/games/ - Games

Leveling systems are definitely shoved into games where they either don't belong or make the gameplay worse. It can be a useful stand-in for the player character's power level where they canonically start off relatively weak, but it doesn't make sense when the character is already a professional or when you aren't comparing levels with any other NPCs/players anyway. Mass Effect comes to mind, like why doesn't a secret agent super soldier have access to all the end-game high level powers right from the beginning? None of them are tied to the story and have no reason to be locked behind abstract point investments. If anything it would benefit from a system more like what you find in Zelda games, where you acquire abilities and expand your toolkit as you progress through the story instead of fretting over point distribution to make arbitrary tradeoffs imposed by the developers.

I guess another thing to consider is that it's a very easy solution and it's so widespread most people won't complain. Grinding out skill levels to get perks in Skyrim (or to be able to cast spells of a certain level in Oblivion) was extremely annoying at higher levels and I wonder how much the gameplay and progression would have been improved by locking perks, spells, and abilities behind quests, vendors, faction membership/rank, and/or trainers. That would require a lot of fine tuning when you could just slap on a level requirement as a time gate and give it no further thought.

>>21958
Game design wise leveling is just lazy

Games are a way to express ideas much like articles, books, paintings and music. Games just do something different and make that idea interactive
Leveling systems in games are a mediocre way of making progression feel interactive and dynamic being that it leveling reduces actions to simple numbers like you said which makes things feel shallow, generally speaking the more simplistic a game is the more “dynamic” it is because the developer can focus on a single or few ideas and produce the most amount of possible interactive outcomes out of it compared to large scale role playing games

Example Celeste runs off a single mechanic dash jumping which provides a lot of replay ability in endgame sections and a lot of depth to its movement for players that understand how to beat levels outside of the way they were designed
Another Minecraft whom didn’t have leveling systems for most of its run sees alot of complex movement styles and mechanics like water bucket falling(or the recent boat trick), strip mining at low heights, masks and companions to scare off enemies etc similar with terraria where progression is almost entirely gear based

It shouldn’t necessarily be removed however it’s role in games should realistically just die out as time passes or at the very least diminish because it can seriously just serve as a stand in for fundamentally lazy components of design

>>21882
>Probably but it wouldn’t be explicitly called half life 3
maybe the order of counting is
half life 1
half life 2
Full life

no,because the story was scrapped like 3 times,all the assets got leaked and dumped,and nobody who worked on the original two is interested in it or working at Valve,especially not the writers

>>21889
ZOMBIE GHOSTS LEAVE THIS PLACE!

>>21889
>>21893
Quarter Life: Half-way to Destruction

The end of HL:A kind of confirms it
But I'm gonna laugh my ass off if they made an entire game to retcon the story into a more comfortable place for the writers and tease HL3, only to go another 10 years with no news about it until they make a Half Life: Kleiner or some shit to promote the Valve HoloDeck and tease HL3

>>19993
That’s not even an argument

Your literally just saying “if I talk about something therefore it it is true without question” and straight up ignored bothering to sight any sources of evidence completely

>>19984
I dunno about all that OP, but, anyone who plays Devil Jin in online mode deserves to be thrown into a volcano

Tires DO exit - with a lot of modern games the line dividing garbage from "shit OP" tends to be blurry at best but if you go back in time then stuff gets pretty blatant.
If you were to argue that Old Sagat and Gouki in ST are not a cut above the rest you're simply wrong.

>>19997
Yes yes because akuma, Paul and Leroy aren’t infinitely times worse and more annoying

I agree to an extent. Using winrates and usage individually are useless, but most people are aware that low rank players can skew the number and exclusively look at high level play. Regardless, when ranking characters in fighting games people are analyzing them across multiple categories. How well does the character achieve their goal, how easy is it for them to achieve their goal, what can this character do for defense, how consistent are they, etc. And looking at things that way you can get a good idea of how good or bad a character is especially in relation to one another.

>what pros in fighting games choose to use depends a lot on the present meta of a game and how the community understand the games mechanics and exploits
I don't see what this is supposed to prove. Yeah, fighting game meta either changes based on what the community discovers or what the developers decide to adjust based on the current meta. You're acting as if the meta of a fighting game only changes based on the former, and then you use Melee, a game that never received any balancing, as an example when its situation is different from most fighting games.

Not even at the time the game was released, but before it even existed. Fighting games have been getting rereleases that balanced the game and added mechanics based on the current meta since Street Fighter 2 in the early 90s. And while it's true that on the other side of the coin a fighting game's meta is also defined by what the community discovers usually most of this is when a game is young. Not only is it rare when an old game has new stuff discovered, but stuff that drastically changes the meta of a game is exceedingly rare (which is part of the reason devs released updated versions or release patches because most people get bored playing a game they feel is mostly figured out).

Third Strike came out a little over 2 decades ago and Sean is considered a bad character (and if you want to know why watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjS1imDYkVM) by virtually everyone, especially Capcom themselves who felt he was too good in Second Impact and made him worse to fit their intended goal of having him as a character to be played as a joke/handicap. Now, there's a chance that someone could discover something that changes how Sean is perceived. But you can't say the current state of a Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

Truly loving a game is playing it for 2000+ hours.

>>21876
So is that why you fucking fuckers talk about Fallout so goddamned much?

>>21881
Dude the most recent fallout thread that isn’t fallout general is on page 10

Autocombos in fighting games are just the modern variant of pics related (and in fact are sometimes tied together depending on the game). They're designed so casuals who pick up the game can mash and that's it. They don't lower the skill floor of the game given they're unoptimal compared to manual combos and the types of players that use them are mashy and get blown up by anyone who knows how to hold down back and punish with a combo of their own. And the bad habit integral to autocombos (again, mashing) is something new players will do if autocombos are in the game or not and will unlearn if they actually care about getting better.

>>21837
People who want to cheese will cheese.
People who want a challenge will play with skill.
It's not like it's a multiplayer game where you have to deal with a meta.
People will even self-impose certain limitations like you see in speedrunning communities.

>>21835
For Skyrim just use a mod called logical health limits
It scales down how much health enemies have based on their level so that a mob at level 14 doesn’t require the player is at level 40 just to stand a chance to kill only to get shit loot afterwards

For oblivion you’ll have to edit the files directly
For morrowind you don’t have to do anything partly because you can already break the game so heavily that what enemy your fighting doesn’t really matter and partly just because the health system there is already in a majestic way balanced
Don’t know about arena and daggerfall

>>21835
The way Bethesda handles difficulty is pretty lazy and consists of either giving enemies more health or letting the player increase "difficulty" by setting a damage multiplier. Perks aren't distributed sensibly according to enemy level, and instead they're usually given damage multiplier perks. Enemy AI is similarly barebones and mostly controls movement patterns or how often they use certain attacks. Most abilities, potions, scrolls, staves, and spells the player has access to don't work at all for NPCs, like racials, bound weapons (most enemies that use them just have a similar looking weapon placed in their inventory), runes, area spells like wall of flames, or any illusion spells. Not to mention for potions and poisons they only know how to use healing or restoration potions and even then only sparingly.

You can use scripts like NPC Stat Rescaler to have NPC attributes scale similar to player attributes instead of getting massive health and magicka pools (or you could have them scale any way you want, really), and ASIS to distribute level-appropriate perks and spells, but problems with enemy AI remain and there aren't any really good solutions out there. Some try to use the tools Skyrim has available, like Wildcat, while others use custom plugins to add things like roll dodging, parrying, and poise, but no matter which one you use you'll never see enemies taking advantage of terrain or using all the tools the player can use.

All of this means combat doesn't require much thought and is down to battles of attrition, just whittling enemies down with the same weapon or spell every single fight. Weaknesses aren't worth taking advantage of and resistances can be mostly ignored, and similarly enemies almost never switch up their approach in fighting you. There's a mod called Know Your Enemy that gives creatures and armors resistances and weaknesses which is a step in the right direction, especially when paired with other mods to make NPCs more challenging, but not enough to make combat really interesting as it would require a significant overhaul of NPC behavior and capabilities.

>>21842
I mean part of it’s just the fact that it’s a fantasy rpg game

Those games in general are historically known for terrible fucking metas because the more systems put in place in those games the generally harder it is to balance them do to the way they function mechanically. Dark souls with setups that can one shot any enemy, world of Warcraft with boosters and mythic gear that destroy the point of playing through most of the game, diablo 2 and path of exile the moment you pass level 7 become overglorified loot piñatas due to how fast everything starts dying including bosses, kingdom heart’s implementation of magic that just make you flat out unkillable(except for kh3’s critical mode they actually nerfed that heavily) you get the gist

I think somewhere down the line when morrowind came out bethesda recognized this and started implemented stronger level caps, limits on DPS on certain builds and started simplifying progression in TES more and more with oblivion and Skyrim to prevent the madness present in TES pre oblivion but they just didn’t go far enough with the rebalancing and the small remains of what came after quickly overrided everything else put in game

>>21806
There is almost nothing "physics" based about Dwarf Fortress combat, what. It's MATERIAL based, with a little bit of force to determine energy at collision. Also, the detail system is mostly cosmetic. Iirc all it does mechanically, is induce bleeding or impair senses such as sight or smell (which is are negligible in fortress mode anyway).

>>21835
Bethesda's retarded level scaling has been discussed to death, even before Fallout 3 was released.

>>21836
>>21838
Percipient.

this is basically me with fortnite and Your Favorite Band Sucks podcast. or me with Assassin's Creed Unity and Your Favorite Band Sucks podcast.
>>21793
literally explain the picrel
>>21795
dr phil



>ink people should be ashamed of doing this, but worried, I guess. Because to me it's a sign that ur mental health is being damaged and that u'r trapping urself in a vicious cycle that's really hard to quit if you want to do more with ur life. Because that's just doing the same thing over and over again, u'r not paying attention to the game, u'r not experiencing new things, u'r turning ur brain off and wasting valuable hours/days/months/years of your life, going through the motions. But anyway, that's just my subjective opinion, it personally makes

>>21809
The picture explains everything, it's a chart of all the main crops, their growing locations, their products, and the uses of the products. Almost every crop can be brewed into alcohol, while some can be processed into products for other industries. It does leave out the newer plants which are only found in certain biomes, but they're all covered on the wiki.
>color: workshop used to make the item; refer to legend at the lower left
>abcd: growing season, from spring to winter where . denotes non-growable (subterranean crops are curiously the only ones with growing seasons, oddly enough)
>raw food: can be eaten as-is with no further processing
>alcohol: booze, sapient creatures get cranky if they go without it for too long
>ration: can be used in a kitchen to make meals, but no seeds are produced if raw foods are the input so it's best to use secondary products like flour, leaves, or syrup
>thread: thread for the textile industry
>dye: dye for thread and cloth, which is an optional input for the textile industry
>export: not usable but a valuable extract nonetheless (gnomeblight technically can melt gnomes but it's a lot of work to set up for little purpose except cruelty)
It also leaves out rock nut oil for quarry bushes, which is used to make soap.

Yeah, this would be a real problem if there were any good podcasts out there.

I've never listened to a podcast. AMA.

>>21815
How gigantic is your penis?

solitaire
chess
whichever erotic game takes the most disk space

>>21752
Fuck, thats true

Some tips and thoughts on this question

I would pick a multiplayer game like TF2
Something fight like Arkham
Something puzzle like Mario

>>21843
i can't find something like this for mario
anons, what's the definitive way to play each mario game?
there's so many versions of each one, so many ports and compliations

which one is the best

I think it's wrong to go at this question trying to rank things. If you get three things for sure, it makes sense to think of both quantity and quality of content. So you could plan to have one title not based on being intensely enjoyable to you, but because it has a lot of stuff (Gran Turismo 6 on PS3 got over a thousand cars, for example). There is a cartridge for Nintendo Switch called 51 Worldwide Games (Chess, Mahjong, Mancala, Poker…), would that be cheating? If not, I'll take these two titles, plus some version of Tetris (either a Grand Master arcade machine by Arika or the one for Nintendo Pokémon Mini).

Alternative triplet, all SNES:
Super Mario All-Stars, Kirby Super Star, Unicracers (ahem you probably haven't even heard of it, ahem, ahem)

Alternative triplet, all PS1:
Point Blank, Tekken 3, Power Shovel (with special shovel-thing controller)

Alternative triplet, all Dreamcast:
Street Fighter III: Third Strike, Skies of Arcadia, Le Mans 24 (this one got a real 24-hour racing mode)

I don't want to sound arrogant, but I just blew you all out of the water with my exquisite taste and vast gaming knowledge.

>>21762
You do know what the game is right?

For context it was the game made in 1989 that defined a lot about black isles “fallout” game made I think 8 years later.

Minecrafting the reaganites in 3 was great

have played 2 and 3. 3 is easily one of my favorite games of the last generation, so much playtime in it and it's one of the only rpgs that doesn't bore me to death. i like the frostpunk design of the early levels, the dialogue and probably the gameplay itself are the highlights for me.
for a franchise that inspired the titan that fallout is today, i think gets enough love and exposure. it doesn't have an appealing gameplay like fallout 4 to do well on charts, but a dedicated fanbase that grew larger when w3 came out.
the design of wasteland 2 is good too, i like the deserty sections because i love new vegas' design.
all i can say about this game.

hello fellow commies, how did you deal with the gippers?

>>21768
I love the gameplay, you can create some really unique characters. the characters don't even have a voice or a way to show any personality in dialog. but they still end up growing on you just because with the unique skills and stats they have and help you out with through out the game. actually wish these recent obsidian crpgs(PoE, Tyranny etc.) had a similar system.

tldr: if it ain't broke don't fix it

You're going to have to wait another 5 years before discussing this game because right now the price is too expensive for most so the majority of the community is sticking with the first and the whales have already moved onto the next flavor of the month.

>>21798
>the price is too expensive for most
Bro the game is cracked. But you're still kinda right, I didn't play it because I'm too broke to buy new components for my computer and make this game run in an acceptable manner.