#that making games easier is terrible

[klysanderelias]

It's always funny to me when a big-name youtuber argues vociferously that souls-like games DO have a difficulty setting, it's Playing The Game Right (leveling, build, using summons, etc), and then later on in the same video will have a fifteen minute long section complaining about how certain boss fights completely invalidate certain builds or require you to drastically alter your style of play, and i'm like... I thought you were in FAVOR of this.

And of course they're not, they just don't understand what a difficulty setting IS anymore, and that's completely fair because I think that most DEVELOPERS don't either, but it means that the criticism they make is always couched in a fundamental misunderstanding of the thing they're trying to criticise (and also usually a complete misunderstanding of where the criticism comes from).

And I want to be clear, I've beaten basically every single Dark Souls game, I beat bloodborne, I played shitloads of elden ring and the reason I didn't beat it was because I got bored, and I've done speedruns and soul level 1 runs of dark souls 3. I'm pretty much the dark souls power player that everyone expects would argue AGAINST having difficulty options.

But.

I've been playing thousands of hours of battletech, and the battletech difficulty screen has been the singlehandedly biggest argument I've had change my mind.

In the game, Battletech modifies difficulty per mission by changing the total health of enemies, changing their skills and experience levels, the usual fare of difficulty curves (although damage is never affected, thank god). But having all these granular options can dramatically change the way the game is played without simply affecting health values or hit percentages.

Toggling mech destruction and lethality means that losing a mech in a mission or having a pilot be knocked unconscious removes them permanently. They're killed, destroyed, you need to go get a new one. That's a HUGE change from the base difficulty where having a mech be completely destroyed in combat just removes the weapon components and costs a ton to repair. Likewise, changing the number of parts required to buy or salvage in order to complete a mech DRAMATICALLY changes the game - the maximum amount of parts you can get from a single mech is 3, and usually you only get 1. Needing 3 parts means that if you're lucky, you could see a brand new mech in a mission, blow its head off, and get one for free. Moving that scale up both means that rare or expensive mechs take much much longer to earn, but also that replacing mechs takes much longer (meaning that losses are even more painful).

Like, every single one of these options can dramatically affect how you play the game or change the feel of it to something much more interesting to you as a player - do you want to play a rogue-like game where you have to save and scrounge to get new mechs, and each mech and pilot is a precious resource you have to protect? or do you want to powerscale fast and constantly get new mechs and rare weapons?

And like, having extremely granular options for gameplay isn't for everyone, but then again, there are the owlcat pathfinder CRPGs that do this same thing, but have a base 'easy-normal-hard' sort of slider that automatically selects certain options, and you can adjust them if you want. If you're not interested in going through each slider you can just say 'I'd like normal please' and the game automatically makes all the selections, but you can also stop and say 'hey actually let me turn on permadeath too' and you can do that.

And I think that when people think about difficulty, they think about the most basic 'health and damage adjustments' sliders, and not ANYTHING else that actually have much more of an impact. I will hit this point to my grave that dark souls would massively benefit from difficulty options like turning off instakill effects (like curse or petrification) or removing the harsh penalty of dying when you can't get back to your bloodstain because a) that's often what drive new players off the most, and b) it doesn't fuckin' matter anyway, all you're losing is souls, the only thing it does is make you have to go grind more to make up for it.

And of course, there are always EXTRA challenge runs people come up with - nuzlocke runs of pokemon, soul level 1 runs of dark souls, hell, when I do Battletech I often add additional challenges like 'no intentional destruction of civilian buildings' or 'each mech must be assigned to a pilot and if one of them is sidelined, so is the other'

But challenge runs aren't difficulty settings, and more importantly there's no way to unchallenge run a game. You can decide to make the game harder for yourself, but you can't make the game EASIER. And when people say that you can, they're lying to you. Like yeah, there builds that are very strong in dark souls, and leveling optimally will make the game easier, but if you don't know what optimal leveling looks like, it's pointless. If you have a deep and thorough understanding of the game, and you check the messageboards, and delve through the wiki, and use a couple of exploits, the game will be easy! And if it's still too hard for you after that? Well, go fuck yourself, you just spent hours of your life doing research only to give up on the game anyway.

And the truth is, most people who argue that dark souls shouldn't have a difficulty slider are doing it out of bad faith, because they have a certain amount of ego riding on 'being good at hard game' as a character trait, and making these games more accessible frightens them because what if being good at dark souls isn't actually getting them into heaven

but also because they're somehow afraid that having extra difficulty options in the game will tempt them into choosing them? And then they won't get the 'true experience'?

Gamers are some of the most fragile people in existence that the mere option of reducing difficulty sends them into hysterics.

[clegfly]

Getting REAL sick and tired of how omori TikTok views sunny.

Like, they view any scene of him being emotionally vulnerable, affectionate, or even just making an expression outside of just being completely neutral as “mischaracterised”. He’s not some cool, stoic, unwavering badass, he is a traumatised teenager. Don’t cry whenever he dares to give his friend a hug or (god forbid) be SAD about something??? Isn’t like. Part of the point of his development about him allowing himself to break down the repressive walls he built when he shut himself in? And being able to rely on his real friends instead of imaginary versions? And isn’t the game like. Meant to SHOW that he still cares about them despite isolating himself?

It’s really stupid to get mad at a character like that showing emotion or affection personally, especially since he’s not used to expressing it properly after so long. But that’s just me

[badolmen]

Actually it really fucking frustrates me as a disabled person how ‘controversial’ video game accessibility is, how contrived it is to find actually useful accessibility mods for even popular games, how abled gamers try to distance themselves from us because we’re the ones without social lives, who don’t leave the house, who can’t work.

[triglycercule]

it must get boring as hell doing continuous repetitive genos like dust does. he probably constantly questions how his human can keep on going and like not get bored (me too tho ngl because what type of person is out there that's trying to minmax every single undertale geno route interaction???) so i say he changes things up during his own process for a variety of reasons

sometimes when he's feeling REALLY apathetic he might just view everyone as stats and precoded scripts and lines and he just goes about the geno as if he was a player playing a video game (this is incredibly hypocritical because he's acting like the player but also this is dust sans we're talking about. pinnacle of hypocrisy. he'd deny any sort of human like actions because he's not the human and what he's doing is for the greater good). also its kinda fucked because it just means that there's been so many resets that he doesn't view his friends and family as simply people that he's taking the lives of but more as just npcs and numbers. but yk of course he moves on from that episode (and refuses to acknowledge the fact that he was acting very much so like the human. nope nope nope)

or maybe whenever he feels really really really shitty about himself he just lets the human kill him sometimes. he purposely interacts with other monsters before he kills them so he has to hear them beg for mercy. he just lets himself wallow in as much guilt and pain and misery as possible because its really really addicting to be sad and upset and feel bad. and dust is never like "hey i should stop doing this because its getting in the way of be killing the human" because he knows damn well it ISNT. he's still gonna be on that him vs. human grind no matter what even if he spends a few resets fucking around and being miserable and the humans always gonna reset anyways. ALWAYS

even if he's not at lvl 20 or something but still above the human in lv then maybe he'd kill them. but then that also means that there'd still be some monsters left because he nor the human maxed out their stats. so then that's just more suffering for dust (because i really think he'd like to make himself suffer because he feels so much guilt for what he did. his suffering is self inflicted and he knows that and still does it. good for him) because he has to walk around the underground knowing that there are some people hiding in corner or something watching him and scared that he's gonna kill them because thats what he did to everyone else. some nicer monsters might go up to him and try to talk to him but dust doesn't have the chill welcoming friendly vibe sans does anymore so it's just creepy and awkward. angrier monsters might try and yell or fight him and dust just sits there and takes it because theyr totally right. to them it might just look like he killed monsters just for shits and giggles one day and theres no way for him to explain the resets without people just forgetting it in the first place so theres not much he can do except accept the suffering. what in the mental masochism

[presiding]

What is your favourite thing about Billie Lurk?

(Answers are obvious possibly but i love when people talk about her👍)

thanks for the ask!! YEAH ME TOO I love when people talk about Billie! I can't say I have a favourite thing specifically, but I can explain why she's my fav. apologies for not taking this qn literally, but -

short answer: she’s really cool

& you can stop reading there, or, for the maybe 2 mutuals who might have time to read this my thoughts on her as a character, her meta, and her character as raw potential...

long answer:

i considered making this entire thing a gush so you could read a gush about Billie. but, part of what draws me to her is that she’s not always well written, and in fandom she’s underrated for a literal protagonist.

since you ask...

billie is a cool character

when I played Dh2 (hadn't played Dh1), I was excited to see a black woman with disabilities who was captaining a massive ship by herself. wow.

then I discovered Billie’s backstory with Deirdre, the way she responded to that, then having to survive while living on the run, and her bisexuality. as well as her history with daud & delilah. fascinating!

she’s an outsider who has so much to lose, and knows what it's like to lose everything - having lost everything not once but three times - but nevertheless speaks truth to power. she's so brave! she went and helped Emily & Corvo and she must have known they might kill her! plus, she’s smart, she’s funny, she gets shit done, she’s gorgeous.

but... the meta

mild critique of fandom & arkane incoming.

skip this bit if you want - you've been warned twice now - jump to tired Hayao Miyazaki and read from there if you'd like my thoughts on writing her.

i thought Death of the Outsider was going to be amazing and then... well. *sad trombone* i've written about that before so i won't keep banging on. i figured others must be disappointed too, so I joined a few fandom spaces in hopes of finding camaraderie.

most people with complaints about DotO didn’t like how the Outsider and Daud were handled. which is valid & I agree. but it seemed like most paid no attention to Billie; when people talk about her it’s with respect to Daud, as opposed to in her own right. you could argue for fandom misogyny because people don’t talk about adult Emily Kaldwin that much either, but in Billie's case, it’s misogynoir (compare & contrast with the popularity of thomas, particularly the popularity of thomas portrayed as a white man for no particular reason that i've been able to discern - i keep asking around, is it in the books???).

i think this is a LOT better now than it used to be, which is fantastic. or perhaps i have found the correct echo-chamber? ha.

ultimately, The Fandom is a fraction of the entire picture, and not even the important bit since The Fandom is not who these games are made for. you can't make money relying on only your hardcore fans even if all of them spent a fortune on merch, this is true for any AAA game.

while it's true that Billie is underrated from a fandom perspective - but Billie as an underwritten protagonist is squarely Arkane’s fault.

it was reasonable when she was a side character - the lack of info in Dh2 makes perfect sense (if anything there was more lore in Dh2 which is kind of wild)-

- but as a protagonist in Death of the Outsider?

.... there’s lousy writing, and there’s whatever is going on with Billie Lurk, a black woman who mostly exists as a foil or saviour for light-skinned characters. In her own game there’s barely any of her own lore except where it's relevant to saving two dudes.

lore hints at, but barely touches on what race means in the Dh universe (xenophobia is stronger in Dh1; separate essay i guess), but Arkane has patted themselves on the back for portraying non-white characters, which feels like the same thing as the aesthetic of diversity we're seeing in advertising currently because it’s in marketing trend guides. it's self-congratulatory and it's a missed opportunity for deeper storytelling.

you can see an example of diversity at its most shallow in the way that Billie’s written: there’s little engagement with her as an entire person with history & wants & preferences, and the world she walks through in that game feels like it has nothing to do with her. you could make a case for alienation as a theme, but then, how do you handle the titular premise of 'Dishonored' without ever letting Billie make changes in an environment without a chaos system? it's disappointing from that angle too.

in my opinion, whatever it's worth, it was an accident Arkane created such an awesome character - they needed someone to betray daud. congrats billie.

all this said, it makes her an underdog as far as characters to enjoy & create art & stories for. it's nice to find so many like-minded, switched on people! <3

billie's character potential

she’s got a wealth of unexplored lore, being deeply intertwined with both Karnaca & Dunwall’s fates & criminal underbellies, as well as her connections to the witches & whalers, and three Empresses.

she’s lived a few distinct lifetimes and in the games we get to meet her at two peaks (KoD & DotO) & a low (Dh2 as Meagan).

her voice is very distinct, her dry & often dark humour is entertaining & fun to write. her perspective is really interesting - she’s had the widest variety of void-powers of anyone canonically, and she’s also lived through the highest highs and lowest lows.

she's got everything going for her :) i couldn't really pick a fav thing!

[mortellanarts]

2023 go bye bye

[illogicalghost]

debating cutting all my hair off again 😒...

[homosticky]

give me pogo jump tips (hollow knight) (controller) (d pad)

[potionwitchmaya-15]

begging stardew valley modders to make a mod that lets me select the mods i wanna use for different files like darkest dungeon does it because i have a huge massive problem with installing mods (i have over 70) but i dont actually want to reap what ive sewn (ironic for this game) because that is simply Too Much Content At Once and my itty brain Can't Handle That because then i feel bad for not using the content ive downloaded and i get Too Busy and Stressed

[allisonreader]

I should really be avoiding screens today, but I'm not.

[mariana-oconnor]

I had Astarion eat a goblin child. I feel so bad.

And then one got away anyway and it turned out that letting them go free isn't even that bad.

I am the worst.

[novelistparty]

the thing holding me back from playing more MTG is the terrible pressure to learn everything

IRL people at game store magic nights have rolled their eyes and made lots of impatient sounds at me as I've tried to come up with a sensible response to mechanics in their decks that I've never even seen before. And even more people sit there and squirm and say aloud, "well, you could do that......." in the most unhelpful way.

it makes me feel like I need a masters degree before I'm allowed to play with other people 😠

what happened to learning enough to use what I have and then learning the rest as-needed. fuck. Sure, I could read things like the entire Level One: The Full Course about How Magic Works but also what about not being sure if it's worth that time and brain space because of the infinite skill ceiling and that people that will huff and puff about me being a n00b -- no matter how much I know????

I really want to play more but everyone else I know has been burned by unwelcome magic snobs and won't go anywhere near it

[hotelbitches-a]

i just started baldur's gate and i already want to start a second playthrough iuwhrgjeth

[todayisafridaynight]

YIPPEEEEEEEEEEEEEE PRICELESS IS SO GOOD RIGHT... LOVE THE ENDING FOR THAT... and very much anticipating First Penguin's... which I am DETERMINED to continued today... I feel bad for falling behind because I ended up binging a whole anime yesterday since the secondary protagonist was based on Tsutsumi and lost track of Fucking Everything 😭😭😭he is so cute though😚

OH BUT YEAH I played DQXI's demo [the first ten hours of the game or so]... yeaaahhhh... definitely that kind of game for me too... but I hope whenever you get back to it you have a good time! I may not know a thing about Metroid but I am also happy to hear it was an enjoyable experience overall :] I enjoy the tag rambles very much :]

REGARDLESS... EPIC... I HOPE YOU ENJOY SP... OR AT THE VERY LEAST I HOPE YOU CAN STICK WITH IT UNTIL IT BECOMES ENJOYABLE...

AND YOU'RE JUST NOT GOING TO DROP THE TITLE so mean telling me about all these interesting things to watch and not sharin the title (;´༎ຶД༎ຶ`)

TEN HOURS FOR THE DEMO ??? long as hell demo... OH BUT NO i love the games a lot !! ive followed the series for a while since. i do have that dragon ball/toriyama fanatic in me unfortunately even if i dont like toriyama himself ☠️☠️ i only really got to actually start one of the games last year when my bro got DQXI for me and ive been loving it so far (*￣▽￣*)ミ|Ю

i've BEEN enjoying it so far !! i'm just about to start episode four tho i AM gonna lose my mind if this hospital arc goes on one more episode bro this half the series already ☠️

[akascow]

watching splatoon videos and theyre like ‘the splatoon 2 campaign was so easy anyone could beat it’ and im just sitting here still on world two after like 6 years

[icewindandboringhorror]

Daily Log 7

Trying out (probably just temporarily) making short daily-ish notes about things, in an attempt to see if it helps me be more reflective or productive lol.

Activities: Finished all of the little things I carved out of avocado pits, will maybe post pictures at some point? I painted some sections (like for the eye I carved, I made part of it white for contrast, etc.) and then generally glazed them with some shiny paint stuff. Now I really wish I had more avocado pits, I was unsure at first, but I have some new ideas.. I want to try inlaying stones like I've seen in some pictures, similar to the same ones I use for eyes in my sculptures. >:3 (random google image example of the stones inside, like this sort of thing V)

Low effort/small house cleaning tasks, did a few dishes, put up laundry, organized things, put up the recycling, paid bills, etc.

Still extremely sleepy and unfocused, it was hot last night and the cats woke me up multiple times so I only got a few hours of sleep and barely had any energy to do anything and also had a headache and back pain a lot of the day. ToT

Finally made an appointment I was supposed to make like 4 days ago lol..

Gave wet food to the cats (this is an ordeal because George eats way faster than Noodle, so I have to separate them and stand guard so George doesn't vacuum his up immediately then run over and try to eat all of his brothers food.. evil boy must be watched to prevent his crimes )

Edited videos for like.. 15 minutes but still have not been very productive on that front (or editing costume photos or anything) due to shoulder pain and stuff making it hard to type/use mouse much on the computer. grrbbb >:V

Spent 10 minutes looking up a weird pendant I had in my rock collection area and found out it's an old piece of costume jewelry from the 60s(?) and could be worth like $200 potentially, which is cool. I'm not sure if I'll sell it though because I do think it's quite unique and good for a prop when making wizard character inventories, etc, and I'd never be able to find anything like it again (it's this one below.. it's very weird.. looks like something a mage would have lol)

Translated the tapestry text for 5 minutes, and got out some tubs of clothes to start organizing them to sell outfits and stuff online, but then felt ill and had to go lay down so now the tubs are just sitting out on the floor ghgh..

Notable sights: It rained a bit and the sky was very pretty at one point. Didn't get to go outside today due to schedule/low energy, so no clovers or anything. Saw a fat squirrel out the window once though. Also when I was looking through my "rock collection" (which also includes marbles, dice, pieces of glass, stones, gems, rubber balls, seashells, smooth wood, jewelry scraps, etc. ggh.. really more "shiny things collection" but it's mostly rocks, so) for interesting stones to possibly put into avocado pits in the future, I saw a lot of pretty rocks I hadn't thought about in a while, so that was nice.

Goals moving forward: Focus on social activities, finding new friends in the places I want to move, communicating with ones I have. Physical therapy exercises. Finish and upload videos, edit costume pictures & etc. Do the new costumes I've planned. MAKE SCULPTURES at some point, I miss them.

Notable foods: Nothing really.. but it's an asparagus day tomorrow I think so.. >:)c hehehehe... Oh, I did try a bite of corn, which I really really love corn but am not supposed to have it on my diet. The miniscule morsel was sufficiently cherished. Still craving hearty stuff despite resuming my iron supplements lol..