Bay 12 Games Forum

I feel really bad for the launch this had on XBox, especially as part of Gamepass. It's immediately obvious that there is a lot of love that went into it, and in general, the design ethos seems sound. Unfortunately, the AI pathing, balance, and control scheme really make it difficult to get into. I found it largely unplayable after barely an hour - I could probably have struggled through, but I found myself having more frustration than fun. Losing is indeed !!FUN!!, but not when you're fighting the game to get it to do what you want.

Hopefully some constructive criticism from a player POV will help. Some things I noticed:

• Having to point directly at every object (especially NPCs in motion) you want to interact with is tedious with a mouse and nigh unplayable on controller - either some cursor snapping or an entirely new system is desperately needed here
• Traversal is frustrating with the current way your character moves. Aiming is very rough, and the fact that melee attacks hit everyone nearby makes dealing with friendly NPCs extremely touchy
• NPCs hit each other (unless part of the colony maybe?) so when monsters attack them, they tend to kill each other instead of fighting back
• The tutorial is relatively decent, but it doesn't give enough guidance in terms of its learning goals for the player: just building a wall is great, but even better if you mention that it's in service of building a house. Obviously too much handholding can be annoying, but having no context for what to plan for means a lot of the effort can be wasted
• Job designations are a good idea, but some more automation with NPCs would be grand - being able to set zones where planting and harvesting happen automatically would go a long way in making the colonies less micromanage-y
• Monsters are way too numerous and aggressive for a game where NPCs need to actually walk back to your camp - losing colonists to animals because they can't path away from danger is not very fun
• Due to how fiddly the environment already is, having no dedicated weapon slots makes combat even more of a juggling act, and if you're trying to save an NPC, healing them and fighting off monsters is nigh impossible

I imagine a lot of these issues are already being tracked, but I hope that the game is able to be updated to make it more playable. Like I said above, it absolutely has a lot of potential, but it's held back by these mechanics and control systems.

I've noticed something odd in PvP videos.

I'm seeing invaders drink an Estus Flask even though it's not currently the selected item in their hotbar, and they don't open their belt pouch to do it. Am I missing something here? Is there like a dedicated keybind for drinking your Estus Flask?

https://www.reddit.com/r/Eldenring/comments/t7y9lq/flask_of_crimson_tears_hotkey/

I found this but it sounds like it's describing the belt again.

This is such an obvious idea that I'm actually a little peeved at myself for not thinking to do it myself.

S-snowy...

Quote from: duckman on July 21, 2021, 08:13:09 pm

Quote from: King Zultan on July 21, 2021, 01:25:10 am

I've found that the game is really difficult if you change the spawn rate to 30 and have the dinosaur mod, because then no where is really safe especially when the dinosaurs start turning into zombies.


Also why do the herbivore dinosaurs hate me?

There's apparently fossil evidence that dinosaurs may have been stupidly aggressive compared to modern animals, but it's probably just the dinosaurs = monsters thing in pop culture.

More stupid aggressive than humans?  I don't believe it... 

Interestingly, herbivores tend to be stupidly aggressive, even moreso than omnivores like us. The main reason why bison, bulls, hippos, and so on are so deadly (to us, but also everything else around them) is because they are large and resilient enough that they rarely take damage that kills them and, since they don't need to hunt and move in herds for protection, they don't have to worry about anything less than catastrophic damage.

The main thing with Stardew's grind is that, for the first three or so game years, you're technically grinding, but there's never quite enough time to do everything in one day. The constraints make you plan out a strategy for tackling your own self-made goals and effectively smooth out the grind. Plus the applicability of the weather to different tasks and various special events help vary tasks for optimization.

It's Solid Game Design^tm.

I'm not a fan of the early game.
Hands are extremely unsteady when holding guns, enemies are all running around in pitch black darkness, none of the guns have scopes or even remotely precise sights, and every gun has a wide cone of fire so that even when I manage to aim precisely at the enemy half of my shots miss.
Of course all of this is intended to give room for growth. I can work towards finding more accurate guns and scopes, and save up money to enhance my eyes and hands. But it's just a lot of artificial handicap right at the start of the game that makes for extremely unsatisfying gunplay.

Also, stealth gameplay is garbage. I don't get prompts to execute stealth attacks until I'm literally rubbing up against my target's back, and even then pressing the prompt does nothing half of the time.

But my biggest gripe, as someone who absolutely cannot pass up a shiny in any game I play, half of the time when I see a bit of loot on the ground I find that I'm unable to get a prompt to pick it up no matter which angle I approach it from. It's literally painful having to walk away and leave precious loot on the floor.

Yeah but have you considered that the game isn't broken and that you're just playing it wrong? /s

I picked up a VR stealth bundle recently, with the two Budget Cuts games, Unknightly (sort of a VR Thief), and Espire. So far Espire has been pretty good, with entertaining level design, good enough voice acting, and enough story to keep things moving. It's not quite MGS, but for modern military sci-fi sneaking action, it's solid. Unknightly could be good, but it definitely feels like a direct adaption of Theif: Deadly Shadows to VR - with all the aging that comes along with that.

As for other games, HL: Alyx is easily the best game on VR, but I've also enjoyed Doom VFR, Duck Season, Raw Data, Job Simulator, and H3 (Hotdogs, Horseshoes, and Hand Grenades). To add to the list of non-VR games that translate well: Elite: Dangerous, No Man's Sky, The Forest, and pretty much any racing game tend to bridge the gap smoothly.

I've been playing a lot of the game Merchant recently. It's pretty solid, with elements of tycoon games, RPGs, and idle games. The ads are not intrusive at all, and the expansions are reasonably priced and (AFAIK) fairly extensive.

Available on Steam as well: Here.