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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • I think I’m part of the Terraria crowd (I play through it basically every time there’s a big content update, at least) and I think the patience argument has a lot of merit even with games like Terraria. If you were only going to play through Terraria once, waiting longer would mean you got to play through more content. For people with limited time to game, I think it makes a lot of sense to focus on games that have had more time to build up features so that they get a more complete experience.


  • ryven@lemmy.dbzer0.comtomemes@lemmy.worldsup
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    17 days ago

    I liked healing in MMOs when all I had to do was click healthbars to fill them up. Other people did all the hard work of actually fighting monsters, and I got loot!

    Now MMOs want to make healers “interesting” so that more people will play them, and this means I have to contend with actual mechanics and sometimes even deal damage. Sorry, my brain does not multitask, I’m simply not cut out for this anymore. :P




  • Initial reviews seem remarkably positive given what we saw in the first gameplay reveal a few months ago. My impression at the time was that about half the voice actors sounded like they hadn’t been given enough context about the scenario and some of the cutscenes had questionable direction, which were bad signs for a curated ten minute slice. I still think it’s ultimately not for me—I don’t really want action combat in my Dragon Age—but I’m glad people are enjoying it.







  • The Build Mode features in 4 are pretty good if you’re into virtual dollhouse building, and there’s a ton of custom content for it (as long as you’re on PC).

    Live Mode is not very good, but it’s functional enough to play dolls in the houses you built if you’re willing to do all the story writing to make up for sims not having very interesting personalities/desires/autonomy.


  • It is part of the main gameplay loop. In order to keep your car in a state where it protects you and is reasonably driveable, you must gather materials to craft repair items and replacement parts, in order to maintain the car’s panels, doors, and bumpers (which together function as armor), its wheels (which are necessary to get anywhere), and the various add-on systems you can craft for it. Tools gradually break with use, so you’ll also craft replacement tools, which are mostly for scavenging materials or interacting with stuff in the Zone.

    By collecting a certain resource you gradually unlock upgraded parts and tools for crafting, which is the main way player power progresses during the game.




  • Open-ended, “sandbox” style MMOs are a lot trickier to get right than “theme park” style ones like Star Wars: The Old Republic. Games like SW:TOR require a lot of content to be developed, but you can at least be pretty sure that if you develop fun quests then players who like questing will have fun.

    For a “sandbox” style MMO, you have to design systems that lead to interesting player interactions… and then hope players actually interact. This is complicated by the market share for sandbox games being smaller overall, meaning you can’t guarantee there will actually be a sizable player population. Also sandbox-style players are sharply divided on basically every topic from “how much PvP should there be” to “how much grinding should there be” so you quickly find yourself either targeting increasingly narrow slices of players or trying to appeal to multiple playstyles at once, which is even harder.

    I think this is why sandbox games have mostly moved towards smaller worlds and self-hosted servers, like ARK and Rust, where they can thrive with small player counts and individual play groups can tweak the experience to better suit their needs.