Gaming Shout Thread

[OCH]

Obviously, Nag has his thing on a Sunday. So this is more a general musing I had lately, thinking about the Switch.

 

Is the handheld market dead? Now Nintendo has the Switch, I don't know if they would ever need to return to a smaller Game Boy type model? But, aside from Microsoft (as far as I'm aware) everyone else has at least dipped a toe in to the market over the years. Now.. they all seem to have stopped trying??

[mfnick]

Mobile market has killed it. Don’t think there will ever be another dedicated handheld from a major platform holder again.  No point when it’s so much easier to just carry your phone about, even though they’re shit to play on - IMO of course. It’s good enough for the majority. 

[DANGERMAN]

I could see Nintendo doing it again but not any time soon, and I don't think it will be powerful machine. The only way I see it working is as a cheap machine ideal for young kids

[one-armed dwarf]

Started trying to play some WoW classic recently. Having been in a modern MMO for a few years now it is very upsetting just how much of this old version of WoW is about wasting as much of your time as humanely possible.

 

I'm determined to give Shadowlands a go this year cause it sounds promising so I didn't want to pour time into 'retail' cause it'll all be redundant soon. But man wow this game just fucking sucks now lol. At least progress is 'meaningful'.

 

If I get to just tank Deadmines I might call it quits there and wait for the new one

[Sly Reflex]

I watched a friend stream it and had a lot of fond memories of the bits I saw, but there's no way I could go back to that after playing ESO. WoW is just a whole lot of fuck all. Even the retail feels way behind the curve.

[one-armed dwarf]

The thing is I do like that it makes you work for every bit of progress. I like that levelling professions feels meaningful and stuff like mage portals are actually useful. 

 

But like it is so fucking slow unless you have a WoW brain that knows the optimal way to level through each zone. But I hate how quickly the 'real' WoW gives you everything, it makes it feel so passive like a clicker game or a Ubisoft game or something. They really need to find a middle ground here. A more slowly paced game than retail that doesn't require no-lifer commitment. 

[Sly Reflex]

It's not just that. The combat is dull. Doesn't matter if it's vanilla or retail, it's boring. Despite there being quite a lot of activity on servers, nobody helps. I don't know what it's like in the FF MMO, but in ESO people will stop and help, doesn't matter where you are, be it a world boss, a public dungeon or a Dolmen/Dragon, chances are if they're in the vicinity they'll be drawn into the fight and help. Even when I played WoW back in the day this was rarely the case, in fact you barely saw anyone out adventuring. I loved the fighting at the time, but we've moved on from this and now it's like watching paint dry. Watching ESO or FF is more interesting because of how dynamic it is comparatively.

 

The other thing is reading. Now I generally read quicker than the voice acting goes anyway, but if I happen to want a swig of tea or I look away for a moment, I still know what I'm doing. Having to read everything slows it down. There's way too much reading.

 

The final nail in the coffin is how it looks. I'm a big believer in aesthetic being better than straight up graphics grunt, but WoW has fallen between stools here. There's parts of it that are passable, but my word if a lot of it isn't fugly The animations and whatnot look terribly dated now. I know MMO's tend to struggle with keeping up with stuff like that, but a lot of it looks really poor. I could really do with celshading or something to freshen it up because it's rough as arseholes compared to what it's going up against.

[one-armed dwarf]

I don't know enough about WoW combat to argue with that but at the same time I kinda figured that it and FFXIV basically had the same combat, except XIV is more slow due to being built around controllers and has you do moves 'off global cooldown' (to make it feel faster at times, basically). XIV is generally quite static.

 

I always wanted to do an endgame WoW raid, whether it be classic or new stuff. But classic is too slow to level and retail feels too fast and trivial so I never stick with it long enough to see this stuff. I've a thick enough skin with MMO stuff by this point that I'd not be intimidated by toxic groups calling out my bad dps/tanking/healing but I don't have the constitution to pick away at boars for an entire afternoon like I tried to do the other day. Holy shit those liver drop rates

 

ESO is a foreign country to me cause when I look at it it looks like Skyrim combat.

[Sly Reflex]

FF is a foreign country to me as well, although it looks nice the whole aesthetic does zero for me since I can't stand Final Fantasy at the best of times. For every intriguing thing about the MMO there's 2 or 3 things that make me want to vomit. I'm not a fan of the combat being the in the circle either, but the actual mechanics behind it look fun enough.

 

WoW raids are pretty fantastic, but my god if they aren't the fucking most bullshit things to set up. I can't think of anything in comparison really that can describe the pain of sitting through one. If you thought Destiny raids were rough with waiting about, you've seen nothing on WoW raids. Despite this WoW raids remain the best raids I've ever played through, it's a bit frustrating that this game laid the foundation for this stuff all that time ago and we've not really progressed from it since. The thing that stands out with WoW raids is how cohesive they are, everything and everyone matters. I never felt this way about Destiny or Divisions. Destiny is closer than anyone else for making them work, Division just feels like they watched a youtube of a raid once and threw any old shit together and called it a day. For these games looking to recreate that style of raid I'd make the devs sit and play through the WoW stuff. Sure it might be dated now, but it's the foundation you need to be looking at, not just of the maps, mobs and bosses you face, but also the mechanics, the way you beat them and also the builds and loot you can use against them, both at a base level and a finely tuned level. Maybe try and keep the bullshit waiting and fucking about out of it though, trimming the fat is something you should always look to do.

 

I could probably talk about ESO until the cows come home. The combat thing is a big misconception, a lot of people think they're getting a Skyrim game where they can play exactly as they do in Skyrim, but this can't be further from the truth. It's exactly what I was expecting and originally I really didn't like it, but after a while I got attuned to it and made my peace that it isn't that. It's an action MMO where you're picking a weapon and then decided what resource you want to use, working out a rotation and then sticking with that. It's probably not a million years away from WoW or FF in that the core concept is the same, it's just that instead of the game blocking for you or providing buffs, you have a direct control over these in being able to block and roll at the expense of resources. You still have a rotation, but if you really wanted to if you had the resources you could just spam the fuck out of your skills until the thing you want dead is dead. In fact that's pretty much how mobbing works if you play DPS.

 

I can't talk ESO raids (or trails, as they're called) because I've never done one. I have done everything up to them though, it's generally a much smoother on ramp for going up to that stuff.

 

Like I said, I could talk about ESO forever, it's such a big game that without a specific focus to talk about I'd be left meandering unless asked about something directly.

[Maf]

@Nag IGN and UBI have decided it’s finally time to call you out on your bullshit

 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/nordic.ign.com/news/39669/how-assassins-creed-odyssey-became-gods-monsters-and-finally-immortals-fenyx-rising-ign-first%3Famp%3D1

 

In other words you’re not real enough to hang GTFO

[Nag]

Just goes to show the IGN (and you) know absolutely fuck all...?

[one-armed dwarf]

If you want to quickly earn your cred then just play Zelda II.

[HandsomeDead]

I don't make the rules

 

[OCH]

1 hour ago, HandsomeDead said:

I don't make the rules

 

 

1)Yes!!!!

 

2) Hard to call between Awakening and LTTP

 

3)

 

 

[HandsomeDead]

See.  Pure poetry for 2020

[DANGERMAN]

to be fair to Nag, the Zelda games are invariably pretty average. There's usually something really irritating in their design

[mmmark]

Can someone time out this mod please, they’re power trippin. 

[Sly Reflex]

No, because he's right. There's not a Zelda game in existence that doesn't have at least one part that makes me go "Oh fucking hell, not this again"

[OCH]

Except that isn't just Zelda, that is every game ever.

[HandsomeDead]

Sitting here agreeing with OCH.  Wild.