So, Dark Souls is not comparable, but an F2P, P2W, turn-based party building mobile game is?
Yeah … I’ll have whatever you’re smoking.
And mobile games make money because they are F2P entry with a gambling-like loot system and a game design built to fleece your money. Their purpose is to make money, the game comes second. They would remake Tetris if that made them the most money, doesn’t mean it’s the best game in the world.
How much a game makes (and how much of the revenue is actual profit) is not related to the game design. If you actually believed that argument yourself, you’ld be over on the Diablo forums instead.
My definition of good game largely varies a lot depending on thousands of factors. But for me at least, a indicator of a good game is how well it sells. Success after that is a scale with 0-°infinite.
The reason I chose a turn based arpg- raid- is it’s closer comparison to LE or ARPGs. You gain gear and loot to upgrade your stats, and you use those stats to determine if you win or loose as you either pass the unavoidable damage or you don’t.
In this game the gear is free- unless you RMT. On a pay game to win the gear is not free. Like in path of exile you can pay to win for loot orbs. The idea is very comparable.
In dark souls the gear is deterministic. You get the gear, and you know what it takes to upgrade it. No rng, no luck etc.
As to diablo I can’t comment on it since I never had any interest in diablo- but diablo immortal was a very financially successful game for them. Sure hardcore players hated it. But it had a large player base, casuals on mobile seemed to enjoy it.
Diablo immortal was a very successful game- and it’s probably better then most mobile games I seen (because most mobile games are not even worth mentioning)
“Because it makes a lot of money” isn’t a good argument for why a game is good or not (Good, not succesful, but mechanically good)
The fact you say you don’t play Diablo, yet it’s made several times more revenue than LE goes against your entire argument, because if the better game makes more money, you’ld be over there.
And Diablo Immoral is the reason I didn’t buy the D4 deluxe edition, nor any version of its expansion, because their game design made me lose the trust that after they have my money, they’ll continue to try and make the game better, rather than just get me to open my wallet again. So that game made them negative money from me in PR. And just like you have your reasons to play Diablo, I don’t play predatory mobile games design to abuse addiction and fleece money out of people through psychological tricks.
If your argument is that good games get rewarded with sales, then simply argue why the decision is good for the game in itself.
Your argument is like telling an 8y old that they should grow up wanting to be a drug dealer, because those guys make a lot of money and even supply services to people!
And a better analogy than your watermelon would be live stock. Treat them right and they’ll make you a profit. But you still need to force your cows in the barn if you know a storm is coming, regardless of what the cow wants. Even if it complains, you don’t leave your cows in the rain, because ultimately, they’ll live longer if you get them in the barn.
I play Last Epoch because I want to help influence the game into my liking. If you look at player count for LE it ain’t doing to well. But I enjoy helping the under dog. Should LE over take diablo then I would help diablo.
I want what is good for the games in general. Why I do variety content.
That’s fair. But games rarely care about the core player base that funded them. Y’all yourself said you wanted LE to be a single player game- but who won? Streamers did who wanted multiplayer. Same reason you got dodge roll. The 99% of players is who matters not anyone individually. Albeit we can voice our opinions.
I would not endorse that position due to the law. But is video gaming or sugar or sales any different to selling people drugs? Most jobs we do are useless and sell people useless stuff to better ourselves. Do what you need to do within the realm of the law- morality is irrelevant .
True. I am fine with it thou. Those animals would never been alive unless they where bred. So they die as told because they would not exist at all
D2 has had naked run challenges since forever and you can easily finish the game without any gear (especially with necro).
In theory, you can also finish PoE/D2-3-4/LE/any other ARPG without taking any damage as long as you’re skillful enough. And people have in the past.
You mean like PoE, the leading game in this genre?
Elden Ring would like to disagree.
Sales alone isn’t what matters. Otherwise we would all be playing minecraft clones all the time.
I don’t like souls-games, but it’s objectively not a bad game. It’s subjectively so, certainly. It appeals to gamers that like a hard challenge. One that they can study and eventually not only overcome but also trivialize. Kinda like an ARPG, only they do it with skill rather than skill/gear increasing power.
Just the campaign in LE May be doable entirely naked- some specs like OG warlock and falconer could probably using bugs.
When it comes to all of LE? There are void enemies that spawn enemies under you and their hits are gonna kill you naked at high lvl . You are not face tanking the fire floor in Soul Fire, you are not getting through The bones dragon naked. In dark souls you can get through the entire game without death.
I don’t think I have heard people saying PoE was hard but that may just be me. What I heard is that PoE is very pay to win. Casuals generally follow guides no?
Elden ring hardly qualifies as a game when a bunch of lvl 10 jellyfish can kill everybody in game. Elden ring is also very casual friendly with save points almost everywhere. You can also one shot most bosses. Elden ring is more of a walking simulator then a game.
It’s a bad game. You can look a the video here where they look at Dark souls hit boxes. The entire game is full of bugs not fixed for decades. Objectively bad game. Some people just subjectively enjoy bad games
It’s fine I also enjoy bad games. I am playing a remake of read dead 1.
You don’t need to face tank the fire. That’s why you have the shield. That’s why it’s skill. And why wouldn’t you be able to get through the dragon naked? As long as you’re skillful enough, you can dodge everything.
As for the rest, if you kill the mobs before they attack, then you don’t need to worry about DoT pools at your feet. Not to mention that, even without gear, you do have some defense options. You can use skills that you normally wouldn’t to make up for it.
That’s why it’s a skill challenge.
PoE has been criticized (even from fans) for being way too hard for casuals and for new players. Ever since the start.
Even with guides PoE is hard and opaque.
It can’t. There are powerful ashes out there, mostly mimic pre-nerf, but you can only finish the game using only ashes the same way you can finish D2 naked: as a challenge. It’s not a valid option for normal players.
And if Elden Ring is so casual and easy, why did less than 1/3 of people finish the game, which is considerably less than the usual 1/2 for most games?
Besides, you’re saying that it’s a bad game because you can use a build to cheese the content. Much like using a meta build in any RPG. Which means that pretty much any game that has choices/builds hardly qualifies as a game, according to you.
A game can have flaws and still be a good game. Being a bad or a good game is objectively subjective because the terms “good” or “bad” are inherently subjective.
Much like any music genre being good or bad is subjective.
Much like any piece of art (which is what games are, inherently) is subjective.
There are cases where fire lich will fire the green death circle while the red fire is on the ground. In this case you will take the fire damage. As his health depletes you will not be able to keep up switching before you run out of currency or die to burn.
There are mobs in game that you can’t dodge. Various enemies such as those (centapid looking things, some of the stalkers etc)
As for killing the mobs, that is doable to a certain extent until you can’t dps them down and your failed.
No skill will have you have 100% up time naked. Not even profane veil.
I don’t know about the current balance of elden ring. When I played on launch ashes could clear the entire game with meteor and comet of azure.
This build was used a lot even casuals could beat it easily. Why moon katana thing was op
Elden ring is very casual friendly. But it’s not exactly good after the first half which just becomes boring - around Melania. It suffers the BG3 content drop, and also opens up a lot making it grindy with leveling of gear where casuals will quit of boredom. Not hard it’s a chore. Same as how monolith is a chore
I agree. If you using a meta build you are just doing a walking simulator. Those abusers of OG falconer- how many of them quit?
If a game fails to function as intended it’s a objective bad game- don’t let IGN tell you otherwise.
Poor optimization- bad game
Bad balance- bad game
Broken or buggy- bad game
Incomplete game- bad game
Most games are 4/10s. And I am sick of people pretending otherwise
Sure you can. As I said, if you deal enough damage he won’t last enough to be a problem. Also, like I said, having no gear doesn’t mean having no defenses. You can still get defenses from skills, passive tree and blessings.
That is true with or without gear. If it has infinite scaling, this will always happen. The difference is that without gear it will happen sooner rather than later.
The only ash that has meteor and comet azure is the mimic ash. And that is if you take those things. But:
-Meteor is in a zone where you’re not supposed to go until later.
-Comet azure is in a zone where you’re not supposed to go until mid-game
-Mimic ash is in a zone where you’re not supposed to go until mid-late game.
The fact that you can cheese the game by skipping everything and then going back doesn’t mean the game is easy.
By the way, you can also cheese the Dark Souls games using magic. That has always been a thing.
Elden ring is only casual friendly when comparing to the typical souls games. Because it remains very casual-unfriendly in that it doesn’t explain things and dumps pretty much impossible to kill bosses right at the start.
Since a game’s main function is to entertain people, if people are entertained by it, it’s a good game by your definition. You can place them on a “better to worse” scale, but as long as at least 1 person is entertained, then by your definition it’s a good game.
You can from my knowledge face tank even the C100 Lagon moon blast. No one is saying it’s hard. The argument I made is that casuals who struggle on him do so because they B line the story mode and end up with no gear.
A player with experience knows to do this. Not new players. Anyone asking help with lagon are new players
But “your liking” is something along the likes of a f2p/p2w hellscape where any form of gameplay is secondary to how efficiently it can extract cash from its players.
But only becausevof the law, not anything moral.
Actually no. You have the bizarrest view of what adult/working life is like.
I have no idea why everyone is complaining about Lagon. My first few encounters with him had been terrible. Ok. He smashed me with his scissors, lasered me and so on. But as soon as you have understood the 4 (!!!) attacks (scissor slam, moving laser, AoE laser, and laser blast) and see their telegraphs (extremely well telegraphed attacks) it is just easy. Especially with introduction of dodge roll it became extremely easy. Just dodge and do damage when you are safe. Thats all it takes.
I currently farm lagon quite often. For the perfect blessing and for the relic, which sells for 300k without LP because people dont run Lagon. 500 Corruption Lagon does not enter phase 3.
The problem with the Lagon fight is framing. Quite a few new players seem to get through the game fairly easily up to Lagon who then represents a very large and unexpected difficulty spike (myself included). If I play through a game just fine and then all of a sudden get completely blindsided by a huge difficulty spike, I’d be inclined to think that something is wrong with the game.
He shouldn’t be made much easier because the purpose is to teach that you need to deal with mechanics. If he was as easy as most prior bosses, then people would simply end up quitting in frustration at the next boss that requires dealing with its mechanics.
I think the player needs to be provided with more information. If a player dies like 3 times to Lagon, show a hint that recommends paying close attention to the visual cues of the boss or simply getting stronger elsewhere first (side quests, Monolith, gear drops, crafting, etc.). I think most people expect to go through a campaign in a linear fashion, so they just go wherever the game tells them to and when they hit a wall, they give up and quit. They probably don’t realize that they could just jump into some echoes.
Perhaps even give a warning before the fight as well along the lines of “this boss is fairly difficult, you will need to pay close attention to his movements”. That might give players some more confidence to keep trying, even after multiple deaths, instead of just concluding “this is terribly balanced, I don’t care anymore”.
I think there are some constraints as to what EHG can feasibly do to improve the player experience with regards to Lagon.
Firstly, a great deal of players want to speedrun or outright skip the campaign, so adding more of a difficulty ramp-up prior to Lagon sort of hinders that player group by extending the time they have to spend in campaign by making it any more difficult. That said, I would love the campaign to be more difficult in general.
Secondly, adding hints before or during the Lagon fight isn’t a bad idea but it sets a precedent that I don’t think EHG or any ARPGs really want to uphold. The precedent it sets it that the game will give you hints about the boss fights, and I don’t think that’s very conducive to the genre - boss mechanics are meant to be learned not told to you outright. We don’t really want boss hints for the rest of the bosses after Lagon.
Thirdly, and to elaborate on my second point, Lagon is a literal god. The campaign leading up to Lagon, arguably from the very start, is telling you thru the story and dialogue that there are real gods in Eterra, and that they are as powerful as gods anywhere. So the entire game is leading you up to a story arc where you take on the literal god of the oceans. I think that’s enough of a warning, hint, clue, and help, that having the game explicitly tell you via pop-ups, or even more dialogue with NPCs, would be redundant and unnecessary.
If anyone is surprised that a god presents a difficulty spike, then I’m not sure that we can help them further.
There will always be those players, the question is whether catering to them is a good idea or not (which I guess is up to EHG to decide). I’d prefer a shorter and harder campaign with more a smooth difficulty curve but that would probably take a lot of work and there’s areas with more pressing issues (imo).
That’s a valid concern. I was thinking of the warning more like a tutorial pop up that just informs the player once “hey, gotta pay attention to mechanics from now on”. A tutorial pop up would (hopefully) not lead to the expectation to see that before every (difficult) boss fight after Lagon but rather just be accepted as a one time thing.
Lore-wise you are right but when I first played through LE (and I did pay attention to the story), I still did not expect that. It’s a game so some “logic” should be thrown out the window for the sake of gameplay.
And many people don’t pay attention to the story, so if the only way to reasonably expect such a difficulty spike was to pay attention to the story, you’d alienate a bunch of players.
Perhaps having some NPC that yells warnings (verbally, not just via a text box!) at a time when there’s not much else going on (so players hopefully don’t miss it) would be a better way because then it’s part of the story but not very missable (unless you disable voices of course).
How (or if at all) EHG ultimately ends up better preparing players for the Lagon fight is up to them, I’m sure they can come up with a better idea/version. But since so many people get (understandably, imo) frustrated with Lagon, I wanted to put out that I think the issue is the expectation a player might have from playing up to that point.
It’s interesting to note (though it really has no direct bearing on the decisions towards this) that PoE2 will have a 50h long campaign.
So, in spite of a lot of players asking for a campaign skip in PoE1 and they ignoring them, they’re now doubling down on that and making an even longer (a lot longer) one.
You don’t need a tutorial popup for that, though. You can make it part of the game, like a sign in-game that when you click says “Beware! God ahead” or whatever. That way, it’s not a tutorial popup, it’s part of the world you’re in and it doesn’t set expectations.
I’ld suggest making it part of the Architect’s conversation somewhere, but then again, pretty sure people would still ignore a giant neon sign and come complain here, can’t imagine skippable text would do better…
Yeah, conversation is most likely skipped. However, if someone sees a signpost on the way, they will likely click it, since that’s a staple of RPGs. They might then ignore the text, but that’s on them at that point.
