Community MetaSteam | April 2023 - We destroy chaos from a galaxy far far away

[Ascheroth]

Well that is a shame and thanks for the heads up. I may just go back and play Genshin instead. Or Honkai Impact. Or FGO (Especially as I don't have to jump through hoops to play it in Europe now). I'll play a bit longer and see where it goes. But now that I think about it, the game does seem a bit less "complex" than Genshin was at launch.

It really is a shame as the story seems interesting and, as I said earlier, Honkai Impact has a great combat system as well.

I was a bit meh on Star Rail at the beginning but I'm absolutely loving it now.
I was a bit worried about combat at the beginning as well, but it seems fine now honestly. A lot of the depth is still in the teambuilding part of things - which characters to use that have synergies between each other and can make use of the enemy weaknesses, but enemies and bosses also start doing some interesting things to shake things up so I'm sure they manage to come up with even more stuff down the line and once you unlock World 2 of the Simulated Universe (the roguelike mode) there's a lot of fun buff synergies you can set up.
It's never overly complex in combat itself with a lot of the strategizing outside out of it, but after playing a lot these couple days I'm actually fine with that and think its a smart decision. Think about it - they want you to be playing this ideally every day. If every encounter is a 20 minute ordeal that requires your full attention, I'd probably start finding it a chore very soon. I think they struck an alright balance for now - will have to see how I feel about it in a couple/weeks months.

The real winner for me here is the writing though. Main story is standard JRPG stuff so far (I'm at the end of the first planet). Nothing really special, but well executed and well paced, with some hype moments.
The side stuff however is fantastic. The side-stories kinda feel like Yakuza - lots of extremely silly stuff that effortlessly transitions into something emotional/thoughtful/sad if they want to. And then the maps are filled to the brim with interactables that have tons of hilarious flavor text.

Regarding the gacha stuff/pay-walls etc: Hoyoverse games imo are extremely free-to-play friendly. They give you everything you need to complete the game for free. The free characters in Star Rail are extremely good. Genshin gives you everything you need to do all of the puzzles, explorations and story as well for free. The story mode in Honkai Impact doesn't even use your gacha characters.
They will however not give you everything for free. You'll get a decent amount of "paid" characters if you play the game regularly, but if you are a collector that wants absolutely every character, things are gonna get expensive... But again, there's no need for that to complete all of the content in the game. Star Rail could go a different way, but from what I've seen so far I don't think that's likely.
I read someone saying their games are effectly "Pay to Simp", lol, and I think I agree. They want you to get invested in the story and characters via many different avenues (design, animations, voice acting, personality, backstory, etc) so that you'll want them and want so spend money for that, but they're not gonna lock you out of any content if you don't do that.

 

[ezodagrom]

 

[C-Dub]

Quite frankly, if a game mechanic takes more than one paragraph to explain, and the explanation can be reduced to one paragraph by paying the developer money, the game probably sucks ass.

No one would ever do something so complicated unless they wanted you to shortcut it by opening your wallet. Fuck that noise.

 

[fantomena]

If anyone is interesting in Rollerdrome and/or Life is Strange 2 Complete Season for cheap, send me a DM, you decide the price.

 

[Lashley]

If anyone is interesting in Rollerdrome and/or Life is Strange 2 Complete Season for cheap, send me a DM, you decide the price.

My price is YOUR SOUL

 

[BaoIzumi]

 

[Cacher]

Discussion - What are you currently playing? (Week 18 of 2023)

May starts tomorrow! What are you playing? Finished Champions' Ballad of Breath of the Wild. Final dungeon and boss fight was great, and I really enjoy riding the bike. Around 20 shrines left to do so I should be able to finish the game within this week. Not sure if the trial of the sword on...

metacouncil.com

 

[Derrick01]

I don't know much about star rail but I find genshin to be very laid back compared to the gacha horror stories I've read in the past from other games. In fact it has less currencies than some AAA games these days. You have standard wishes that only work on the permanent banner and the other wish type works on the weapon banner (which you should never really use anyway as it's a waste of wishes, 5 star weapons aren't needed at ALL) and the character banner that rotates every 3-4 weeks.

The only other currency you need to pay any attention to is the daily resin which is similar to other gachas in that once you run out you can't do domains (dungeons) or world bosses, however in genshin that stuff is like 20% of the game at most? You can still run around and do story, side quests or just explore the world without resin. And a couple years ago they added an item that restores almost half of your resin cap and it's very easy to gather a large mass of them over time since the free version of each battle pass gives about 5 I think. For example I currently have over 90 of those items.

Genshin just seems like a lot when you first start and you don't even unlock most of the game's features until adventure rank 20 or so, so the early game can put off a lot of people. But it really has far less stuff weighing on you than most games of this type and an increasing number of "normal" AAA games. Genshin doesn't even really have end game content that could push you into pulling more characters or making/building more teams of characters. It has the spiral abyss which is the same thing since day 1 of the game and just rotates the last 4 floors every 2 weeks, and you can easily skip that if you want without affecting the game at all (for example I almost never do it). It's actually surprising how laid back mihoyo allows genshin to be, as they could easily create ways to manipulate people into spending more on characters or materials if they wanted.

 

[Kyougar]

Why not Factorio?
Yeah, yeah my joke is getting overused, but like 95% of my gaming time is spent on old games.

GAMES where the GAMEPLAY is the draw and not the fancy story or a checklist on how much towers you can find on an open world map.
If I find a "cinematic experience" interesting, I will just watch it on youtube I certainly don't have the time and muse to "play" substandard boring gameplay to watch the next segment of the story.

 

[Li Kao]

I didn’t expect to see Star Rail discussed in the main thread.
As for me, after hating my first session with it, I lowered my expectations (or more appropriately stopped wishing the game was something it obviously wasn’t planned to be), and I must say I relatively love it.
On the writing front, if the plot is whatever, the characters are likable and the lore with the Aeons is pretty great.

Sure, the combat is too simple, but I think what really hurts is the corridor dungeons design. It’s nothing new for a 2d gacha, but in a 3d world it feels pretty weak.

 

[QFNS]

This video is wild to me. Some truly fucked up stuff from AMD, ASUS and some other motherboard manufacturers.

Gee, maybe those "protections" you advertise should maybe like..... protect something. Instead of turning your CPU into a bomb.

 

[Mivey]

This video is wild to me. Some truly fucked up stuff from AMD, ASUS and some other motherboard manufacturers.

Gee, maybe those "protections" you advertise should maybe like..... protect something. Instead of turning your CPU into a bomb.

While it's a very particular edge case that clearly no one tested for, it is a bit wild how this exactly happens. I guess the vendors just copy-pasted a lot of their code and things to this new chipset, and didn't bother to really stress test it. Basically having your customers act like beta testers. It's wild how many things had to go wrong for this to happen. Really huge fuckup by everyone involved.

 

[Lashley]

 

[Hektor]

Does Honkai Star Rail have any Honkers To Rail?

I'll see myself out

 

[STHX]

Does Honkai Star Rail have any Honkers To Rail?

I'll see myself out

 

[Knurek]

Does Honkai Star Rail have any Honkers To Rail?

I'll see myself out

 

[Alexandros]

Jedi Survivor is a mess on PS5 too performance-wise.

 

[Line]

Speaking of gacha currencies and stuff like that, there's also the problem that the confusion is often the point - typically so people don't really grasp how much money they spend by converting various numbers along the way, which makes problems out of a molehill.

Like in Genshin, the main currency you need to get characters, weapons, and about everything important is primogems.
You get those everywhere, from quests, chests, achievements, events, daily logins, etc etc.
But they convert to two different currencies to get characters/weapons, one of which you do not want to convert as it's for the "free" slot machine that you regularly get to play with ingame.
And there's genesis crystals, which can only be bought with real money. And they are primogems. Literally, they convert 1-to-1 in every situation (well you can buy the few outfits with them and not primos I guess), they have the same use, but a different name and icon.

That's the kind of thing that muddies the understanding of the mechanics, for no reason. That's 4 different currencies that are technically the same thing.
They could just delete all of that and just put a 160 primogems price on the slot machines and give you a +1 free roll when you get the dedicated currency, but obscuring the design was the point... despite probably not being needed at all, I think if they were more honest with how things work people would have less issues jumping into those games.
Especially for a super casual one like Genshin, just give people their completely free AAA open world game, and put the characters and weapons in the gacha with a price on it, then they play or they don't

 

[Lashley]

Jedi Survivor is a mess on PS5 too performance-wise.

nuh uh, pc sucks, ps5 better forever

 

[Parsnip]

Yikes at the PS5 Jedi resolution and performance.
It's almost like the game shipped unfinished everywhere.

I'll eventually play it, I liked Fallen Order well enough. Definitely deep discount though.
Kind of too bad that the writing on the main guy was kind of boring, almost everyone else in the first game was more interesting than him. Make a game with the space witch instead, I'll play that.

 

[Mor]