Fair warning: the rest of this post has mild player character capability spoilers and a judgemental tone. No mention of puzzles or solutions, just observations about how people are playing the game and some talk about my own experience with it.

Like Outer Wilds, this game involves a lot of reading and connecting the dots on one’s own. Unlike Outer Wilds, a lot of the puzzling happens outside the game entirely, providing you no in-game method of remembering things or solving some puzzles. Very early on, the game tells you to keep a notepad for it, and it quickly becomes more than a suggestion. In my hubris, I didn’t take any notes until a fair way into the game, and had to basically repeat some of my earlier forays to get information I had thought to be extraneous.

Anyway I’m approaching 120 hours spent and having a blast with it still. I feel like I’m approaching or in the late game, as some of the things I need to do involve having already solved and re-used info from previous puzzles, sometimes more than once.

Have you played the mainline souls titles? The NG+ system in Nioh 2 leads out into new unique maps (The abyss) rather than being the same game with revamped enemy placement and health nine times lol.

I see Outer Wilds here but not Nioh 2, so I’m posting about Nioh 2.

Soulsian adventure with ninja gaiden blood, extremely high amount of endgame content, wild depth of character building, lots of avenues to increase your character’s power with many “correct answers” to the question of “how should I make my dude stronger”. Dropped a while before the most recent push for graphical fidelity with AI upscaling/antialiasing so it actually runs well on a large majority of steam hardware surveys machines.

It’s hard early on, but provides the player with tons of options when it comes to progressing through stages and bosses, flexible movesets for each class of weapon and access to potent tools like Gun and turning into an enemy that killed you a dozen times the first time you saw it briefly. The endgame goes beyond replaying through the game into dungeons made of fragments of the stages and some more unique maps (The Abyss). There’s a hefty amount of individual bosses to learn, and incentive to do some of the more fun fights in the game multiple times - a lot of which do not require a run back through a stage to get to them. The game does itself a service by breaking up gameplay into chunks with a world map you launch missions from, some of which are just a singular straight up boss fight.

There’s a lot of games being mentioned here that had a full run. Let’s talk about an actually cancelled game - SkySaga: Infinite Isles. Block game in the vein of Portal Knights that was extremely inspired.

The gameplay loop consisted of using “Keys” on a portal at your home island that would randomly generate a floating island with various objectives on it and a boss, all of which was harvestable for materials and blocks to build with back on your home island. There was a social hub city island everyone could access that alowed access to PvP and a few types of guilds with various combat, gathering, and exploration quests. Crafting was pretty good, allowing you to use metals with various properties to mix and match your own gear - some metals did more damage or applied an elemental effect, some had quicker swing speed, some were durable as armor and others not so much but they increased movespeed or jump height.

The game had about a dozen beta access phases then dropped off the face of the earth, with the server (and how it worked) lost forever. Completely lost to time, cancelled before it could release proper. No other block game has come close to the kind of structural appeal it had for me, and I think about it frequently. There’s a few reverse engineering projects in the works but they are stagnant.

I love a lot of the games in this thread but they had an actual release and real servers, you could play them for multiple years. Some others promised a bit more than they delivered, and were cut a bit short by EA or other trash publishers. SkySaga was killed before launch and placed in an opaque prison, truly cancelled.

Oblivion paintbrushes will get me up there just fine.

I didn’t intend it to be directly insulting, but it seems like you’re well aware how lemmy leans already and you’re willing to double down on centrist stalling points anyway. With no realistic middle choices available, and none cropping up, Americans are a little more than a little tired of centrist talking points.

It’s because you’re a centrist.

Love veloren, but it’s worth mentioning this is a Cube World clone and not a minecraft clone

This is becoming less true for FPS every month - the described method of cheating (off-device reading and input simulation) is becoming more accessible as more cheat makers are selling premade devices that do this. Huge problem even for new shooters like rivals - someone was already caught doing it in one of their ingame tournaments. It’s the primary way people cheat in League of Legends, and it would not surprise me to see evidence of it in dota 2(though I haven’t personally, I haven’t been paying attention to it for some years and it isn’t as frequent that a variety streamer or youtuber plays it compared to lol).

As mentioned before, kernel anticheat won’t catch these guys anyway, so it’s largely just a way to alienate your user base. There’s a new problem it does nothing special to solve.

Outer Wilds. Wish I could forget it, as the progression is based entirely on player knowledge it has 0 replayability(I mean this as an endorsement).

Tombstone is out! Skilling MMO (So think runescape) with a retro-future wild west type theme and pixel gfx that can be played from steam, its own client (available on itch), a browser, or android. Runs on anything, obscenely fast update pace, developers on discord respond to issues dummy fast. I’m currently playing tombstone.

CRPG doesn’t usually refer to MMOs or action rpgs. They’re referring to games that emulate a tabletop RPG but on a computer, which is where the C comes in. Generally they’re modeled after Dungeons and Dragons or similar systems, like Pathfinder.

You can bookmark webpages to come back to later and even organize them in trees by category. You can ceeate a playlist of songs from youtube and import it to a service with no ads like piped, then shuffle it. If you’re willing to put up with 30+ open tabs these are much less time consuming than scrolling through the default way it situates tabs, AND there aren’t 30 open tabs sucking your resources.

If you already knew all this, I’m almost sorry.

You are not thinking of the hippocratic oath (there is no mention whatsoever of gossip about patients). The do no harm clause specifies bodily harm/abuse in a physical context. You have supplied a TV or Movie memory concerning diagnosis, or maybe you think HIPAA is somehow related to the oath. Many modern doctors don’t take the traditional hippocratic oath. If you’d ever read the text, you would know why.

You’ve clearly rattled all this off without taking a single second to look at context. The goldwater rule isn’t an actual law, and it does not in fact have an explicit analogue in the current APA ethics guidelines (though you can argue the same instruction is conveyed throughout a couple of the standards). You have made up rules that doctors live by in your brain. American psychologists do not “have to follow the goldwater rule”. Every time I see you post it’s some “I googled it!” regurgitation with absolutely no understanding of the topic, or insane ramblings about how we should be nice to AI. Your five minutes of searching is not going to help you think critically about anything. This is facebook user behavior.

You described the garlic-like genre. Which has gotten VERY big. “we’d be seeing a lot more football-manager-like tweak-and-simulate loops, if that’s what they were going for.” They are MAKING THEM it’s VAMPIRE SURVIVORS lmao

Most of your complaints about obfuscation make me think you haven’t played Last Epoch and don’t know there is a solution: simply put the information someone would alt+tab or otherwise leave the game to find it IN THE GAME! LE has a robust in-game guide with info on everything from weird status effects down to how elemental resists work against elemental penetration and reduction.

A large portion of the issue is the ever eternal Minecraft Problem imo, it seems like you (and many people in general) have trouble setting your own goals when it comes to why you’re making the character more powerful. ARPG have different approaches to this: diablo 3 hasn’t got much stuff to “distract” you from pushing greater rift levels, while Path of Exile gives you a 12 boss checklist in different dimensions and you need to finish a LOAD of content, then fight 4 of them to fight the bigger bosses after them (and content beyond even that). Without knowing which bosses or how to find them, some players get lost.

TL;DR the genre is evolving as people ask these kinds of questions and you’re slightly behind the forefront of questioning here. Not a knock, just worth mentioning that what you’re looking for (an ARPG with sparkling information clarity) already exists, and the thing you’re thinking might exist in the future (streamlined ARPG with less mechanical intensity) also already exists.

E:D doesn’t really have them, but valheim and other information heavy games tend to have writeable signs. Since early modded minecraft, I have utilized these signs to communicate with my future self; writing down what I’m doing at the time and what my major goals are before logging off for the night is just part of my gaming routine now. Takes me a few seconds of reading to trigger the flow of action again. When games don’t have signs, I use a notepad .txt file to track what I was up to, or failing that I’ll save a note in my phone.

I would never have finished factorio or satisfactory without text files and signage. I would never have finished most large minecraft modpacks without signage. Organization skills rock.

Ark has cryopods which do the same thing mechanically, the only major difference being that you don’t visually throw them. If you use the vague wording on the patents surrounding pokemon’s box mechanics, it falls easily under there, since you are storing a captured creature in a digital storage.

Nintendo is the KING of frivolous patents. They’ve lost cases on it before, and with palworld being a sony interest, I don’t think the usual financial bullying nintendo brings to the table is going to cut it on this one. They need an airtight case and their vague patents (and recent history trying to patent THE LOADING SCREEN and vehicle speed matching for player characters with totk being denied) is a bad look for them in a courtroom. Like the US, the holder of a patent in Japan needs to file suits swiftly to protect the patent, or they risk losing cases (like this one. See “laches defense”).

Palworld is back in the top 100 global bestsellers today.

They literally tried to patent the loading screen and mechanically locking a player object to a moving object ingame just after the release of TotK. Nintendo is the absolute king of frivolous gaming patents. Here’s hoping it’s their downfall. For an example of how seriously vague some of the patents they’ve been granted are, check out some of their current ones after pokemon sleep’s initial success (basically trying to keep everyone without 9 digit money out of the sleep app game space).

https://patents.justia.com/assignee/the-pokemon-company

PT stands on its own in the horror video game genre IMO. Too many games fail to convey one of the elements of horror well, typically overusing shock and disgust as it’s hard to achieve psychological terror when your art medium has the potential for funny things to happen (like physics objects in amnesia deciding to fling themselves all over the room when you let go because they bounced wrong). Really interrupts the flow of the scared juice. The other half of horror games give you enough tools to completely defuse the horror after an initial few encounters (death stranding) or straight up don’t try to scare you situationally, just acting as combat action games with horror themes (later resident evils).

PT remakes for PC are in a good place finally, “P.T. emulation” being a bit closer than unreal PT to the source material as a project. How konami could possibly drop a project with star power like kojima+del toro is beyond me, especially considering reception to the demo was GREAT and it was slated to release while streamers playing horror games was still in vogue. Unbelievable fumbled bag lying there

It’s so hard to describe contact. It’s like a more exploratory Rune Factory with no farming sim element and swappable jobs like the final fantasy MMOs. I feel like the audience for the game wasn’t targeted well, as it fell in that era where “core gamers” stopped being a popular target audience (we hardly use the term at all these days).