Hm, I actually found the voice acting pretty not great. Some line reads were odd, and the different voices felt like they were recorded on different mics.

I made it to one ending, and really didn’t feel any desire to do another go around.

I know what you mean about ‘perfect’ though, I have my own small list of odd games that, to me, feel like they’re ‘perfect’ in what they’re trying to do.

I never gave it a chance, as theit practice of paying for exclusivity is infuriating to me.

Make your shit better. Hell, make it comparable, and charge a lower cit (so devs make more), and I’d support then.

Paying to make the market more closed off sucks.

I think controller is only ‘necessary’ for souls games due to them not supporting keyboard and mouse well. I’d prefer to use keyboard for it, but all of the inputs and menu-ing is fucked up.

Tbh, its a testament to how good the games are, that they are enjoyable despite a huge lack of QoL across the board

I don’t care for it. It does some interesting things, in base building. But having played it a lot mostly because my friend group likes it, it’s very janky. It does not feel close to 1.0. And, while there’s some fun to be had, everything outside the horde nights just feels like busywork in a way I didn’t feel with Valheim or Grounded.

Short answer: read Jack Vance’s ‘tales of a dying earth’. It’s the reason dnd magic is called ‘vancian’.

Longer answer: in that series, magic works by just remembering words, and then saying them. But these magic words are powerful things, weighty in the mind, hard to carry. And, when said, they tear themselves out of your mind, causing you to forget them.

So, not ‘spell slots’ per se, but the idea is you’re prepping spells almost as a ‘potion’, something you carry in your mind, and consume to cast out a spell.

Mmm, psionics, Shadow Weave Magic, Initiate of Mystra.

A min-maxed character is one with dumpstates and weaknesses. A powergamed character is one with fewer weaknesses than a ‘normal’ character. Anything that can challange an OP build will wipe the floor with a party of ‘standard’ characters.

If they’re actually powergaming, the likely answer is: “No, I’m immune.” Or: “okay, with my buffs, I get to add +200 to this.”

It really depends.

I’m thinking about 3.5 in particular, where an optimized wizard will be able to do the job of the rest of the party (assuming they’re built to be fine, but not power-gaming), better than them.

There’s no real in-world way to balance that. Either the DM Fiats the power-gamer weaker, the DM tells the power gamer “no”, or the rest of the party power games to. Its just too unbalanced.

If we’re talking 5e, that’s all out the window then. If 3.5’s power runs from 0-10, the strongest 5e build is like a 6, and the weakest is like a 3. Its still extra work for the DM to balance, but can be done all in-world without needing to rely on metagame fiat.

And, of course, there’s lots of other systems out there, where the above can be more true or less true depending on what kind of game it is, though 3.5’s power ceiling is probably higher than 95% of the systems out there.

Eh, disagree. Unless everyone is power gaming to the same degree (which can be fun!), an OP character being adequately challenged will probably result in all the other players feeling irrelevant.

I fully agree. If you read my first comment, I pretty clearly as much as the new ones are pretty bad (story wise), the two Jaffe worked on are even worse in that regard.

I mean, I too would be unhappy with the new games’ stories. They’re not very good stories overall.

But, they’re better than the vast majority of video game plots, because that’s a low bar.

Still, Jaffe seems to imply the old stories in GoW were any better, when they were pure drivel. I might still be very underwhelmed by the story in the two new God of War’s, but I at least like that they’re trying (even if I think the direction of relying heavily on animation and visual flair is the wrong one, as far as telling good stories goes).

Yeah, they got that ‘no pores’ look that selfie filter give, that’s somewhat uncanny looking.

I got through the tutorial, and into the ‘hub world’ or w/e it’s called, and it just felt very ‘MMO’ to me. Which, on top of the monetization already putting a bad taste in my mouth, I just refunded there. I hate games that shove ‘multiplayer stuff’ into single player games. Like, I played through Elden Ring in forced offline: I don’t want to interact with others, even through little stuff like bloodstains.

Good. This is a game I played and immediately refunded when I saw all the monetization stuff.

I just want a single player TBS, in the style of their other game, Monster Train. But I got immediately turned off by the FTP MMO type design choices in Inkbound.

I think it should just crib notes from PF2e; make it a bonus action, and also a 1st level spell. Though, they should also rewrite the confusing ‘no slotted bonus action spell with non-bonus action slotted spell’ bandaid too.

BG3 was basically unplayable for us for about 2 weeks post 1.0

But also, we really wanted to only play co-op, and the bugs were mostly online related, which is arguably more forgivable.

But still, hard crashing or freezing every 15 minutes for one of the three of us sucked, and looking at support forums, wasn’t uncommon either.

You are, of course, correct.

But even so, costs are costs. It doesn’t matter if you’ve achieved communism, and are in a moneyless, stateless existance, you need labor and materials to build nuclear, and labor and materials to maintain it (along with other infrastructure).

And, I’m not anti-nuclear; it does make sense to use sometimes, in some amounts. Its just very very costly for what it provides.

But frankly, even only accounting for current tech, wide spread nuclear just doesn’t make that much sense compared to renewables + storage and large grids interconnects.