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This Week in Games - Aren't You Tired Of Being The Hero Of The Wilds? Don't You Just Want To Go Ape-


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FilthyCasual



Joined: 01 Jun 2015
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PostPosted: Fri Mar 31, 2023 11:17 am Reply with quote
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Industry clown Geoff Kighley
Damn, what's the beef with the Doritos Pope?
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AQuin1904



Joined: 13 Nov 2021
Posts: 266
PostPosted: Fri Mar 31, 2023 12:55 pm Reply with quote
Had no idea Metal Dogs existed, but I might check it out now. I've barely touched Metal Max, but I probably should if I ever find the time, considering it's a major influence on an LN I'm paid to translate.

I bounced off weapon breakage on BotW hard, and frankensteining weapons together won't fix any of my core problems: constantly opening a menu (even a quick menu) to switch weapons or make adjustments mid-fight sucks, constantly being "rewarded" for finding hidden areas with more of weapons I already have and probably can't carry because there are weapons everywhere feels like shit, and cool shield-surfing being a limited resource is a kick in the teeth. Go ahead, throw an easy mode in Dark Souls and kill whatever other sacred cows you want—sometimes the designers' artistic vision isn't fun, and I'm not up for another round of menuing my way through another samey moblin camp every five minutes when I just want to puzzle out cool mountain climbing.
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BadNewsBlues



Joined: 21 Sep 2014
Posts: 5940
PostPosted: Fri Mar 31, 2023 7:55 pm Reply with quote
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Fire Emblem Fates, which means no more DLC characters. And heck, this one hits Fates especially hard as you can purchase either the Nohrian or Hoshidoan routes as cartridges but the third "Revelations" route—with its exclusive "good" ending—is forever lost.


Unless you’re one of the lucky few who copped the Special Edition version which unless I’m mistaken only Japan got.

Quote:
Like Atlus games? You're losing a ton of great DLC for Shin Megami Tensei IV and Etrian Odyssey. And don't get me started on the Virtual Console's loss—Nintendo Switch Online doesn't offer Game Gear titles,


I would presume they will eventually, especially considering they’re offering Gameboy titles in addition to Genesis titles……but you’ll have to have the Expansion Pak.


Quote:
However, the ten-million-dollar question on many people's lips is what Tears of the Kingdom will do about weapon durability. It's the single most contentious aspect of Breath of the Wild and about the only thing people will talk about when it comes to that game (besides Zelda's dumpy).


And not being able to swim on the surface of water without the stamina meter (because we needed to bring back the dumbest mechanic from Wind Waker) or needing to properly plot out a climb since someone thought it was a neat idea to not be able to rest during a climb.

Also memory’s hazy but didn’t gliding use stamina too?

Edit: and it did

Truthfully speaking though the problem with weapon durability isn’t that weapons breaking but the weird shit of how you can’t repair them.

Elder Scrolls lets you do this. Fallout let you do this, the original version of Nioh if I recall would’ve let you repair broken weapons. And this game decides to do regressive shit.
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Top Gun



Joined: 28 Sep 2007
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PostPosted: Fri Mar 31, 2023 9:07 pm Reply with quote
BadNewsBlues wrote:

Truthfully speaking though the problem with weapon durability isn’t that weapons breaking but the weird shit of how you can’t repair them.

Elder Scrolls lets you do this. Fallout let you do this, the original version of Nioh if I recall would’ve let you repair broken weapons. And this game decides to do regressive shit.

There's no reason to repair weapons in BotW because there's absolutely nothing special about any particular weapon. Every Royal Claymore is like every other Royal Claymore. And that's the whole point: you're meant to use their weapons until they break, grab new ones, and use those in turn. I'll never get why some people seemed to have this intense desire to hoard individual weapons when the game goes out of its way to shower you with replacements. (And before you bring up weapon bonuses, when you get far enough in the game you'll get plenty of good ones at random.) The durability system didn't bother me at all, at least not once you get off the Great Plateau and get a constant supply of ever-better weapons.
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Cho_Desu



Joined: 27 Dec 2022
Posts: 194
PostPosted: Fri Mar 31, 2023 9:34 pm Reply with quote
BadNewsBlues wrote:


Quote:
Like Atlus games? You're losing a ton of great DLC for Shin Megami Tensei IV and Etrian Odyssey. And don't get me started on the Virtual Console's loss—Nintendo Switch Online doesn't offer Game Gear titles,


I would presume they will eventually, especially considering they’re offering Gameboy titles in addition to Genesis titles……but you’ll have to have the Expansion Pak.



I thought that too, but then Sega announced all the Sonic-related Game Gear games are going to be added to Sonic Origins collection. While there are better games for the old handheld, I imagine the Sonic titles would be the biggest draw for a Game Gear addition to Switch Online. Going to guess it's not happening.

(A PC Engine / Turbografx-16 addition, on the other hand... Nintendo and Konami are pals, right?)
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Treecko Tempo



Joined: 25 Sep 2016
Posts: 155
PostPosted: Fri Mar 31, 2023 9:53 pm Reply with quote
BadNewsBlues wrote:
Quote:
Fire Emblem Fates, which means no more DLC characters. And heck, this one hits Fates especially hard as you can purchase either the Nohrian or Hoshidoan routes as cartridges but the third "Revelations" route—with its exclusive "good" ending—is forever lost.


Unless you’re one of the lucky few who copped the Special Edition version which unless I’m mistaken only Japan got.

The version with all 3 routes was released on cartridge in North America as well but in a limited amounts and is now very expensive.
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FinalVentCard
ANN Reviewer


Joined: 28 Oct 2018
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PostPosted: Fri Mar 31, 2023 10:03 pm Reply with quote
FilthyCasual wrote:
Quote:
Industry clown Geoff Kighley
Damn, what's the beef with the Doritos Pope?


Long story short: I'm very displeased with how much Geoff bent over backwards to give Kojima "his due" during the Game Awards for MGSV, but won't spare a moment for the many hundreds of employees at Blizzard that actually suffered abuse from the toxic environment. Or the many contract employees demanding better treatment.

The Game Awards show are empty spectacle, and Geoff wastes no opportunity primping himself up in an attempt at grabbing some kind of validity in his appearance... just so that the Game Awards look like a "real" awards show. And for what? To hawk trailers for next year's bargain bin liners? To put developers at risk when some random kid sneaks on-stage to make antisemitic jokes in front of a national audience?

There are a lot of good people that work in the game industry. The Game Awards Show does jack-all to help them or their efforts in making games great. There's a lot Geoff could do with the attention he hounds after to make their lives better. But he'd rather just smirk and pretend he's got some kind of moral high ground while E3 crashes and burns.

There's a word for people like that: "clown".

BadNewsBlues wrote:

And not being able to swim on the surface of water without the stamina meter (because we needed to bring back the dumbest mechanic from Wind Waker) or needing to properly plot out a climb since someone thought it was a neat idea to not be able to rest during a climb.


I defend those decisions because unlike Skyward Sword, which just limited your movement with Stamina for the sake of really bad running puzzles, the Stamina in BOTW both forces you to be creative in getting around while also gating you from going too far when you explore. If you could just go from Shore A to Treasure Chest on Island B then the world feels a lot smaller as a result. Forcing players to think about their world and find ways to traverse obstacles makes exploration more memorable. Likewise, it sounds good on paper to just walk anywhere you want at any time and climb anything, but then you hit the problem of the game's pacing getting jacked up. Again, Link has to think about crossing the environment, it's valid to make some areas inaccessible until you have the proper tools (or Stamina) to go there.

BadNewsBlues wrote:

Truthfully speaking though the problem with weapon durability isn’t that weapons breaking but the weird shit of how you can’t repair them.

Elder Scrolls lets you do this. Fallout let you do this, the original version of Nioh if I recall would’ve let you repair broken weapons. And this game decides to do regressive shit.


Yeah, well now we have something better than just repairing weapons with the Fuse mechanic. I dunno, I prefer Mushroom-Shields and rock-on-stick more than "combine two swords to make the same sword that won't break as fast". Wink
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BadNewsBlues



Joined: 21 Sep 2014
Posts: 5940
PostPosted: Sat Apr 01, 2023 2:20 am Reply with quote
Top Gun wrote:
There's no reason to repair weapons in BotW because there's absolutely nothing special about any particular weapon.


There doesn’t need to be anything special about the weapons to need a reason to repair them. A point that’s hard to justify when it comes to the Ancient Weapons which are rare and can only be acquired by fighting Guardians and hoping they drop the particular weapon you want or craft for resources which I forget whether they were common or rare to the extent this process is not worth it in the long run.


Top Gun wrote:
Every Royal Claymore is like every other Royal Claymore. And that's the whole point: you're meant to use their weapons until they break, grab new ones, and use those in turn.


And yet as I mentioned in other games with breakable weapons you can either repair the weapons or replace them with stronger similar weapons looted from enemies or chests which those games at least justify with weapons having levels and even buffs. That by comparison just makes the inability to repair them in BOTW look illogical. As for why players horde weapons? that’s usually due to fact that some weapons are better suited for certain engagements.

Whereas in BOTW you’ll have to do it by default unless you want to be stuck trying to fight a Lynel with a Boko club or with no weapon at all.

FinalVentCard wrote:
I defend those decisions because unlike Skyward Sword, which just limited your movement with Stamina for the sake of really bad running puzzles,


Never played SS but that does sound terrible.

FinalVentCard wrote:

the Stamina in BOTW both forces you to be creative in getting around while also gating you from going too far when you explore. If you could just go from Shore A to Treasure Chest on Island B then the world feels a lot smaller as a result.


As someone who just started Pokemon Sun I can kinda agree with this on that with the idea of not wanting players to just have free rein to just run the entire map from start to finish. But at the same time the way some developers go about gating access to areas in open world games can just come as rather ridiculous to say nothing of contradictory.

Cho_Desu wrote:
(A PC Engine / Turbografx-16 addition, on the other hand... Nintendo and Konami are pals, right?)


I would think so considering the Switch ports of the CastleVania, Contra, & Cowabunga Collections and with the PC/TG minis being marked up as it is.

Treecko Tempo wrote:

The version with all 3 routes was released on cartridge in North America as well but in a limited amounts and is now very expensive.


I shouldn’t be surprised.
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AiddonValentine



Joined: 07 Aug 2006
Posts: 2214
PostPosted: Sat Apr 01, 2023 11:55 am Reply with quote
Top Gun wrote:

There's no reason to repair weapons in BotW because there's absolutely nothing special about any particular weapon. Every Royal Claymore is like every other Royal Claymore. And that's the whole point: you're meant to use their weapons until they break, grab new ones, and use those in turn. I'll never get why some people seemed to have this intense desire to hoard individual weapons when the game goes out of its way to shower you with replacements. (And before you bring up weapon bonuses, when you get far enough in the game you'll get plenty of good ones at random.) The durability system didn't bother me at all, at least not once you get off the Great Plateau and get a constant supply of ever-better weapons.


No kidding; save for the Master Sword, all other weapons are dime a dozen and can be easily replaced, they're lying around EVERYWHERE. Furthermore, the durability adds spontaneity to where your weapon can break and you have to think on your feet. It's one of the many design choices made to blow up the tedium that so many sandbox games had suffered from over the past decade. Making it so it's essentially impossible to min-max creates a more organic and memorable experience.

That's why the Fuse mechanic looks to be genius. Not only does it make repairing something other than tedious busywork, it takes another common sandbox mechanic (crafting) that had been rendered unfun through tedium and bloat and boils it down to "Just slap that ham on a hammer and see what happens!" creating a more freeform experience. We're gonna see so many goofy "Sword-chucks, yo!" combinations.

As for other things:

-eShop: Rest well, you plucky storefront. So much stuff now becomes history. The only grace is that most of the really big stuff has been ported and while I have no doubt a lot of the bigger titles like Dragon Quest and Fire Emblem will eventually be remade or ported, there's a lot of rarer stuff now lost without stuff like preservation.

-E3: Utterly mismanaged. The only way to keep it going is to basically reboot the whole thing. The only way I see is to do a Tokyo Game Show thing where it's industry for the first couple days, and fans for the last couple. In-person events and conventions have a place, but E3 had an identity crisis for years.

-Microsoft: The thing that just kills me about that little tidbit is Congress being stunned at an American company doing that badly overseas. Guys, it's not hard, Microsoft is not being locked out of the market through malevolence, they're just incompetent. Microsoft barely put any effort into Japan and gave up after a few years because they didn't get overnight success. They were lazy and entitled, as they've shown through this entire ActiBlizz ordeal. They have only themselves to blame for screwing up their chances.
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FinalVentCard
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Joined: 28 Oct 2018
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PostPosted: Sat Apr 01, 2023 1:03 pm Reply with quote
AiddonValentine wrote:

That's why the Fuse mechanic looks to be genius. Not only does it make repairing something other than tedious busywork, it takes another common sandbox mechanic (crafting) that had been rendered unfun through tedium and bloat and boils it down to "Just slap that ham on a hammer and see what happens!" creating a more freeform experience. We're gonna see so many goofy "Sword-chucks, yo!" combinations.


It also means players have more control over their combat encounters. People already loved encounters with Lynels because you could fight a Lynel on your own terms, but with Fuse you can create weapons that make it even easier to control the playing field. Longer spears for keeping enemies farther away, or using mushrooms to make it easier to land sneak attacks... chances are, there will be some kind of weapon combo that makes flurry attacks easier, too. And if not, someone can ad-hoc design one. People got creative with BOTWs combat system.

Meanwhile, Bethesda just has you flailing your weapon while you backpedal away from an enemy.
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Top Gun



Joined: 28 Sep 2007
Posts: 4581
PostPosted: Sat Apr 01, 2023 1:21 pm Reply with quote
Meanwhile I was picturing the speedrunning community actively licking their chops at that teaser. These new mechanics are going to be ripped to shreds by them, and the results will be glorious to watch.
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DKL



Joined: 08 May 2005
Posts: 1951
Location: California, USA
PostPosted: Sat Apr 01, 2023 2:12 pm Reply with quote
Top Gun wrote:
BadNewsBlues wrote:

Truthfully speaking though the problem with weapon durability isn’t that weapons breaking but the weird shit of how you can’t repair them.

Elder Scrolls lets you do this. Fallout let you do this, the original version of Nioh if I recall would’ve let you repair broken weapons. And this game decides to do regressive shit.

There's no reason to repair weapons in BotW because there's absolutely nothing special about any particular weapon. Every Royal Claymore is like every other Royal Claymore.



To add to this, and I might be mistaken since it's been a long while since I've played, but there's actually only 4-5 weapon archetypes or something. Stick A will very likely have the same moveset as Metal Rod F and the only difference will be the damage numbers... it's literally just a reskin.

In a casual playthrough, there is not actually a lot to learn since you'll know what to do once you start swinging.

When people complain about the weapon durability in Breath of the Wild, they are talking as if this is Nioh 2 or something where you need to spend more than 20 seconds in training mode because the weapon has a bunch of different mechanics and skill trees: there's a very a good chance that you can win any general encounter in Breath of the Wild by rolling your face across the attack button.

If you are underpowered for the area and were bashing things for a million years before they died, you were normally meant to go find something easy to kill and steal its stuff since the damage on that will likely be appropriately scaled to the immediate area... and then there's stuff like stealth and throwing weapons about to break that have a damage modifier that will make this more autopilot than it already is.

If you really really don't want to engage something, you can always just find a random weapon lying around and use that.

Yes, you can do cool things with the combat in Breath of the Wild, which can get extremely execution heavy, but none of this is mandatory to actually win since combat is only slightly more demanding than the games before this one: if you know how to lure enemies away from mobs, you can probably win.

If people really wanted in-depth combat mechanics that were semi mandatory and actual meaningful minimax crap, they would just go play Nioh 2 and go Ki Pulse something to death with the wealth of movesets and skillsets they offer you.

I'm here to use the cool tools they give you to get from point A to point B and go find some useless crafting trinket from a chest I couldn't reach 20 minutes ago.

I would be more open to critiquing Zelda's menu navigation or something because managing the billions of weapons thrown at me that all pretty much do the same thing became a giant pain.
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AQuin1904



Joined: 13 Nov 2021
Posts: 266
PostPosted: Sat Apr 01, 2023 2:55 pm Reply with quote
DKL wrote:
I would be more open to critiquing Zelda's menu navigation or something because managing the billions of weapons thrown at me that all pretty much do the same thing became a giant pain.

See, this is my main complaint. Weapons breaking doesn't actually bother me (except for shields when you surf on them, because that's more fun than anything in BotW's combat and I want to play around with it without having to stop and go pick up more shields), but opening a menu to get out my next weapon kills the pace of combat I already don't like that much. Faster, more intuitive menus would improve this a lot, but I think it would take PC style number-key shortcuts to make it not bother me. In some ways I would like it better if it locked the menu in combat and forced you to rely on weapons picked up off the ground, but that would require reworking a lot (every fight with a single strong enemy, for one thing).

People love to say that your weapon breaking makes you think on your toes, but you have so many of them after the first couple of hours, all it means is a trip to the menu.

Fusing weapons seems like it will just make this problem worse, since it will mean more things to stop and do in-menu. So, I don't think this (hopefully improved version of a) Dead Rising mechanic is going to be for me.

All the new traversal stuff looks great, though. I still go back and try to play BotW like every three months because nothing else does the exploring in a way I like as much, but then the combat and the reward structure (which, to be fair, Zelda has always sucked at; going through some hidden cave to find a chest with a rupee too big for your wallet was just as bad as doing it to find another copy of a weapon that the world is already literally carpeted with) make themselves too obnoxious to keep going.
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AiddonValentine



Joined: 07 Aug 2006
Posts: 2214
PostPosted: Sat Apr 01, 2023 3:11 pm Reply with quote
AQuin1904 wrote:
DKL wrote:
I would be more open to critiquing Zelda's menu navigation or something because managing the billions of weapons thrown at me that all pretty much do the same thing became a giant pain.

See, this is my main complaint. Weapons breaking doesn't actually bother me (except for shields when you surf on them, because that's more fun than anything in BotW's combat and I want to play around with it without having to stop and go pick up more shields), but opening a menu to get out my next weapon kills the pace of combat I already don't like that much. Faster, more intuitive menus would improve this a lot, but I think it would take PC style number-key shortcuts to make it not bother me. In some ways I would like it better if it locked the menu in combat and forced you to rely on weapons picked up off the ground, but that would require reworking a lot (every fight with a single strong enemy, for one thing).

People love to say that your weapon breaking makes you think on your toes, but you have so many of them after the first couple of hours, all it means is a trip to the menu.

Fusing weapons seems like it will just make this problem worse, since it will mean more things to stop and do in-menu. So, I don't think this (hopefully improved version of a) Dead Rising mechanic is going to be for me.


BOTW has quick select that lets you immediately switch to another weapon without going into the menu, it's not that hard.
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AQuin1904



Joined: 13 Nov 2021
Posts: 266
PostPosted: Sat Apr 01, 2023 8:39 pm Reply with quote
AiddonValentine wrote:
AQuin1904 wrote:
DKL wrote:
I would be more open to critiquing Zelda's menu navigation or something because managing the billions of weapons thrown at me that all pretty much do the same thing became a giant pain.

See, this is my main complaint. Weapons breaking doesn't actually bother me (except for shields when you surf on them, because that's more fun than anything in BotW's combat and I want to play around with it without having to stop and go pick up more shields), but opening a menu to get out my next weapon kills the pace of combat I already don't like that much. Faster, more intuitive menus would improve this a lot, but I think it would take PC style number-key shortcuts to make it not bother me. In some ways I would like it better if it locked the menu in combat and forced you to rely on weapons picked up off the ground, but that would require reworking a lot (every fight with a single strong enemy, for one thing).

People love to say that your weapon breaking makes you think on your toes, but you have so many of them after the first couple of hours, all it means is a trip to the menu.

Fusing weapons seems like it will just make this problem worse, since it will mean more things to stop and do in-menu. So, I don't think this (hopefully improved version of a) Dead Rising mechanic is going to be for me.


BOTW has quick select that lets you immediately switch to another weapon without going into the menu, it's not that hard.

No, it is super hard though (I die constantly playing BotW).
And the quick select menu is the menu I'm complaining about. It doesn't magically become not annoying to dive into in mid-combat just because it works like the PSP interface. I really am not here for the weird staccato rhythm that creates.
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