Games

Hey! Over the last four years, I made an action platformer called Mask Quest together with Stephen Lavelle, aka increpare whom some of you may know for his puzzle games such as Stephen's Sausage Roll. It started as a weekend jam, but then we got carried away 😅

We tried to get the game out in 2020, but it took much longer than we expected. Now it's finally releasing on October 17th – way too late for it to be thematically relevant, but too soon for people to be nostalgic about the pandemic. 🙃

The game is satirical and has a unique breathing mechanic, where you have to press a button to inhale and release the button to exhale. If you breathe too litte, the blood oxygen gets too low and you die. If you breathe too quickly, you hyperventilate and you faint (which is also game over). So the central challenge in the game is to control your breath while doing some old-school platforming.

If you have any questions about the game, I'd be happy to answer them! 😁

RuneScape was my favorite game of all time when I was a kid. I'd play it for at least 8 hours a day every day, and never get bored. Now, RuneScape is RuneScape 3, terribly infested gambling microtransaction mess that looks like a really bad early access game, or Oldschool RuneScape, which is really fun, but is infested with bots. It's honestly so bad. I tried to play it and it feels so... good, but also low effort. The worst part, however, is the corporate greed. Jagex, the company that developes Runescape, has been sold numerous times. This time, it's owned by some Venture Capital or investment firm, the kind that kills games off to gain their IP and then sell them for huge amounts of money (CVC Capital Partners and Haveli Investments). The first thing they've done is raise the subscription of Runescape to nearly $15, which is truly nuts. This game used to be like $8 a month previously, some are still paying that much....

It's sad to see corporate greed kill such a great game. Idk what to even play now....

Starfield steam page for the DLC currently shows eight user review score of 41%, making this one of the worst Bethesda DLC's released of all time. This is so horribly, shockingly bad for Bethesda, because it shows as a gaming company, they are no longer capable of delivering a really good gaming experience as they had in the past. Some of the reviews sum up quite nicely what is wrong with this DLC....

Less content than any skyrim DLC. Less than The Fallout 4 story DLCs. Doesn't change of the complaints people had with the base game, writing is still at a 4th grade level.

Quick: If you are looking to buy my answer is no, you aren't missing much content. I was really hoping to enjoy this DLC. Took about 4 hours for the main story and maybe 2 more hours to 100% the achievements.

These two reviews I think really summed up what Starfield has become, $70 for an AAAA title that has extremely little buy-in from the community, horrifically low amount of replayability and can be breezed through easily. It's mind-boggling to see this

Today is Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty from the Master Collection, Volume 1 on Steam. This is really just the HD edition from a decade ago though. But they did seem to enhance the visuals a bit, and like the other collection games, it comes with some background material like a Screenplay. This was probably my 20th time playing this game on yet another platform since the original.

Here messing around with soldiers. I like the markers over their heads.

Magazines come in handy.

I also like a lot of the in-game posters. There's some mods for these too. You should give Ghost Babel a try. It's non-canon, but still a great game.

More "interesting" posters.

There's an easter egg early in the Tanker if you find a specific poster of a woman in a locker and stare at it just right, then call Otacon.

3 big ones recently, this year was God of War Ragnarok, FF7 Rebirth and Jedi Survivor

Back when 3d games were new, tomb raider, prince of persia etc the traversal was the challenge, the gameplay.

Eventually they got watered down and simplified, now they are cleverly disguised choke points while the open world or boss ahead loads.

You'll notice the squeezing between narrow walls to separate 2 areas or a simple climb against a flat wall just before a boss. I think Uncharted was the first to do this as they moved away from climbing and focused more on combat and puzzles.

There is no reason to actually have the characters climb anything if it's not fun or there are better ways of traversal, GoW being the biggest offender here

Jedi Survivor embraces traversal more but still locks you out with invisible walls and floors that kill you

I think I might prefer the elevator loading screens from Elden Ring, at least you get to stretch out your fingers when waiting

Happy Halloween Month! Today's game is The WereCleaner. It's a cute yet gory game about a janitor named Kyle who turns into a werewolf at night. Which isn't normally a problem because he works during the day. But due to not meeting quotas, the CEO demands ALL employees work the night shift for a week until they're back on track. Meanwhile, the CEO is napping, getting drunk, goofing off, etc. in his office:

So it becomes a stealth game, wherein you're trying to do your janitor job while not letting employees or the security guard see you. If you're spotted, you go into a blind rage and kill the employee. (See first screenshot.) So it's in your best interest to stay hidden and sneak around the office while cleaning. Don't forget to clean up the bodies you mutilate in the office!

The security guard is on to you, but he doesn't suspect you specifically. As the week goes on, he gets closer and closer to identifying you, which culminates in you having to avoid him on the final day as he hunts you down in the office.

It's a really short, but very entertaining game. I really enjoyed playing it! Oh, and it's free on Steam!

This is cool. Hans Zimmer is very talented, so I'm looking forward to this.

Good stuff. I didn't get far in Ghosts of Tsushima because the open world felt very samey, but if they work on that I could probably try the sequel.

Today’s Game is Alan Wake. I finally got a chance to finish Chapter 1 on nightmare mode.

It was surprisingly easy. If you look at my ammo you’ll notice I still have a ton of Shotgun rounds. That’s because I conserved Ammo and fled when I could, hoping to use it in the fight against Stucky. Turns out though, Stucky went down in a couple Flare Gun Shots and took all the other Taken with him.

I also got stuck wandering around in the woods for a while, as it turns out I took a wrong turn. Those woods are like a fucking maze.

The photo I chose for today was of the Gas Station. It felt appropriate as the End of Chapter 1, since that’s where I chose to end my gaming session for today.

I’m going to continue with Chapter 2 tomorrow hopefully though, as it turns out I still have my Alan Wake II save from when I thought I deleted it because it ate my Steam Deck’s battery alive and I’m a few chapters into that, so I’d like to make parity with them before playing parallel (assuming I don’t end up changing my mind).

with Google's assault on Invidious leaving it inoperable, consider watching this video with FreeTube, a nifty open source program that lets you watch youtube videos privately!

Combined with Libredirect, which automatically opens youtube links in Freetube, it becomes really slick and effortless to use.

For Mobile, consider giving FluxTube a try.

I remember fondly the days of playing Heroes of Might and Magic II, never played HOMM3 or anything after, but as I looked at the latest and most "recent" heroes games... they're all rated/reviewed SO harshly. Apparently, they never gained steam like the earlier titles. RTS seems to have the same issue, tapering off. Starcraft is basically dried up and dead, and we never got another Warcraft unfortunately. Even WC3 Reforged was a total flop/disaster, people were hoping one day to get Warcraft 4. Would've been nice, honestly.... But it never happened. as of today, I can't find a single RTS or RPG I actually enjoy that isn't some old 'classic'.

What happened to these genres?

Happy Halloween month! It's my favorite holiday of the year! And to celebrate, I'm going to attempt to post only screenshots from horror-themed games all month long! Starting with one that's literally about hell on Sanctuary (i.e. Earth), Diablo IV!

For those unfamiliar with Diablo lore, here's the TL;DR - The game franchise is set on Sanctuary, a neutral realm between Heaven and Hell. The angel Inarius and the demon Lilith created the realm as a safe haven for any who wanted to escape the constant war being waged between their home realms. The merging of angels and demons created a race of mortal beings that are both angel and demon, and yet neither one. Called Nephalem, but basically human beings.

Diablo IV has Lilith being summoned from the void she had previously been banished to, in order to fulfill a prophecy to "save her children." She then goes around Sanctuary, corrupting people into following her. You play a wanderer who was nearly corrupted by her followers, but escaped and can now see visions of her actions in the realm. You're sent on a quest to stop her. Also, Inarius wants to help you kill her, because he thinks it's his fate to stop her and that it will grant him passage to his home realm of Heaven. I guess he's a little homesick. Here he is, tired of you and your kind's shit:

No intentional spoilers (because I haven't finished the game, so I have no idea where the plot is going), but I keep predicting we're eventually going to turn on everyone and join Lilith. Because, despite all the supposedly evil things she's been doing in Sanctuary, her ultimate goal is to save "her children" (i.e. everyone). I feel like it's building up to a reveal that she was a good guy the whole time and we need to stop Inarius, who is being an asshole and doesn't give a damn about anyone in Sanctuary. His own son refused to trust him! So I feel like he's being set up to be the bad guy and Lilith will be revealed as a protagonist in the end. Or maybe they're both evil and we'll end them both. I dunno; I guess I'll find out when I finish the campaign.

My friends and I have been playing this game almost daily for the past couple weeks now. It's a bit of a nostalgia ride, as we used to play the original Diablo together over dial-up Internet back in our childhood. I still remember when Diablo II released and we were absolutely floored at the in-game weather events. We would be playing and it would randomly start raining! We'd never seen anything like that in a video game before.

Below is my current party. From left to right: My wife (Rogue), a childhood friend of mine (Druid), myself (fire Sorcerer), and another childhood friend (Barbarian).

We're trying to play through the campaign together, but it's hard to match up all of our schedules, so we spend a ton of time fooling around in game and doing side quests on our own. I'm level 58 and we're about halfway through Act III right now. I read online that you can beat the campaign by level 45 or so, and I got to level 50 before we even started Act II. Hopefully we'll finish the campaign in the next couple weeks.

Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana for PS Vita. Fishing edition. Some random fishing pics I grabbed. I liked the fishing part of the game. It even slightly contributes to the story and progress if you catch them all.

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?

Unfortunately it doesn't seem like they're going to call it just "Lords of the Fallen" again. That would've been so good.

Today's game is Alan Wake. Both in preparation for Halloween and my heart's one desire to play Alan Wake II, I am replying through the first one again on nightmare difficulty.

What i'm thinking i'll do though since i'm feeling a little impatient to get to AW2 is Play it parallel to the Second one since i've played through both AW1 and AWAN 4 times in the past. So i'll do one chapter of AW1 and then one chapter of AW2. I'm still thinking this through though

I may have gotten a little out of control with the screenshots though after i discovered the built in free cam, as instead of my usual 10-20, i took 80 in just the opening section. So I figured i'd dump a few extras here today since i won't get a chance to reuse them again.

I also got explorative with it once i realized there wasn't a range and i could go anywhere with it (you'll see more of that in the second section)

Alan and his Magic Spinning Flashlight

The dorky deer float i saw

I screenshotted this building as i realized that i don't think i ever get to see a proper look at it, for how much detail it has. the only other time we're on this side of bright falls is at night during combat.

This kitchen had a surprising amount of depth for not being able to go back here

This is where i got a little explorative with the camera and spent a large portion of my playtime exploring just unseen things:

The entire backhalf of the lodge is rendered in (mostly) full textures despite not being able to see it from the first chapter. Especially not where i'm at

An entire unused room in Birdleg's cabin. I just thought it was interesting the window was see through on the inside when you can't even see it from the outside

out by the coast (?) i noticed this weird water mapping thing going on. It's hard to see but they are on completely different levels

I found some remedy debug textures on the ground under the water. Also interestingly the land under the water had depth to it, instead of just being a flat plane. I'm not really sure why this is (maybe just to be thorough?) but i thought it was interesting.

And god dammit. I leave for a few hours and the entire cabin gets stolen. Can't have shit in bright falls

cross-posted from: [email protected] | https://lemmy.mods4ever.com/post/318

Download DXRandoInstaller.exe in the Assets section under the changelog or download from Mods4Ever.com. It is safe to update in the middle of a playthrough.

Use vanilla (optionally with Lay D Denton) to get all of the Randomizer's features, best QoL improvements, and the most polished experience. Our installer has an option to install Lay D Denton for you automatically.

If you're having an issue with the installer program: Manual Installation Instructions for Vanilla, Lay D Denton, GMDX, Revision, HX co-op, and Vanilla? Madder.

Trailers

Happy October 1st (depending on your timezone)! Here's a trailer for our new Halloween modes!

See the full README here. Also check out our Discord and Mods4Ever.com

Major Changes

• New game modes: Halloween Mode, WaltonWare Halloween, Zombies Horde Mode, Halloween Entrance Randomization, and WaltonWare Halloween Entrance Rando
  • Halloween Trailer
  • Limited and Fixed saves - you need a Memory Containment Unit to save, and you must save at a security computer, personal computer, public terminal, or ATM. (Save Behavior in New Game)
  • Mr. H is immortal but you can hurt him to make him run away for a bit.
  • Zombies will spawn from dead carcasses after about 20 seconds (adjustable using the "Enemies Respawn Seconds" option in the Advanced menu).
  • You start with Run Silent instead of Speed aug (optional in Advanced settings)
  • You need to loot your Halloween costumes (clothes looting option in Advanced)
  • Halloween cosmetics: Jack 'o' Lanterns, and spiderwebs!

Minor Changes

I had an extremely busy day yesterday and didn't remember to post until about 11 PM, so I decided to skip a day. I was almost too busy to post today, too! Good thing I'm not tying myself to a solid schedule like the other two guys posting screenshots here. 😅

Nightingale is a new MMO that's still in early access. You play a person from the early 1900s who passes through a portal into the Fae Realms. I forget what's happening on Earth, but some sort of ominous fog called "The Pale" or something is spreading across Paris, forcing you and a bunch of other explorers to travel through the portal to escape it. And then you find yourself trapped in the lands of the Fae.

A fae named Puck offers you assistance in finding a safe realm to visit and gives you a card that helps you cleanse the realm so its inhabitable. Knowing what I know from stories of the fae, I was very hesitant to trust him, but the game doesn't really give you any alternatives. So... into the Fae Realms we go!

From there, the game is an open world crafting game, kind of like Enshrouded. You learn how to craft tools, defenses, houses, etc. You can make extravagant fantasy homes, or just rudimentary structures to keep you safe. There are all sorts of things to explore in the world, too. Plenty of questing, discoveries, enemies to fight, other humans to interact and trade with, etc.

The screenshot at the top of this post was taken after cleansing my first realm. Below, you can see a couple shots of what it looked like when I first arrived there. It was dark and dreary, with an "enraged sky."

Also, here's a look at my custom character and her inventory and stats.

I've only played a couple hours of it so far, but it's been unique and enjoyable. I hope it only gets better as it nears a full release date.

https://steamcharts.com/

On Steamcharts, Counterstrike has been the #1 game on Steam every single day I have EVER looked at this site, for at least 3 years now. This top 10 has basically been the same for years... I don't get it. Do people just not play anything else?

Dota, Rust, PUBG, GTA V, Call of Duty, Apex.... Admittedly, Satisfactory is new to the top 10. Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege FINALLY fell out of the top 10, adn so did Destiny 2.

It just feels like it never changes, which is crazy.. what happened?