Cbirdsong

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Posts posted by Cbirdsong

  3. Posted

    Yeah, grab herbs when it's easy, and if you're missing just one thing for a recipe, go and buy it from an alchemist.

     

    Also, it took me way too long to figure this out: the fancy alcoholic ingredients you need for White Gull and other fancy alchemy ingredients are for sale at weird places. The best place early on is probably Crow's Perch, which has two vendors that sell them.

  4. Posted

    The Hidetaki Miyazaki quote that made the rounds this week seems very relevant to the reader mail/ensuing discussion on polishing the fun out of games:
     

    "Well, there aren’t any undiscovered items, or specific bits of gameplay," he says. "But Dark Souls is in some ways an incomplete game, and I like to think that it has been completed by players, by their discoveries, as they moved along. I’d love to say that the nature of this incompleteness was completely deliberate, but it is both deliberate and by accident, in different ways." 
     
    Miyazaki reveals that during development he thinks about the different ways that players can enjoy the experience. "I am conscious of that when I make these games: I try to make a game that has beautiful open spaces, gaps, room for players to enjoy it in ways that were not authored," he says. "I never want it to be where you have to follow the rules completely, where you have to do things exactly as the designers intended. 
     
    "I like to think that this way of creating – leaving spaces – is satisfying. So if there are incomplete aspects of Dark Souls III, please forgive us. When the player is inside the world of the game, there are various places where they feel they may be able to peek behind the curtain, pry open a window and see beyond."

  8. Posted

    Interesting discussion throughout.

     

    Though mostly unrelated to the topic, you guys absolutely nailed why I'm not really big on Power Grid. It feels like optimal play requires keeping a mental spreadsheet of everyone's current money level and board state, updating it every turn while everyone waits on you.

  9. Posted

    I finally got a new computer capable of running Witcher 3 with decent settings, so I've picked up the game. When you talk about Dragon Age 3, everyone will tell you "The starting area is miserable, get out of it as quickly as possible", is there any similarly important advice for this open-world fantasy hack'n'slash? Stuff to avoid, stuff to pick up as quickly as possible?

     

    Just do whatever feels fun and you'll be great! There are a couple points of no return in the story but the game warns you when you reach one.

  13. Posted

    Dan Ryckert did a pair of Periscope streams this weekend wherein he a) ordered everything from the Taco Bell menu, and B) took a bite out of them each, reviewing them as they went. I didn't pay a lot of attention, as I was busy continuing to have my life consumed by Fallout 4, but it seemed like even though he was using a hundred point scale, nothing deviated more than 3 points from 85. All that time reviewing games has apparently made an indelible mark.

     

    I would guess this is because everything at Taco Bell uses the same 8-10 core ingredients.

  17. Posted

    What with episodic games making a resurgence I'm surprised that that model hasn't resurfaced. Was the idea of making the first episode free and charging for the rest of the season discussed at Telltale? It seems like if anything it would be more effective with the more story-focused titles, since rather than selling more of the same thing you'd be selling the conclusion to the story once people are hooked. Then again, I don't know if it was ever an especially good business model, even if it was commonplace for a while.

     

    On the consoles and mobile platforms, Telltale usually makes the first episode of a season free after a couple more are out.

  18. Posted

    Interestingly, if the gap in levels between the host and summoned player is large enough, the summoned player's stats will be altered to be close to the summoner. I think that's a really neat system. It allows coop with anyone, regardless (almost) of level, but doesn't allow the summoner to be straight up carried through content.

     

    This is a great change, but once they added the whole password/play with a friend thing, they should have gone all the way to traditional invites. Once you beat the game you can't help a friend because you aren't physically able to meet them in late-game areas.

    Though the last bosses are an exception!

  22. Posted

    I'm not sure the built-in level discovery mechanisms are ever going to be good, barring a total overhaul. The top lists are pretty calcified and full of autoplay levels, and the 100 Mario Challenge is entirely based around difficulty and not fun.

  24. Posted

    I really loved the vibe of the first act in Velen, where you're in what feels like a fantasy version of the rural south filled with intractable problems both fantastical and mundane, and you can't just walk in and fix everything like a video game protagonist does. The fact that you're able to just go back and kill the

    Ladies of the Wood

    like a stupid boss monster almost ruins the tone of that whole section retroactively.

  25. Posted

    I also think it's weird that, you as the creator, only get to see a death heatmap for the main area of an uploaded map and not the sub area. It's a really useful piece of information for refining your maps, and Nintendo's kind of needlessly limited it.

     

    I also want this information, but making it more available would draw more attention to a different problem: you can't patch levels.