Notices by Jacek Wesołowski (jzillw@mastodon.gamedev.place), page 8

"Crypt Custodian" was recommended to me by a coworker and it is indeed very good in a "back to basics" kind of way. Bonus points for a charming story.

It also reminds me of just how much I hate boss battles - but that's a me problem. They're very well done, like the rest of the game, they're just not my cup of tea.

Slowly getting to the end of Original Sin 2 (over 100 hours already, this game is even slower than BG3). It has its good moments and bad moments, but overall it's a decent game. BG3 is essentially the next iteration, it even uses the same narrative tropes.

One thing I haven't managed to get used to is that this game expects you to tank and it expects you to cheese. It forces me to think in terms of exploiting the mechanics' edge cases. Makes me feel like I'm doing QA.

One of my cats has just invented stealth gameplay.
She hid herself under a blanket, but not very well.
The other cats could see her but didn't recognize her.
It was tense.

Which I guess means a plain old HFSM in an immersive sim has the intelligence of a cat.

A: who do I talk to about X?
Me: B made it, but then I added a few bits.
A: Ok, so I need to use X to do Y, does that make sense?
Me: Seems so.
B: Yes, it makes sense.
A: Thanks.
Google's auto-summary: A wants to know who to talk to about X. B says it makes sense.

@adrianhon I was in the room when a left-wing party member asked a leader how we're going to solve the problem of lorry drivers losing their jobs when autonomous cars become a thing, and the response was "well, people are getting older, we're going to need a lot of nurses", so unfortunately I no longer take it for granted that someone with a Big Idea is going to notice or care for small details.

(FWIW the leader in question lost the relevant vote back then)

They said global warming would me let grow vine on my balcony, but they didn't say it would turn the entire late autumn to early spring season into one perpetual November.

November is easily the least pleasant month of the year in Poland: wet, windy, and hovering around 5 degrees Celsius. I'd much rather have -5 degrees and half a metre of snow, which is what i remember as the winter from my childhood.

@7nihilate Oooh, strong demoscene vibes! :-)

"BG3 races worst to best", says the title of a YouTube clip, and I know what they probably mean (either "least to most fun to play" or "least to most likely to survive combat"), yet the phrasing is making me uncomfortable.

(might be clickbait)

@quaithe The mechanics in both of these offer a lot of tactical depth, BUT it's still trumped by stats. Ultimately, it's more about the order in which you approach the enemies than it is about actual execution.

The multiple entry points thing is neat, and there's also the teleport spell, which is very fun to use but messes up the roleplaying layer a lot, which is my point.

A few examples (you might want to not use all of them, depending on your design goals):
- a more linear experience
- a generally lower difficulty bar that gives the player more margin for suboptimal play
- less XP from enemies, more XP from quest resolutions
- fewer stats to farm
- optional handicaps the player can earn through other means (DOS2 does a bit of this: most boss arenas have multiple entry points, some of which grant tactical advantage - this is neat, actually)

This isn't a git gut situation. because the entire gameplay loop is "encounter an enemy, lose a fight, go somewhere else, gain a level, go back to the same enemy, kick their ass so hard there should be an achievement for it"". The window where tactics actually matter is fairly narrow. Most of the time your stats decide the outcome.

Yes, it's a delicate balance design-wise, not easy to maintain. There are things you can do to make the mechanics more stable, though.

Right not I'm about to try the final fight for the first act, and I'd really like my characters to advance one more level before that. My options are:

- kill a bunch of characters that are technically my enemies by I don't want to kill them for roleplaying reasons

- have a fight with an "optional" boss that I could also auto-defeat with a quest item, except then I wouldn't t get the XP

The boss isn't really optional because I need all the XP I can get, or else.

Gave up on Divinity: Original Sin because the progression curve felt very demanding and it stopped being fun. Game the sequel a try and I can see a lot of improvement. But the core issue remains: no matter how good your tactics you are, your party simply has to farm the stats, or else.

Problem is, the game systematically robs you of XP if you play a certain way that generally involves avoiding combat (via dialogue options, mostly). It's a side effect of several design decisions.

Today I converted a few dozen layers into separate pngs, I imported them into Unreal, and I found the option to bulk-edit their import properties. That's all I did today, it took about an hour, and it makes me feel like a hero because it's 2 January and I'm still on vacation.

I think if I had to point at a single issue, it would be the fact I can't tell how tough the enemies in a given encounter are going to be, because typically they spawn their entourage after combat begins.

In BG3, when you walk into the main goblin camp, you can see how many there are and how they're going to be a problem even if they're lower level. When I played, I spend a good chunk of time planning my approach to this battle - and that was fun. Stumbling randomly into deathtraps isn't.

About 20 hours into Divinity, and the similarities with BG3 are undeniable, but also it makes me appreciate the progress they've made in BG3 much more. BG3 is way better balanced, in that you can still visit places out of order and have fun, and you don't constantly stumble into difficulty spikes. In Divinity, it's like trying to feel my way out of a maze: I go there, the enemies are too strong, so I go there, the enemies are still to strong, so I go there, oh I can beat those, etc.

I bought Divinity: Original Sin because it was on sale and because I was curious about that game I never played that everyone seemed to like.

It's basically Baldur's Gate 3 version 0.1.

I can see how they made this one on a much smaller budget, made a bunch of mistakes but learned from them, verified some ideas, and then reused that experience in a higher profile title.

I was worried this was going to be a real-time hack&slash slog but no, it's actually decent, if a bit rough here and there.

I've been playing immersive sims since the original Thief, and I love the genre, but I have this dream I'm probably never going to be able to fulfill: to make an immesrive sim with wholesome characters in it. I don't want another story about criminals. I want stories about regular people trying to deal with the mess around them.

Reinstalled CP2077, but bounced off an abusive scripted sequence fairly early in the Act 1 main quest. This made me think about the difference between CD Projekt games and the games I actually enjoyed, like Deus Ex: Human Revolution or Dishonored.

And I think it boils down to the fact these games know how to do a complicated character who's navigating a pathological system and making (flawed) moral choices, as opposed to just being the most disgusting asshole the writers could think of.

@robryk Czerwony, derived from czerw. The color of an earthworm, basically.