Nelots

I usually don’t mind enemies having more health or taking less damage, but there’s gotta be a limit, and 6x is definitely far, far above that limit. Oblivion Remastered in particular was funny, because the damage multipliers only affect you. Meaning your followers or summons deal and take normal damage from enemies. If your sword feels like a wet noodle but your allies are doing just fine, something’s wrong. The difficulty sliders in that game were just poorly designed.

I think I eventually swapped to whatever setting is right above 1x damage taken/dealt. Fights were a bit too easy imo, but at least every mud crab wasn’t practically a miniboss.

Same here. I’ll intentionally play on the hardest difficulty (hell, sometimes I’ll find a mod that adds even harder difficulties if there is one) and don’t mind running boss fights 50 times if that’s what it takes to beat them. Just makes it all the sweeter in the end.

Though some games take difficulty settings way too far in lazy and unfun ways. Like when Oblivion Remastered came out, I tried it on master difficulty and quickly noticed I was getting one-shot by enemies in the tutorial and was almost unable to hurt them because I was doing 6x less damage and taking 6x more. I tried it for a while but it just wasn’t fun in the slightest so I lowered it eventually.

Project Zomboid really does have a surprising amount of depth to it. It’s also got a really impressive modding scene. Like, in this particular instance, cutting off limbs and prosthetics are from a mod. In the vanilla game, once you’ve been bitten, you’ll die soon after no matter what you do.

I was also a big fan of the gear overhaul initially, until I saw how it was actually implemented and really came to dislike it. I just don’t see who it’s here for. It screws over newer players who are stuck with really poor gear, making the already punishing learning curve the game has significantly worse, and it screws over any experienced players by punishing anybody that actually wants to interact with the level prestige mechanic once they do get themselves to level 100. Meanwhile anybody who doesn’t prestige just permanently has even better gear than what previously existed and never needs to worry about the other tiers. And since there’s no reward for prestiging aside from a cosmetic badge, why should you interact with the system at all? Overall it was a poorly thought out and unbalanced update.

While some updates haven’t been great and some things desperately need to be reworked, I’ve still been really enjoying the game. Once you get to around level 40 and unlock all the original gear, you can largely pretend the gear overhaul never happened. The newer maps and map reworks are awesome (aside from the new-ish lighthouse map point hope, that thing sucks), and I don’t play frequently enough to get too bored of the basic gameplay loop. Playing on nightmare where you only get 2 evidence helps since it adds a bit more strategy to each round than just getting 3 pieces of evidence and leaving. The newly reworked media evidence is pretty fun too, where you get rewarded for getting videos and pictures of unique forms of evidence rather than taking 10 pictures of a pile of salt that somebody stepped in.

I love the deogen. I was just playing phasmophobia last night and encountered one or two of them. I love that it flips the game on its head. Quite literally every other ghost wants you to hide somewhere, usually in a tight spot like a locker or behind a cabinet so the ghost can never get line of sight on you. But for the deogen that’s the exact opposite of what you should be doing, and if you don’t know that or don’t know it’s a deogen before it hunts, you’re screwed. Nothing gets my heart pumping like hearing a ghost rapidly running towards my exact location like Usain Bolt as I realize what it is and desperately try to escape my hiding place before it traps me.

Fun thing about the deogen is that it’s the second fastest ghost in the entire game, and then it slows down to be the slowest ghost when it’s extremely close to you. So you can’t safely hide anywhere, no matter how far away from it you are. By the time it’s near you, the deogen becomes slow enough to out-walk, but if you manage to back yourself into a corner? Good luck.

Honestly. Games that came out after late 2001 and have less than 5 weapons have no business getting sequels. That said, I feel like we’re ignoring some more important criteria here. Like the amount of main characters named John. Gears of War didn’t have any! Can you believe that??

Sounds like people like talking about AI, time to push for even more of it!

Wow, I just got hit with a wave of nostalgia looking at those PureBDCraft inspired textures.

It’s just one of those years. There were a lot of great games that came out this year.

Different strokes for different folks and all that. I personally couldn’t stand The Witcher 3, Red Dead Redemption 2, or Baldur’s Gate 3 despite them being constantly praised.

Reach is my favorite Halo game. To be completely honest, I always wanted more from the story telling in most Halo games, as you’re usually just a one man army with nobody else to care about. Sure, maybe there’s some high stakes overarching story, and you often have some regular soldiers helping you out, but it’s not something I ever really think about during a mission. I’m just here to shoot aliens, and my allies are meat shields who will not be missed. Which is fine, but when I played Reach for the first time and watched characters I came to like actually die, I loved it. It’s funny too, because in the lore Master Chief is a competent commander that prefers fighting with a squad, while Noble Six is a total lone wolf that always fights alone, and yet their games play opposite that.

I didn’t want him taking the sniper so i threw myself off the ledge to stop him from getting it.

I love this. Every time I play Halo with somebody, this type of shit goes down. Somebody does something and then suddenly it’s just a free for all, and by the end of it, we’re more worried about fucking the other person over than whatever we originally wanted to do.

Nah, Vocaloids like Hatsune Miku aren’t AI. Vocaloid music uses voice synthesizers, with each character being a unique voicebank with a mascot. But the final result of a Vocaloid song is completely man-made. They’re closer to instruments than they are to AI.

Any time I hear people say county music is bad, I’m reminded about Bo Burnham’s pandering bit. There is good country music out there, you unfortunately just gotta wade through the slop to find it.

Minecraft on peaceful difficulty isn’t violent at all. Hostile monsters don’t spawn, and while you can kill a pig or something, there is no reason or encouragement to since you don’t get hungry. As far as aesthetically ugly… that’s entirely subjective. I highly doubt your kids will mind how it looks (I sure didn’t). In fact, I loved the blocky style when I was a kid. Reminded me of legos.

Depends entirely on how you interpret the question. It could be read as “What’s a recent game you’ve tried…” (as in, a recently released game that you tried), as you’ve done, or “What’s a recent game you’ve tried…” (as in, a game you’ve tried recently) as the person you’re responding to did.

I think either interpretation is fine since the title doesn’t actually clarify either way.

How good’s your computer? Running locally is always the best option, but an 8-13GB model is never going to be as good as the stuff you’d find hosted by major companies. But hey, no limits and it literally never leaves your PC.

You can find models on Huggingface, and if you don’t know what you’re looking for, there’s a subreddit where they have a weekly discussion on enthusiasts favorite models. I don’t remember the sub’s name, but you should be able to find it easily enough with a google search like “reddit weekly AI model thread”. Go to the poster’s profile and you’ll find all of the old threads you can read through for recommendations.

I had a somewhat similar experience. I was playing Phasmphobia just last night as well, and we planned to play a bunch, but an emergency popped up and my friend had to go so we only played the one game. We hopped on Sunny Meadows as a nice warm up before hitting the harder maps like Tanglewood (not that we ever got around to that).

This was the first attempted hunt in the game. TWENTY FOUR MINUTES in! We had the ghost pinned down to either shade or deogen before even getting any evidence, with our suspicion getting stronger every minute it refused to hunt. We eventually got spirit box evidence, which all but confirmed deogen. And sure enough it was a deogen, which was a dream come true on Sunny Meadows. Easiest (and possibly slowest) $3,000 perfect investigation I’ve ever gotten.

A big part of the appeal of Hollow Knight and Hades are their respective art styles. They are both genuinely gorgeous games, and it really improves the experience. I would rather open up Hades again instead of, say, TBoI for exactly that reason, despite my thinking that TBoI is the better roguelike.

Admittedly I can’t bring myself to enjoy Hollow Knight at all, but that’s just an issue of me disliking metroidvanias.

That’s because you’re playing it wrong. You see, at it’s core Skyrim is actually a puzzle game you play on the Nexus Mods website. You spend 30+ hours carefully researching, building, and tweaking the perfect pack of mods, only to immediately run out of interest in playing Skyrim once you’re finally done. The actual Skyrim installation only exists to check if you solved the puzzle correctly and it runs.

That baffles you? I’d be willing to bet that 99% of windows users don’t even know what explorer.exe is.