homicidalrobot

Shroud (and folks like me) with 200+ hours found the fun. The quest design in starfield has extreme lows, but it has some extreme highs that are probably helped if you watched the shows and films the quests are referencing. The faction questlines are stellar the first time through.

If you just hate all quests and only care about gameplay outside of that, you should probably admit that to yourself instead of flinging buzzwords and design guesses around. Bethesda open worlds have always felt surprisingly dead, closest they've got is morrowind and oblivion with almost every npc having a domicile and a daily routine. Their open worlds have been panned as being empty, too quest-locked, too small (or artificially large), poorly balanced, and any number of other complaints that they're trash/slop/unplayable.

We've heard this take (new game bad, old game good) for the entirety of video games existing across basically every genre. If you don't like it, cool. It's a game where you assign your own goals after a point (or even from the get-go) so ultimately it's on you to find a satisfying gameplay loop. It's okay if you can't, but it says something about you and not the title, especially when you turn into a goblin who can't stand the fun or joy of others on public spaces

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.

In high school, I took some time to read Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People". The title is as edgy as I was as a teen, but the advice is wholesome and sound, the core being one of the first few rules the book prescribes: Take a genuine interest in people. It's a solid set of rules that help beyond masking behaviors and can even act as masking itself, even if it could do with some more up to date examples.

I saw your reply and regret to inform you the other folks are right, I'm no gamergater and the context isn't even right. Woke is a descriptor that causes me to buy a game. "Core" referred to gamers that were willing to grind, basically; it was a useful demographic for describing players and I don't really know what has replaced it.

Not that odd. Seems like a decade and change ago it became common knowledge that market-tested, sanitized content wasn't really resonating with "core gamers", but we don't even call the demographic that anymore. Not really sure how we got here

Unfortunately not how nicotine works

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.

MRI machines do explode and send shrapnel everywhere. Emergency stopping them causes the helium that's trapped in the part that rotates the magnets to become a gas, then expand as the magnets superheat. In some cases, this causes an understandable explosion.

Seriously happened once already this year https://healthimaging.com/topics/medical-imaging/magnetic-resonance-imaging-mri/mri-explosion-leaves-3-injured-including-2-hospital-staffers , the cop is lucky.

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).