Bay 12 Games Forum

I remember trying Icarus a while back, I liked the wrapping concept about being an explorer of a world, but the nature of exploration means you can't bring all the advanced technology with you every time you drop to the planet (can't risk it being left behind when you die). Which is a bit contrived but eh whatever.

But it also necessitates losing all your progress (constructions but especially tools) when you're done with the area. Like you found iron and made your own pickaxe but you can't take it back with you when you go up and that means you can't take it back down with you the next time you go down. Sure, you can't bring an advanced laser drill or scanning equipment, but you can't bring the things you make from materials on the planet itself?

Also I didn't quite like how things were balanced. Not sure if that was just how "open world survival crafting" games do or if it was bad balance specific to the game. Killing a wolf or a bear or a mountain lion required several minutes for me to cheese them even though one stab with a sharpened wooden spear should be enough for them to leave you alone under most circumstances. I remember there was an early mission that artificially limited what tools you can even make, but then sends you to clear out a den of wolves (1 wolf boss and like 5 adds) and all you have is a basic bow and arrow at best. At night.

Maybe the balance was also intended for cooperative play.

Trying to remember a star trek MUD. I know, there were dozens, perhaps even hundreds of them.

Gosh, it would have been 20, 25 years ago. It was set in the DS9-ish era. The only day I played, I did a stint in a Cardassian border outpost under the supervision of someone else (because it was to get me familiar with the controls and the role). Scan ships, let them pass, challenge, alert authorities about contraband, etc. Nothing interesting happened. Maybe we went out on a ship after? I think Dominion was a faction, so maybe it was after DS9 ended. Borg were a special invite-only faction.

I'd been trying the Elin's Inn alpha, and it is making me nostalgic for Elona.

But I don't really want to boot up elona because the whole farming->cooking->fusion crafting (picnics) and pet cooking meta strategy for managing stat potentials is tiresome. But I will probably end up playing it again anyway because I can't think of anything that offers quite that the same broad variety of activities (farming, ranching, shops, shipping, crafting scrolls/potions/equipment, investment, variety of gods with their individual benefits, pet system, melee/ranged/magic and skills, and probably a bunch more that I'm forgetting). Probably whatever version the latest +CustomGX is.

PS: Do you have to micromanage your shop pet for training its potential? That is, they're staying in your shop full time so they can never go back to the city and train potential. Do they train it overtime even if they stay in the shop? Or is it enough to have a good, static negotiation/charisma pet and only worry about upgrading it when you can capture something better?

Edit:

It takes 8 negotiation to get up to 10% purchase price, 40 to get up to 20% purchase price, and 98 Negotiation to get to 30% purchase price. The maximum value of 36% is reached at 213 negotiation.

So I guess potential doesn't really matter all that much. Make do with something in the 20 range, eventually capture something in the 40-90 range and forget about it.

Shadowflare gameplay seems like the most familiar but it's not 100%. I remember the inventory having a paper doll.

I really I have no idea why I ever confused it with Blackthorne. I wonder if my brother had burned something back 20 years ago but mislabelled what it was.

Tried Tower of Fantasy.

I can hardly speak about the gameplay because ToF's UI alone is filtering me. There are a dozen different menus that you cannot access from each other. Some information isn't even accessed from the default "menu" system but rather from buttons (that don't look like buttons) attached to your minimap. There are multiple "premium" currencies that are spent on their individual... things (I don't know the correct term, but I wouldn't call them banners). You not only upgrade your weapons and "matrixes" (slotted into weapons with set bonuses, acting like GI's simpler artifact system) but also a full set of gear for your own character (helmets, bracers, legguards, etc). You have mounts and relics. All these items require their own (multiple) individual garbage to upgrade. Relics are various tools, mostly puzzle solving or traversal related, but you can only equip 2 at a time and they are complete pain in the ass to switch, especially when you only need it to solve 1 puzzle and then switch back to what you normally have in the slot.

The UI is clearly designed for mobile and its an obnoxious, if not outright hostile, experience on PC. I don't know if I'm a boomer and all this is normal now or if they're doing some kind of psychological manipulation tactic that I'm too old to just accept. Given it is, after all, a gacha game, I'm inclined to believe the schizophrenic UI is intentional.

I really quite like the concept behind the games, in terms of the content and world and how you explore and hit things up mostly randomly/naturally as you explore, and get resources to upgrade your equipment from different content. I really think I prefer this kind of item system - where you can commonly find items that will fit the build you want to make, and then upgrade them to the point that they are viable for the content you want to do - versus having to constantly upgrade to completely new items and shuffle stats, as is typical in an ARPG. The downside is that they spend all this effort on the world but then focus the endgame on some "waves of damage sponges in a square room disconnected from the rest of the world" that are so bone-dead simple you can't even call it procedurally generated.

I haven't played Genshin Impact outside of maybe a week after its global PC release, and while I equally had problems with the game and its UI, they felt more like boneheaded inefficiencies that result from a touchscreen-first interface design rather than the "this is deliberate" vibe I get from ToF.

This is, of course, not even getting to the gacha aspects. I really wish there were private server alternatives or some western studio could develop a game mostly like this with a more conventional payment model (i.e. one-time purchase + big expansions). These games make billions per quarter, to say nothing of per year, and only invest a fraction back into development. It should be possible to create a game with very similar content and a much less predatory profit model, if only the studio were willing to make handfuls of cash instead of buckets.

GTA in space would lose the best part of GTA imo - the getting from point A to B across a unique and highly varied environment by any means necessary. It's that parkour mentality. In space, you can just go in a straight line. It's terribly boring.

Hence the need for a heavily dense system, like an asteroid belt or maybe an enormous interconnected station. But you're right, it would severely limit "parkour" potential.

I really can't decide how I feel about Necrosmith.

Conceptually, it should be interesting-- it's like taking Majesty's hands-off style of play and giving it a roguelite metagame, with unit customization via assembly of bodyparts that are loot. Except it just doesn't seem to come together for me.

Has anybody else tried it and can weigh in on if I'm just missing something fundamental to the experience?

I tried it for about an hour but I felt the frequency of enemy waves vs. how many monsters I could create (both in terms of parts and mana) vs. how much I had to micromanage put me off.

What few monsters I could create tended to get themselves steamrolled before they could destroy lairs, and I couldn't micro them because I had to constantly keep 1 strong minion on micro near my castle to efficiently deal with the enemy waves. Maybe that opens up as you unlock more gold-progression stuff but I didn't feel like grinding to solve that.