Bjorn
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Posts posted by Bjorn
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You're right, but then I'd say people being hostile about this sort of business practice isn't actually new either. Being "nickle and dimed" isn't exactly a new expression.
Totally true! Also, "there's no such thing as a free lunch."
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For one thing I think the idea of microtransactions has been tainted by the bad actors. Also I think the lack of ceiling on dollars spent makes people distrustful.
These are two things that I think make "gut sense", but we can look back and see the animosity towards microtransactions (even completely optional cosmetic ones) from the very beginning. There are also plenty of other examples where there's no strict ceiling on what people pay for a game (MMOs, dedicated servers for some games, ridiculously priced Collector's editions). For each of those examples, the people paying for those things are still often paying more than most of the people who buy stuff in ethical F2P games (I know there are a few whales for each game that go nuts, but let's be honest, the typical player isn't actually worried about protecting a theoretical whale they will never meet).
Even in games without P2W they often tilt the progression so you hit a point where its a choice between a super long slog or buying stuff. Free to Play mechanics just encourage some bad game systems.
I have fairly limited experiences with these F2P games, but I do know the point you're talking about that they hit. But, the question then becomes, does the amount you have to pay to get through that barrier cost more than you would have been willing to pay for the game outright? I'm using Warframe as an example here because it's what I'm playing now, but paying $25 will pretty much push you through all the slog gates I know of without making them feel grindier than many paid games are. $25 for a polished, fun 3rd person, RPG-light shooter seems very reasonable. I would suspect in many of these games, $25 would often be enough to push through the slog.
And I'm not even necessarily convinced about the bad design systems. Binding of Isaac: Rebirth with it's expansion now looks like it probably takes upwards of 200 hours for an average player to unlock everything, and it's not like that is a huge game. I think unreasonable expectations on player time are common across many, many games both within pre-paid and F2P. And yet, we tend to see them as a criticism of design more commonly leveled against F2P.
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Why do gamers seem to have such an antagonism towards paying money for F2P games? I get it when they are using abusive/manipulative/P2W systems, makes sense. Having gotten into Warframe recently, there's a ton of antagonism in it's community towards paying for things (which otherwise seems really good), with most advice being not to buy Plat, just play. Even though as a system it's very friendly towards players who don't want to spend money. All content is available to everyone. Platinum (the currency you can pay cash for) is tradeable between players, so people can sell rare items they don't want/need to get Plat to buy things that are just a lot easier to buy than grind for.
We spent $25 a piece once we knew we liked it, and it's been great. Got us a nice variety of starting gear to give us some more diversity in our loadouts, got a nice boost to stockpile some credits/experience/crafting mats.
Is it because it feels like the system can be gamed, so the system must be gamed? Why wouldn't you want to pay to support the dev/game you really enjoy?
It's just a very weird attitude to me. -
Yeah, effects can be far more entertaining than just damage. In Warframe, all 14 damage types (phsy + elem) have a status effect associated with them that have a chance to proc on each attach. Multiple types of damage can be on one weapon at a time, so you can have a variety of effects that can potentially proc. Though, based on what I've seen so far, an enemy will only have one effect at a time on them.
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Yeah, I'm dying for that but my wife just told me that there is a perk in the Strength tree that lets you fast travel while over-encumbered. So, I'm definitely aiming for that as soon as possible in lieu of such a Torchlight option.
It would make a good mechanic to be able to load up your power armor and send it off to go sell all your junk while you keep booking it on foot. Would allow selling on the fly, but also introduce a risk mechanic to it.
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Warframe seems to have an interesting way of doing damage types/resistances (though I'm still learning, so maybe it will be bunk eventually). There are 4 elemental types, and an additional 6 combos made from combining the 4 core types. There are also 3 physical types of damage. Enemies are generally weak to 2-3 types and strong against 2-3 types. Each faction tends to favor certain defense types. With a primary weapon, secondary weapon, melee weapon and powers, you can generally build to be strong against whatever faction you are playing, with one weapon being a backup to use against something unexpected you might encounter. It feels overly complicated at times, but also because of multiple weaknesses/strengths, you rarely ever feel like "Oh fuck, this thing is strong against fire and that's all I have".
One thing I like about damage types, that only a few games have done well is the possibilities of spell combos. Freeze them then blast them with fire for extra damage. I think my favorite game for spell combos was Dragon Age Origins (my favorite spell casting game in general) http://dragonage.wikia.com/wiki/Spell_combinations
I really liked the idea of Runers, which is entirely built around spell combos and chaining effects like that. Unfortunately I found the need to repeat the pretty boring first couple of levels each run to kill my enthusiasm for it.
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I generally try to be an advocate for second chances, people fuck up and need room to grow. But, in this specific situation, my understanding is that she serves in a supervisory/training/director role over graduate teachers, and the fallout of her words in that discussion are such that she's lost the respect and authority she had over the people she's supposed to be training. I don't know that she needs to be removed from the university, but if someone in a leadership position fails hard enough, they may have put themselves in a position of simply no longer being able to execute their job duties anymore.
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I think you are sort of describing STALKER, developers of which split off to found Metro developer 4A.
I know the STALKER games exist and are beloved by their fans, but I've never really known a lot about them (or the connection between the games).
Edited to add: Oh hey, Stalker totally gets mentioned later on in the cast.
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On the idea of what would a Fallout game look like removed from America, a fascinating question to me is what would it be like to have it be a foreign country that wasn't devastated going out and re-exploring the world. In World War Z, Cuba is one of the few (or the only?) countries to survive the zombie apocalypse relatively unscathed, in part thanks to their social/political isolation and in part thanks to being a small dictatorship willing to use brutal tactics to protect the greater population. Cuba ends up taking the lead on a lot of humanitarian aid and rebuilding in the years following the apocalypse. So having a game where say a North Korean expeditionary force ends up stranded in Mexico and has scavenge and survive would be fascinating.
I'd also enjoy seeing the Metro devs get a shot at making the Soviet version of Fallout, something big and open world rather than the linear shooter design of the Metro games.
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The protests at Mizzou and Yale have spread to some other campuses, including KU. KU students are now calling for the firing of a professor after she showed that she's an ignorant asshat in a discussion about how TAs can handle discussions of racism in the communications classes.
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Seems like a simple solution. Landmines.
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So I used cheat engine to finish off Greed Mode. If you don't know, there are unlocks all the up to putting in 1000 coins in the machine now (after the ARG was done). But, each character has an increasing chance to jam the machine, meaning that it will take up to a hundred Greed runs in order to do it legit. Fuck that. I like this game a bunch and I do enjoy Greed mode, but I do not want to have to run that mode that much.
Spoilering the rest for people who don't want to know what gets unlocked.
You get the Keeper, a new character who looks kinda like one of the store keepers. He gets 2 coins instead of health, and always takes 1 full damage, no half damage. He also can't increase his health past 2. So he's a lot like the Lost with the Holy Mantle. His advantage is he starts with triple shot. Neat character, but definitely challenging. I beat the Blue Baby on normal difficulty with him last night, which honestly shocked me. I've never even made it past Isaac's Mom with the Lost, even with Holy Mantle. But I got Mom's Knife (triple knife with his starting ability) and the book that gives you temporary invulnerability, and that combo could kill any boss in a few seconds.
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Life
in Idle Banter
Congrats! Baby Hazard would make a great nickname for a kid
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Yeah, Rebirth is a remake in which most of the actual work was done by the company Nicalis with Edmund providing design and guidance on the rebuild, and Afterbirth is the expansion for it that just came out around Halloween (again, with Nicalis doing the heavy lifting and Edmund giving guidance). Edmund, by his own admission, isn't exactly an expert programmer. The original BoI was built in Flash because it's what he knew, and he ended up seriously pushing up against the limits of what Flash can do with it (which is why a whole bunch of items had to be cut and why some interactions between items got cut, because they'd cause crashes or errors). Rebirth is built in a new engine, which is one of the reasons it can do things the original can't and why a remake of such a recent game was worth doing.
Afterbirth also added a new final boss, new challenges and a new mode, all of which really help extend the game if you find yourself wanting to dig deep into it.
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I know I made this recommendation before, but I enjoy repeating myself
. If I were you, I'd wait for Rebirth to go on a good, cheap sale and pick it up rather than continuing to hammer away at the original. The remake (and it's expansion) are better in every way, at least in part because they control better and the balance has been adjusted. But the difficulty can be really pushed with optional challenges and unlocks. It actually has a tracking system to know which characters has beat which bosses, so it's super easy to know what items you haven't unlocked yet. It's got more characters, and more interesting characters who give you a fairly different experience starting a run. It's also got way more interesting interactions, synergies and weirdo effects when combining items. The odds of being able to see all the items is much higher as well, since there are some items that really mix up the likelihood of pulling different things. I think in the original there were still an item or two I had never seen because of the drop rarity of them. -
Piper has started picking up and using weapons she finds. Recently she almost killed me when she pulled a FatBoy of of nowhere and killed a super mutant very close to me. I think we were getting along!
Haha, that's amazing.
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So the ARG wrapped up over the weekend, secrets were found, new stuff was added to the game. There's a complete writeup of it here. Pretty neat that they actually pulled this off.
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Some of the new store items in Afterbirth are game breakingly good (Chaos and Refresh), which makes the store even more compelling. If I've got 15 coins, I already consider it worth the time to open every time for a shot at Blank Card or one of the batteries if I've got a good active item.
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That reminds me, I always meant to try a game with an all MEC team, preferably all with the punching arm, and just punch everything to death.
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Somebody finally put together a summary of the ARG hunt.
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Yeah, if I ever do another run, I think I may well skip Memetic Skin and force myself to use other upgrades. It made even late game Classic pretty trivial a lot of times.
I did find MECs more useful when using the Roulette Second Wave option. Units who ended up with a poor collection of skills could be turned into MECs, which then at least gave me a guaranteed set of skills I knew could be useful, particularly when other units were healing.
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Oh, so apparently there's an actual ARG going on with Edmund dropping hints on Twitter and some hints hidden in codes in the achievement images (assuming people aren't jumping at shadows, but based on Edmund's tweets, they aren't). Current thought is pointing towards there being real life clues somewhere in Santa Cruz (where Ed lives). Looking to see if someone has a coherent writeup of the hunt so far.
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I finally noticed there was an option to import save files from Rebirth to Afterbirth recently. I'll have to go through Greed mode again then, but that's not so bad since I still really like Greed mode. Also my third save slot now has the Real Platinum God image on it even though there is absolutely nothing unlocked on it, which is weird.
Probably the design decision I find most annoying in Afterbirth is the way Ultra Greed and the new super secret boss cap the maximum amount of damage they take per hit (or maybe it's not per hit, I don't know). It's true that in Rebirth most bosses, even right up to Mega Satan could become trivial if you ran into the right combination of items, but I never really saw this as a problem. To me, Isaac is the most interesting not when it hits a sweet spot of being the right amount of challenge, but when I get an interesting, unusual or particularly satisfying item combination. Getting those broken runs once in a while just makes up for all the annoying ones you had leading up to it, and personally I'm even guilty of rerolling runs until I find a nice item in the very first item room when I'm not in the mood to deal with Isaac's shit.
So even though the intended effect of this damage cap may have been to always put up a fight even when the player is incredibly OP, the actual consequence, for me at least, is that you now need to be incredibly OP in even more specific ways to deal with those guys. Glass cannon builds aren't really an option, since the game explicitly prevents you from dealing damage quickly enough to end the fight before you take more hits than you should. So now you want plenty of health mixed in there, and defensive items that help you not get hit, and of course you still want those damage and tears up for the rest of the run and so you can deal as much damage as you're allowed to in those fights.
Maybe it wasn't ideal that damage trumped everything else in Rebirth, but actually needing to have everything doesn't increase the amount of viable approaches.
Apparently it's not just a cap, but a cap that's variable based on how strong your current build is. Someone posted a video the other day of Ultra Greed being unbeatable because he could heal faster than they could do damage (their shots were also spawning coins, which I think can heal him, so the whole run was kind of a mess for that person). Edmund has acknowledged the balance is off and it's one of the things they are supposed to be working on.
With the unlocks, Afterbirth had a bug that unlocked everything for everyone. I don't know if it's been fixed yet or not, or what the trigger condition for it was. It happened on my primary save, but not on my secondary save (which is brand new, thought it would be fun to start from scratch and see what that was like).
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Haha, I still make stupid mistakes
I'm particularly prone to play later than I should, to the point where I'm tired enough that I end up doing stupid things and ruining a run.I also still keep the item/card/trinket list open in a window, as there's still a handful of items that I just cannot remember exactly what they do or how they interact, even after all this time with the games.
Buying a New PC
in Idle Banter
Posted
I'm still running an AMD FX-6300, a 3 year old CPU that was being beat by multiple Intel options back when I bought it, and I honestly don't see a point in the near future that I will need to replace it (the GPU will need to go before the CPU). Save the money on the CPU, and either just save it or put it towards other components that will pay higher dividends. Or spend the savings on a quiet cooling system.