TheBananaKing Now • 100%
Obviously ideas of fun vary; people are allowed to enjoy things I don't like :)
Also I'm not rampantly disagreeing with you here, just picking at the edges for discussion because it still doesn't sit quite right in my head.
It's just... sometimes I feel like the implementation of complexity in these things is just kind of lazy, comparable to adding difficulty by making enemy bullet-sponges. It's certainly more work to defeat them, but is that work rewarding?
Consider the annoyance that triggered this whole post.
In grim dawn, mid way through elite. I had some gloves with fairly miserable specs for my level, but they were providing most of my vitality res. Can I change them out?
Well there's some with better overall specs but no vitality but they do have a lot of fire res, so I could swap those in, then the ring I was getting lots of fire res from could go, and there's one with some vitality but unfortunately no poison, so let's see, I do have a helmet that ...
spongebob_three_hours_later.jpg
... but now my vitality is three points too low to equip the pants, oh fuck off. How is this fun?
Finding a reasonable solution doesn't make you feel clever, and making an awkward compromise doesn't feel like a justifiable sacrifice, it feels like you finally got too exhausted to search through more combinations and gave up. You can't really look forward to getting better gear to fill a gap, because you're going to have to go round and round in circles again trying to build a whole new set around the deficiencies that come with it.
It's like debating against a Gish Gallop - taxing to keep up with but without any real sense of achievement.
And honestly it doesn't feel like that's really intended to be the real gameplay. If the genre is really a build-planning-combinatorics game with a bit of monster-bashing on the side, where's the quality-of-life UX to go with it? Where's management tools to bring the actual problem-domain to the fore? Where's the sort-rank-and-filter, where's the multi-axis comparisons? Where's the saved equipment sets? Why is the whole game environment and all the interface based around the monster-bashing, if that's just the testing phase? And if navigating hostile UX is part of the the challenge, then again I say that challenge is bad game design.
And all the layered mechanics across the genre feel like that: bolted on and just kind of half-assed, keeping the problem-domain too hard to work on because of externalities rather than the innate qualities of the problem itself. I know, let's make the fonts really squirly and flickery so you can only peer at the stats for five minutes before you get a headache, that'll give people a challenging time constraint to work with.
Did you ever play mass-effect: Andromeda, with the shitty sudoku minigame bolted on to the area unlocks? You know how that just... didn't make the game fun?
That.
Also it seems to me that if the prep-work was really the majority drawcard, we'd be seeing a lot more football-manager-like tweak-and-simulate loops, if that's what they were going for. Build your character, let it bot through the map (or just do an action montage), then come back with a bunch of loot and XP to play with before sending it out again.
I think an ideal game would hit all three kinds of satisfaction: tactics/graaagh, exploration/harvesting and mastery/optimisation. And ideally, each of those three targets would be free of external complications and left to focus on their own innate challenge and rewards.
I know that's easy to say and hard to do... I'm just surprised that we haven't got signficantly better at it in the last couple of decades.
TheBananaKing Now • 100%
I've played the crap out of both; they're really good.
TheBananaKing Now • 100%
And that's entirely valid; like I say, stardew gameplay is immensely satisfying in and of itself.
I just feel like all these other mechanisms in arpgs are thrown on top to try and disguise the nature of the thing, and it's that disparity that leaves people jaded.
Stardew doesn't have an endless progression of increasingly fell and eldritch vegetables that need you to constantly grind for upgrades just to tend to them. You water things in one click all the way through, and that feels good; you don't need to chase a sawtooth pseudo-progression in order to be satisfied.
Stardew doesn't make you do NP-complete multi-knapsack-problems in order to even have a viable character, or drown you in overly complex interactions so you can't usefully plan in your head; there's complexity there, but of the kind that opens up more options.
It manages to be fun without those things, but ARPGs seem to overwhelmingly rely on them in order to be engaging at all.
Why is that?
Why does gory-stardew need all those external obfuscations, when the normal kind doesn't?
How could you make a gory-stardew that's comfortable in its own skin?
TheBananaKing Now • 100%
I have absolutely no wish to dumb them down.
As I said, if you just took away all those mechanics, you'd be left with a boring empty game.
What I said was that it would be nice if you could make the combat feel more like hunting than gathering, so you wouldn't have to make up for it with a:) number-go-up and b:) np-hard - then you could then go for much more enriching forms of complexity.
For instance, making mobs fight a lot more tactically as their level increases instead of just stacking on the HP and damage - and instead of your perks just driving stat inflation, they unlocked new tactical options on your part, giving you a series of new stops to pull out as the battles got more fraught.
TheBananaKing Now • 100%
If someone came into my home and started making derogatory racist remarks about me, I'd say that response would be entirely appropriate.
TheBananaKing Now • 100%
I dunno if it even needs to be difficult; even a bit tactical would change the nature of the thing. As it is the mobs in these things tend to be mindless converging waves; what if they set up set pieces, ran for help, dived for cover, used supporting fire etc etc?
Also perhaps overambitious, but what if the difference between low and high level enemies wasn't their HP or damage, but how tricky and organised they were? What if leveling up didn't make number get big, but instead gave you more options in a fight?
TheBananaKing Now • 100%
Ah, perhaps a slight miscommunication.
though I do enjoy traditional roguelikes, I'm not looking at the stakes or the intensity, but rather the kind of itch that's being scratched in diabolikes, and it feels a lot more completionist/procedural in nature than it does adversarial.
Both are good, but dressing one up as the other can lead to an underlying sense of disappointment.
I've been playing the things since Diablo I; I love the concept and the gameplay loop, but the game-design issues they run up against, and the mechanics that get implemented to address them... irritate the crap out of me over time, and I want to talk about that. I think the paradox at the core of it all is that the gameplay loop is basically Stardew Valley in Doom clothing. It's not a hunting game, it's a gathering game. Walk through this area, and harvest all the objects. Explore every part of the map, rip up all the weeds, look for hidden goodies under every fallen log. The satisfaction you feel ripping through a wave of mobs isn't the satisfaction from triumphantly pounding your enemy's skull into a pile of bloody ashes and limping away, it's the satisfaction you get from ripping off a really big crackly sheet of tree bark in one go. You could probably reskin the whole thing into an apartment-cleaning game and it would still work. And that would be fine in and of itself, but it probably wouldn't sell many copies - so they dress it up as Epic Monster Combat, and that's where the problems begin - layers and layers of obfuscation to hide the seams. In order not to feel tedious and grindy, there needs to be a sense of progression; your standard power-fantasy stuff, where the challenges increase, you improve to meet them, rinse and repeat. In practice this equates to a varying number of clicks-per-mob. You start out needing three clicks to defeat a mob, over time you get better gear and go down to two clicks, level up and drop to one click, and woah I'm so powerful. But oh no! A new area with bigger scarier mobs! They take three clicks, even with my new powers! But of course you'd see through that straight away, so they put numbers on everything. You see bigger and bigger damage numbers as you level up, so it keeps feeling more impressive. For a while, at least. But that only lasts so long before you start to feel played for a chump, so slap on more and more layers to hide the lines, and make little mini-metagames around navigating them. Trouble is, those minigames really aren't very fun. Scattering a dozen different stats and resistances across half a dozen gear slots is just a box-packing game. You want to get the best possible numbers for each attribute, but they're clustered randomly across all the different items, so you need to evaluate a butt-ton of different combinations in order to get the best coverage. I'm guessing that's going to have some kind of shitty NP-hard algorithmic complexity, so you're basically doing the travelling salesman problem in your head. Wheee. (ok but seriously this has to map to a named problem that someone's analyzed already... any ideas?) And hey look, there's the insanely complicated perk tree of PoE, or the similarly confusing devotions from Grim Dawn. Again it looks like they're confusing complexity with richness, and making optimization too confusing to do without third-party tools or even less fun, following a published build. (for god's sake, if we're going down that route, let us plug the final build in at the start, then auto-level towards it) Item sets! Because there's nothing like grinding for weeks until your corneas dry out, filling up endless stash tabs with partial sets that you'll level out of before you ever complete; it's so much fun. Crafting recipes, same deal, and even worse, meta builds that rely on unique items that are impossible to reliably SSF, so you spend your whole game grinding for trade. And on and on, there's so many symptomatic patches to delay the eventual ennui, but no fixes to the fundamental design issue that causes it. You can't just take them away and replace them with nothing, or you'd be bored in minutes. But building up to completely jaded after a couple of weeks once you start playing the engine rather than the game is also pretty crappy. How do you make the fighting feel like fighting instead of watering cauliflowers, or else how do you make crop-harvesting feel badass? How do you create a sense of progression beyond mere stat inflation? How do you do a rich slew of possibilities without creating spaghetti hell that ends up only having six basic metas at the end of it? How for the love of god do you make combat feel intense without blanketing the entire screen in particle effects? Could someone design a system where every build can be effective if you adapt your playstyle to suit? I dunno, It just feels like the genre is still only half-invented, and waiting around for someone to do it properly. Thoughts?
TheBananaKing Now • 100%
TheBananaKing Now • 91%
There is no planet B.
Earth is the only place that could sustain human life.
We have not found any other bodies with the basic composition, atmosphere or temperature to have even the remote potential for sustaining life, even with the most extravagantly optimistic technology and unlimited resources to apply it.
Nix, nada, no dice.
We are not getting off this rock - and if we fuck it up, we're done.
TheBananaKing Now • 100%
When my kid started out using the internet, it was over-the-shoulder supervision to start out, then slowly dropping to in-the-room supervision (the PC in the living room), and progressively less over time, with the clearly stated proviso that I would occasionally be glancing over history just to make sure he wasn't getting caught up in anything horrible, but that I wouldn't be going into any kind of detail. At 13, he got his own PC in his room, and I left him to it.
I'm a very firm believer that you don't attempt technical solutions to administrative problems. Privacy is important and monitoring is shit. You equip your kid with the tools and the supervised-experience to make good decisions, and once they can balance by themselves you let go of the bike.
Teach them to do dangerous things safely, that's parenting in a nutshell.
(actually to clear up a misconception: to teach a kid to ride a bike, you hold the shoulders, not the bicycle. With the extra feedback they can actually compensate and learn to balance; if you hold the bike itself it just weirdly fights them and their cerebellum never gets it)
TheBananaKing Now • 57%
Anyone who pushes jira is a waste of fucking carbon, and I hope they never find happiness.
TheBananaKing Now • 100%
If you want twenty minutes of rage-filled ranting, ask me about vscode-server sometime.
TheBananaKing Now • 100%
Nonsense. Where do you think lawyers come from?
TheBananaKing Now • 13%
Why do you only frame the issue in terms of the voters' responsibilities, and never in terms of the candidate's responsibilities?
Why aren't the politicians the ones who need to make hard choices? Why can't they get wedged on the issues for once?
TheBananaKing Now • 12%
That's not the question.
The question should be what choice does Harris have, except to stop Israel?
If (as I strongly agree) trump is the worst human on the planet who will cause irreparable damage to :gestures wildly: fucking everything, then why doesn't his opponent have the responsibility to do whatever the hell it takes, within the law to keep him out of power?
Especially as in this instance his opponent is currently sworn to be responsible for the ongoing welfare of the nation.
Imagine being so fucking intent on enabling genocide half a planet away that you'd rather let your own country fall into the hands of Camacho Harkonnen rather than attract progressive voters.
TheBananaKing Now • 18%
Why is it always 'voters need to lower their standards', and never 'candidates need to be decent human beings'?
TheBananaKing Now • 100%
Mayonnaise-filled inflatable dolphin?
That's a phrase I've not heard in a long, long time.
TheBananaKing Now • 100%
Paging Dr. Streetmentioner
TheBananaKing Now • 83%
Two things I need to ask:
- What inspired this question, exactly, and
- Can I have some, please?
TheBananaKing Now • 100%
Congratulations you just invented magenta
So, fungal spores are literally everywhere, and the requirements for fungus to thrive seem to be trivially low; give it a moderately humid environment and it'll grow on a bare concrete wall ffs eating god only knows what; the dust from the air maybe? Well, and the great outdoors is full of slightly damp places, many of them downright soggy most of the time - and absolutely rife with organic material to snack on. Where's the bottleneck? Why isn't the world a choking fungal hellscape?
Actually this would be a neat mechanic in-game: everyone around you nopes the fuck out at the sight of you, especially if you killed them previously. They don't know and they don't understand, but things are very firmly Not Ok. Partly the cost of failure, possibly a strategic tool.
Presumably either a terrible idea or already a thing, not sure which. I'm thinking crispy-fried-aromatics-in-oil, Mediterranean edition. Garlic, eschalots (aka scallions), thyme/rosemary/etc, vast quantity of parsley, peppercorns, lemon zest, fine-diced rye sourdough. Jar of that in the fridge, use it like chilli crisp but for white-people food. Is this a thing? Should it be a thing?
So, uh, stupid question, but I'm not from the US. Do Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) and Michael Scott (Steve Carell) share a specific accent? If so, what is it? They both get that same distinctive tone in their voice when excited; is that a thing from somewhere, or do they just kind of sound alike as humans?
City boy checking in. So, this one time out on a hike in a semi-rural area, the trail opened out on a grassy riverbank kind of place, and there were a dozen or so cows between me and the path onwards. Now, I mostly grasp which end of a cow the grass goes in, but that's about my limit; I have no real idea how they operate IRL. I ended up carefully edging my way past them and gave them as much space as I possibly could, and got extremely stared at by all of them, who probably thought I was nuts. Just out of curiosity - how careful did I need to be? Can you just like walk through the middle of them, or would that be asking for trouble?
As I understand it there's two main kinds of empathy: cognitive and affective. Cognitive empathy is the ability to perceive and understand the emotional states of others, and affective empathy is actually sharing those emotions yourself. I do the former, but the latter doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Like, if I see someone being sad, it's possible that I'll be sad or angry that they're in that situation, but those will be *my* feelings *about* what's going on, not theirs. But for those of you who inherently feel-what-you-see, how does this work with, say, anger? If you see someone being terribly angry, do you feel angry yourself? If so, who do you feel angry *at*? If you see a fight going on, do you hate both participants? If someone is angry at you, are you also angry at you? I guess this applies to any targeted emotion, but anger is a good example.
Yes it's old, I know. In [this opening theme](https://youtu.be/x5i5ERDE_2E?t=64), that deeply unsettling fuzzy vibrato tone. I'm sure it's copying some kind of hospital sound effect, like an old-tech intercom tone or a warning buzzer, but I just cannot fucking place it. I know I know this sound. It's driving me nuts. Can someone *please* tell me what it is? Bonus points if you can link to a recording.
while picking up some paperwork. AAARGH.
M49, I tend to go a bit long between haircuts which is on me, but I seem to have a really hard time explaining that I want short hair, like 20mm / 3/4" I usually ask for a #2 clipper on the back and sides, (which works fine), then take as much as they off the top so I can still brush it straight up, preferably too short to grab onto. Basically a cigar butt with eyes, shut up it works for me. Even indicating with thumb and finger, this somehow gets interpreted as just barely trimming the tips off and painstakingly shaping the surface, barely affecting the overall quantity of hair. How's that for length? What no, get in there with fire and the sword, wreak devastation, I want all of this gone. :carefully trims another quarter inch off: It's not just one guy, not just one place, so I am obviously using wrong and misleading words. How do I ask for the thing I want?
That is to say, could they get enough forward thrust to push themselves along, without taking off? Maybe with like a little perch to hang onto...
So, I almost never play evil characters in most CRPGs - despite the potential fun to be had - and recently I've been thinking about why. I mean, lawful good is the most boring alignment, evil NPCs can be an absolute hoot (exhibit A: Astarion), stealth murdering villagers for lulz can be entertaining, so why am I always such a freaking goody-two-shoes when it comes to actual plot decisions? I think a lot of it comes down to lame and crudely-drawn motivations for the evil option in each case. Your options in most games always seem to boil down to callous, greedy or spiteful: haha no / fuck you pay me / I just blinded your child lol. And those just aren't satisfying. Especially when you're starting out and forming your character's persona and network, you're pretty much powerless, dumped in a situation where you're casting around for allies and can't afford to burn your bridges. Running around just randomly being mean to folk like some poster child for Troubled Youth and the need to be Tough On Crime is just... stupid. There's some crude sadism there, and there's some crude avarice, it gets you minor short term benefits but no long-term ones, it gets you hated but not feared, without any real sense of control. Everyone dies or gets led off in chains with big sad eyes, and there's always the strong implication that you failed. It just feels like a heavy-handed morality lesson where all the bad people are thugs, arseholes and/or developmentally challenged. Apart from being not much fun to play, it's kind of erasing the harm presented by smarter, more insidious kinds of evil. Being a good guy gets you willing allies, is about personal validation, and feels like success. It gets you the generosity of the people you help, but that's a bonus on top the fundamental win of making the world a shinier better place. By the same token, being an evil bastard should get you unwilling allies, it should be about power, and *it should feel like winning*. It gets you benefits you did not earn, but that should be a bonus on top of the fundamental win of tightening the screws on people. That's the actual payoff, but it seems to be the one they always miss. I think evil playthroughs could be a lot more fun if you had better ways to be evil: blackmail, extortion, *sneaky* betrayal and brutal revenge. Not ODD, in other words, but NPD. Control, leverage, perfidy. Locking your victims down so they have no choice but to help you, or deceiving them into working against their own interests. Either keep a tight rein on your PR - or let them hate, so long as they also fear. And another BG3 example: I think the nature of the shadow curse was a misstep, what with the all the grotesque madness and putrid corruption that surrounded it. I think it would have been far more effective as psychological horror, *morally* corrupt but reeking of purity, so shadowheart would have had believable reasons for wanting to join the gothstapo, and the player could plausibly be sold on it despite everything. But instead the lesson seemed to be that evil is yucky and broken and ew don't get it on you, and that just feels like a missed opportunity to me. What say you? Am I an outlier in this? Do the typical offerings feel satisfying to you? Are there games that do relatable, enjoyable evil especially well?
dear god I love this game
I'm going to assume you've heard the stereo-panning version of the [record player song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTua7_AYUps) that did the rounds. However, searching for more like this, I can only seems to find shitty low-effort remixes of songs with someone swiping the entire audio track back and forth, without timing it to the actual notes of the song or putting distinct elements in their own space or any of the actually cool counterpointy stuff you could do with this. Has anyone found any that don't suck?
Not sure if this counts as politics or not; let me know. One major brick in the toilet tank of the rental market is apparently investors just 'parking their money' in properties and leaving them vacant longterm, with an eye to selling them later at an inflated price - with rental income being not worth the hassle. Some people have suggested a tax on vacant properties to give more incentive to rent them out. Good idea, but I say we go one better. 1. Put a hefty tax on all properties that aren't owner-occupied. 1. Give a rebate for renting them out, proportional to the percentage above or below the average rental for comparable properties. If you charge above-average rent, you get a small rebate. If you charge average rent, you get a medium rebate. If you charge below-average rent, you get a large rebate. This could even exceed 100%, using the funding from the other categories. People chasing the large rebate will drive the average down over time, ate viola, we have a race to the bottom and the consumers reap the benefits. There's probably a dozen reasons why this wouldn't work, but I like it anyway.
It must be a tsunderestorm
tl;dr: something with the murderbot / hexarchate / locked-tomb kind of vibe I'm after something sweet but astringent to bite down on; this is the general tone I'm almost always looking for, and I've mined out most of the obvious seams of the stuff. I don't mind whether it's fantasy or SF, I just want a chunk of emotional intelligence mixed with harsh conflict - with a modern, progressive take if possible. LGBTQ-themed stuff tends to be good at this in my experience, but I'm not fussed either way. I'm not after romance/smut for its own sake, but it's fine as part of a bigger picture. Suggestions?
As per title. I very, very rarely drink, and I generally just want to buy a single of something for a rare treat, however most beers/ciders/etc are sold in multipacks. The pricing on the shelf is usually per-pack only, yet sometimes I see random products with single cans/bottles missing, and sometimes random products will have a little section of unpackaged singles, despite not having a separate price showing. Is it generally OK to split an unopened 4- or 6-pack, or is that as weird and inappropriate as doing the equivalent in a supermarket? What even are the rules around this?
You ever see a dog that's got its leash tangled the long way round a table leg, and it *just cannot* grasp what the problem is or how to fix it? It can see all the components laid out in front of it, but it's never going to make the connection. Obviously some dog breeds are smarter than others, ditto individual dogs - but you get the concept. Is there an equivalent for humans? What ridiculously simple concept would have aliens facetentacling as they see us stumble around and utterly fail to reason about it?