (with a week long heads up for new players and a month long heads up for existing players). Nobody actually got locked out of the game, and as my PSN account is registered somewhere I do not live, I don’t think anyone would’ve been stopped playing by the change if it had been pushed.

    What we “won” and sony “learned” is that they can’t get accurate metrics on playercount since HD2’s statistics aren’t being tracked correctly by the game’s session system and the playerbase is uncooperative. In this era where data is king, this just means we’ll stop seeing Sony funded helldivers ads on youtube while they market their giants that correctly report the data they’re looking for that helps them make a userbase that prints money.

    Oh, and we marred the all-time and recent review score from overwhelmingly positive. Guarantee you the successful action was the steam refund count on the game - truly unsolvable problem. As refund requests that don’t meet an automatic metric need a reply, and resolution usually takes ~an hour, the 6 digit refund count was not realistically solvable without rolling the requirement for a legitimate PSN account back. You can track how many total refund requests steam has day by day, as this is a public count in steam’s support page. There were 800k more than the average weekend.

    Tl;dr: while the complaint was this, the reality was not. The review bomb hurt arrowhead’s relationship with sony more than it hurt sony. The refund bomb didn’t cause steam to change policies this time but damn if it isn’t justified now.











  • SPT and the multiplayer conversion (Now Project Fika, formerly MPT) are the best ways to experience the game now for a multitude of reasons. I think learning heatmaps and dead locations applies no matter how you play - and the same can be said for bullet penetration, it’s just part of the game - but there’s a neverending stream of cheaters that feel far worse to lose to than a boss you weren’t prepared for. I can get trashed by tagila eighty times and accept that gear is just forfeit, I chanced it going to factory; when I am killed by a head/eyes with no audio five seconds into a fresh raid multiple times a day there’s substantially less to learn from and improve on.

    Worth noting you can get mods for SPT that change how AI behave, categorize them so some are doing a common farming route, some are moving to quest locations. It doesn’t make up for what we lost (the awkward vocal exchanges as you agree to not slay a new player at a starting quest location), but it helps retain some of the spice.