Oh hey look all my social links are coming along fine, all around Level 5 or so- OH MY GOD ALL THESE NEW SOCIAL LINKS now what do I spend my time on!?
At least I had some fun Mazio'ing the Floor 47 boss to death.
Oh hey look all my social links are coming along fine, all around Level 5 or so- OH MY GOD ALL THESE NEW SOCIAL LINKS now what do I spend my time on!?
At least I had some fun Mazio'ing the Floor 47 boss to death.
Been playing FFX for fun again. It cracks me up that Seymour has such obvious bad guy hair.
So Mass Effect: Andromeda is really fun, but I can't shake the feeling that the combat is strangely more simple than before. I mean, you get all these options and abilities that are no longer class-restricted, which is great, but you can only choose to have three active powers. You can switch between your 'favourites' mid-combat, but that activates all your cooldowns, so there's not much point switching up.
For example, Mr. Carny's been using Pull+Throw pretty much the entire game. and there's barely any incentive to switch it up. He's maxed out all his biotics at this point but I don't see him using backlash, lance, singularity etc. anytime soon. Why should he?
Combat issues aside, probably the best thing is exploring and sidequesting. Compared to DA: Inquisition, there's much better engagement with people and characters on all the different worlds, which I love.
To be fair, I'm replaying ME2 right now and the combat is painfully simple really. I've always felt that the original Mass Effect played like a really troutty third person shooter. 2 and 3 were really just average third person shooters but they were so good by comparison they get away with it.
I feel there are two myths that shroud Dark Souls that are not really true.
1) The game is ridiculously hard - Not really, it's just a basic trial and error style of challenge like old school arcade games or some modern mobile titles even. If you have the patience to just keep nudging along, you'll quickly start to see it's easy to make progress, and the consequences are really just a slight slap to the wrist. Hell by the end of the game, I would be more annoyed about losing humanity than a few thousand souls. In some ways Demon's Souls is more challenging, but that has to do with other features that were more frustrating than fun that Dark Souls had the good fortune to remove.
2) The game is completely fair, unlike other games - I would put a little asterisk by the word fair. "Trial and error" style difficulty is not exactly fair challenge since the entire basis is to learn from your mistakes, but these games tend to always place you in unwinnable situations that only hindsight could ever hope to overcome. So yeah, you're still going to feel like the game cheap shots you a lot and there are certainly a few situations where the game stacks the odds in it's favor or gives unfair advantages to enemy units. The ghosts of New Londo can kiss my ass with their ability to take pot shots through walls and remain completely invincible. I doubt there is anyone who successfully completed the Bed of Chaos on their first try without getting some kind of help. That's not to say the game doesn't offer a fair challenge but it does cheat occasionally in ways other games do, it just doesn't do it as often ,which is why its not called out on it. The real fairness comes from the game making death trivial, so you don't get as pissy about the cheap shots, hidden enemies, or learning the hard way about the aggro range of Gwyn's Black Knights.
True beauty exists in things that last only for a moment.
Current Mood: And it's been a long December and there's reason to believe. Maybe this year will be better than the last. I can't remember all the times I tried to tell myself. To hold on to these moments as they pass...
That's one thing I always hated, hindsight was required more than skill. There's a lot of situations you're not supposed to win the first time you go in blindly. Which is disparaging
So in the Witcher, I couldn't get the drop I want from ghouls until I got the bestiary entry for them. But you don't just get the bestiary entry by beating a ghoul - you have to talk with some grannies and give them food before that.
Now, at first I was pretty annoyed with that, but then I realized this actually made the game more involved and really integrated story and gameplay. Because you won't know how to effectively extract a ghoul's blood just by killing it, so you have to scout for information. And who knows old stories about all the fantastic beasts better than the grannies. And who doesn't like free food?
I've been playing a string of games lately. The UI has stuck out to me after playing Persona 5 most recently. The two before it were Final Fantasy XV and Mass Effect Andromeda. Persona makes me appreciate how a good UI can enhance the gaming experience. I wonder why some games struggle with functional maps and menus more than others. I've played some games in my old crotchety life where the map, menus, and/or HUD were just atrocious. They don't have to be stylish (though that's cool) so much as helpful. Are things changed during development too fast for those in charge of this to keep up? Is it just not considered priority much of the time? I dunno. And I'm too lazy to research. But I thought about it.
Mjolnir + Thor = suddenly doing 2x-3x the damage of your allies even when they're hitting the enemy's weakness
Sweet.
I remember being kind of sour towards Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance, but I don't really know why anymore. I like that we got a lot more different Disney worlds, and the gameplay is fun if a little challenging for me towards the end. Getting close to beating it again, so maybe something towards the end stuck out to me in a bad way?
True beauty exists in things that last only for a moment.
Current Mood: And it's been a long December and there's reason to believe. Maybe this year will be better than the last. I can't remember all the times I tried to tell myself. To hold on to these moments as they pass...