Community MetaSteam | April 2020 - A Disaster Report From Raccoon City

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Theswweet

Dirty Weeb
Mar 12, 2019
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I game share'd GTA V on PS3, thought it was just ok, and have no desire to rebuy it on PC.

...on another note, got my new survey for the W101 kickstarter. Physical PC was an option, and since I sincerely doubt there'll be any other way to get one, that's what I bit on.

I'm curious what that'll look like.
 
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QFNS

Plays too many card games
Nov 18, 2018
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That Rogue Legacy 2 page says runes can stack to infinity. So like penta-jumps? Hyper ultra speed? Lolol

Meanwhile shit has gotten REAL in Crossbell. Chapter 4 just wild.
 
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Le Pertti

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I hope Rogue Legacy 2 becomes this years GOTY here, just for the drama.:D

but mostly because I hope it's that good!

Edit: I'm of course referencing when Rogue Legacy 1 was the our GOTY back in the SteamGAF days.:D
 
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Cordelia

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After reading through FF7R spoilers, I'd say that one year exclusivity for that game is a big scumbag move.

NOMURAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
 

Le Pertti

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Ordered a new keyboard! Couldn't afford the one I wanted, Razer Huntsman TE, but I found Razer Ornata Chrome on sale so got that one instead! BUUUUT it's in french haha, having spent typing on a QWERTY since, C64 days? It's going to get some used to going to AZERTY. But living in France I need to get used to it sooner or later.
 
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Deku

Just nothing
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Ordered a new keyboard! Couldn't afford the one I wanted, Razer Huntsman TE, but I found Razer Ornata Chrome on sale so got that one instead! BUUUUT it's in french haha, having spent typing on a QWERTY since, C64 days? It's going to get some used to going to AZERTY. But living in France I need to get used to it sooner or later.
You could change the keyboard layout ;)
 

PC-tan

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Jan 19, 2019
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What are some improvements that Valve can make to the review system on Steam? Reviews are important, so what can be done to not only get more people to do? You could offer incentives but then that could potentially get abused and then you will see people posting even smaller reviews ("drive by reviews"?)
 

Arsene

On a break
Apr 17, 2019
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After reading through FF7R spoilers, I'd say that one year exclusivity for that game is a big scumbag move.

NOMURAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Probably wouldn’t have released on PC until 2021 even if Sony didnt pay for exclusivity tbh.
 

Deku

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Not sure it's possible to remove the keycaps. Sure I don't need to see what I'm typing, but still.:D Still think I will need to learn the AZERTY layout, any time I've used a computer in France I've had to ask people how to do basic shit haha.
I didn't mean on the keyboard itself, but on the system itself :p
 
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AHA-Lambda

MetaMember
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A couple of questions have randomly come to the front of my mind

1) wasn't there supposed to be a demo for Disaster Report 4 yesterday?
2) with the rerelease of the original Sin game on Steam again, and the rights reverting to Nightdive Studios, what about the sequel?
 
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Hektor

Autobahnraser
Nov 1, 2018
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After reading through FF7R spoilers, I'd say that one year exclusivity for that game is a big scumbag move.

NOMURAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
🤔🤔🤔

I dont really want to know
But reading this after what Nomura-San did with Yozora im immensely hyped

But reading in between the lines on ERA i have the impression the remake will be similar to the eva movies
 
OP
lashman

lashman

Dead & Forgotten
Sep 5, 2018
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I just meant rereleasing the single episode that came out not finishing them all 😛
ahhhh ... well in that case - yeah, probably :)

Wasn't that cancelled? Or am I thinking of SS3?
technically SS3 hasn't been canned ... but i don't think we're gonna see that one happening any time soon (if ever) :p

but yeah - at least the remake is progressing well ... in fact - they do regular dev streams :)
 

Amzin

No one beats me 17 times in a row!
Dec 5, 2018
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To be honest, I can see the purpose of these "time-wastes" in certain circumstances. Although, I'm not really fond of calling it "time-waste" since playing games is a pastime already and "time-waste" isn't really much of a critique, but still I see what you mean.

Without some of these sacrifices though a win won't be as substantial. In this particular case I'm thinking of games like Souls or even Battle Royale games such as PUBG or Fortnite where defeat isn't necessarily a fail state but a part of progress. I can even say that some of my favorite moments in Souls and PUBG are during matches/sessions where I end up dying/losing, so to me it isn't as simple as death = waste of time.

Having played The Witcher 3 recently, I gotta say having to re-loot a section + re-do all inventory management after dying can be frustrating as hell. It's one thing having to run back and restart a boss, but all the micro-management is really frustrating to do all over again. :notlikethisblob:
Yeah, I think we kind of see eye to eye here mostly. It's really the repetitive, pointless things that get to me in these games. For instance in Hollow Knight, there is a walk back to a boss that is simply empty space, just for the sake of taking time. It's like... What's with these games and not allowing to retry bosses instantly? HLD did that, and it's one of the most challenging games I've ever played. Are they averse to the idea of not wasting the player's time and having some quality of life? :p

Now checkpoint-based exploration, I can get behind, because it's about pushing a little further every time and it'd be even better with an element of procedural generation between deaths.
It is far too late and I am exhausted but hopefully this is coherent - I just want to clarify what I mean by "false challenge".

I think it's important to me to distinguish between actual challenge, e.g. a hard battle that you can learn and retry and get through, and time wasting, e.g. multi-minute endeavors to get back to the thing that you died to that offer no challenge whatsoever. Furi to me is probably the absolute worst offender ever for this - it is only boss fights, and after the first couple I could (usually) get to the 3rd, final phase of each one on my first try, but then I would die (all 3 of your healthbars) to that one because of the completely different design and spike in difficulty. But you have to start at phase 1 every. Single. Retry. The thing I did the first time... the thing there is no way to speed through... it was bad enough where even though I liked the game I just stopped playing because I had no patience for it.

Games like Sekiro and Souls vary wildly in how much they make you redo completely trivial things. It's not necessarily a problem that a death itself is punishing, but forcing you redo trivial things that you've already proven yourself against is a design flaw in my opinion. The final boss for the "true" Sekiro ending resulted in me just cheating to finish it because, again, I got to the FOURTH phase on my first go and died, and those are not short phases. I just had no desire to redo those same stupid chip-away-at-giant-health-bar fights for another 10-15 minutes for each go at the actual challenge. Hollow Knight is guilty of this too in their "true" boss battle, where again you have the time waster of a phase that means nothing and soaks up your time before going on to the part you'll die to 15 times at least. Even Thumper did this in their "boss" levels, and that's a rhythm game so there is literally no way to speed up the retries or get better at the parts you already cleared.

There are games where the actual entire challenge is potentially long and there's no good way around it, like a tactics game where the challenge is "clear the fight" and sometimes that can take a good half hour before you fail, but it's one continuous encounter. To me, that is different than boss phases or making you wade through mooks over and over because when you retry the battle you are immediately facing what stopped you before, whereas in the other examples you generally aren't.

I think Hyper Light Drifter is a great example overall of how to actually handle challenge. I remember one room I died in probably over a dozen times, no bosses or anything, but it was satisfying and fun because the entire time I was working ONLY on that challenge because you respawn at the door to that room. Your actual downtime is like 2 seconds tops. Most of the boss fights were hard and fast and only had one phase, they just escalated as they got more hurt. There was another area where the checkpoint was worse and you had to redo more (I think it was one of those smashy-block corridors) and it stood out.

MO: Astray has a few missteps here but also handles the like 400 deaths I had well, with extremely close checkpoints and maybe only 2 or 3 times in the whole game did I really have to redo things pointlessly.

I definitely don't hate hard games. I hate games that don't understand what hard means.
 

Alextended

Segata's Disciple
Jan 28, 2019
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Looks good. Most of it appears to be 3D though, not pixel art. To me for some reason it reminds of Yahtzee's adventure games like 6 Days a Sacrifice. Random.
 
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LEANIJA

MetaMember
May 5, 2019
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forcing you redo trivial things that you've already proven yourself against is a design flaw in my opinion.
I would have to look it up in detail, but I read/heard that this is generally done by design. When you fail at a certain stage of a level or boss fight, there's a possibility that letting you retry that same section over and over again would be more frustrating, giving you a feeling of incompetence. Making you start over gives you an opportunity to get a sense of accomplishment again, since you already know what you're doing in these parts of the level/bossfight.
 

Ge0force

Excluding exclusives
Jan 12, 2019
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Started playing Everspace last night. I still suck at it, but it's fun!

Also played My Friend Pedro. Great concept, but I'm not sure I want to play 50 levels of this. Humor is great tho.
 
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Li Kao

It’s a strange world. Let’s keep it that way.
Jan 28, 2019
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Well, I finally purchased Dandy Dungeon. I loved Black Bird and Million Onion Hotel. Love Onion Games quirkiness. There is an update, discount, and a tailored-made demo now as of today
What do you mean by tailored-made demo ? Is it a prologue or something out of the main game ?
 

beep boop

MetaMember
Dec 6, 2018
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What are some improvements that Valve can make to the review system on Steam? Reviews are important, so what can be done to not only get more people to do? You could offer incentives but then that could potentially get abused and then you will see people posting even smaller reviews ("drive by reviews"?)
Maybe a badge that levels up as people mark your review as helpful. And it only counts for people not on your friends list or who you’re not in a group with. That might be enough work to dissuade people from trying to game it. Then again, if we presume many people have poor reading comprehension, they will farm helpful ratings from their friends/groups anyway.

I would think reviews are typically more useful when a person wants to share their opinion on a game, so measures to incentivize writing them other than a periodic reminder will not necessarily lead to a better output of helpful reviews.

I do think Steam could be better about deprioritizing funny reviews or one-sentence reviews. Even if they’re marked as helpful, more often than not there is little information to be gleaned from those. Their main relevance is whether the game is recommended or not, and since that is accounted for in the recent and overall review rating, they really don’t need to show up as the first customer-facing reviews on a game’s page.
 
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Cordelia

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Jun 10, 2019
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🤔🤔🤔

I dont really want to know
But reading this after what Nomura-San did with Yozora im immensely hyped

But reading in between the lines on ERA i have the impression the remake will be similar to the eva movies
Correct.
Damn that trailer gives me extremely strong Nihei vibes.
I'm in :dmcblob:
I just scroll over it but this post make me interested on that game.
 
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Swenhir

Spaceships!
Apr 18, 2019
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Your post was not only coherent but very well-written. I agree with every word you said. Redoing things you've already managed is, to me, the opposite of fun. It is punishing, tedious and something I'm glad to see games do away with. HLD is an excellent example of a game that respects your time while providing you with one of the hardest mechanical challenges I've ever seen short of MP competitive games.

It's about downtime before retry and some of the hardest platforming games get that. Press "r" to retry, bam you're there again. And sometimes, for especially long platforming sections you have checkpoints halfway. In my opinion, during Ori 2's final chase sequence, they should have implemented one. I do remember that smashy-block section in the underground city level of HLD :). And the 800-dash challenge...

I would say that boss phases are absolutely eligible for being checkpoint-skipped as well. I'm the kind of player who once I've "gotten it" finds it just mind-numbing to repeat. I don't know how others can find it exhilarating to have to redo the same thing you've already understood and executed on over and over again, but it's not for me. Sekiro was the one game that I dropped in the first third because I could see myself never enjoying it despite how much I loved the art and world. I finally made myself give up instead of letting my "gamer" ego get in the way of sanity and I'm glad I did.

TL;DR : I agree and it's heartening to see someone else have the same issues with this particular design for "hard" difficulty.
 

Durante

I <3 Pixels
Oct 21, 2018
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Durante co-op alert
It's a major pet peeve of mine when developers either don't know or don't care what co-op means.

Valve now even made it very explicit in the game tags (thanks, finally!).
But this game: text: "local competitive multiplayer"; tag: "Shared/split screen co-op". What the hell.
 

xxr

Member of the Abyss
Dec 21, 2018
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Games like Sekiro and Souls vary wildly in how much they make you redo completely trivial things. It's not necessarily a problem that a death itself is punishing, but forcing you redo trivial things that you've already proven yourself against is a design flaw in my opinion. The final boss for the "true" Sekiro ending resulted in me just cheating to finish it because, again, I got to the FOURTH phase on my first go and died, and those are not short phases. I just had no desire to redo those same stupid chip-away-at-giant-health-bar fights for another 10-15 minutes for each go at the actual challenge. Hollow Knight is guilty of this too in their "true" boss battle, where again you have the time waster of a phase that means nothing and soaks up your time before going on to the part you'll die to 15 times at least. Even Thumper did this in their "boss" levels, and that's a rhythm game so there is literally no way to speed up the retries or get better at the parts you already cleared.
I can definitely see the frustration, but I'm curious if I'm understanding this right; would you want Sekiro to save progress in the middle of a boss-fight? If so that makes no sense to me. I've never played a game where I could go back to a boss after a death and have it at half health. That would take away the whole purpose of a boss fight in my view. You might as well be invincible since there's no need to learn the fight if you can start off right where you died previously.
 
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fantomena

MetaMember
Dec 17, 2018
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Im gonna go ahead and recommend Recore and Quantum Break from the Xbox Game Studios sales on Steam. They are not masterpieces in any way, but I had a ton of fun with both of them.

Picked up Recore (finished the Windows Store version previously) and AoE 1 DE.

Already played Gears 5 on game pass so I will wait for a deeper Steam sale.
 
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Pommes

Hey you! Have a nice day!
Jun 4, 2019
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Also I bet Cyberpunk is getting pushed back to Nov or early next year :(
...
Cyberpunk will most likely be delayed as well at this point, along with the new unannounced Assassin's Creed, if that was actually planned to release this year and a few other games. Nothing they can do about it though.
Some days ago there was a podcast of a german gaming magazine with two employees from CD Projekt Red.
CD Project Red is completely working from home now. The podcast guests said that their personal productivity has actually gone up because of no more meetings etc.
So maybe the can keep the planned release date (I personally also think that it is probable that Cyberpunk will be moved back).

Interesting titbit from the podcast: When CD Project Red moved their workers to home-office they actually shuttled roughly 700 workstations with Cyberpunk 2077 on them threw Warsaw in two days.

Link to the (german) podcast for those who are interested: Folge 81: So machen die Cyberpunk-Macher trotz Corona-Krise weiter
 
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Dragon1893

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Another FF7 trailer?! Is there even anything left to show at this point? I've been avoiding new footage for a long time, it's crazy to me that some people watch all of these, this one in particular is supposed to be extremely spoilerish.
I mean, you've played a demo and seen several trailers, surely you've decided if you want it by now.
 

MegaApple

Just another Video Game Enthusiast
Sep 20, 2018
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Another FF7 trailer?! Is there even anything left to show at this point? I've been avoiding new footage for a long time, it's crazy to me that some people watch all of these, this one in particular is supposed to be extremely spoilerish.
I mean, you've played a demo and seen several trailers, surely you've decided if you want it by now.
Maybe to push the non-hardcore people?
Like I've never properly played FF7, don't get the hype and haven't played the demo. But the latest trailer had me excited.
 
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Swenhir

Spaceships!
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I can definitely see the frustration, but I'm curious if I'm understanding this right; would you want Sekiro to save progress in the middle of a boss-fight? If so that makes no sense to me. I've never played a game where I could go back to a boss after a death and have it at half health. That would take away the whole purpose of a boss fight in my view. You might as well be invincible since there's no need to learn the fight if you can start off right where you died previously.
I'm not Amzin who you are replying to but It actually makes a lot of sense. We're not talking half-health but moving past the previous phase. It makes a lot of sense considering you've already beaten it and any more than that is dull repetition.

I also think that "learning the fight" is kind of a design crutch for knowing how to balance combat's mechanical difficulty. These games rely a lot on memorization and not on an overarching combat design. It's about learning enemy patterns and forgetting about them once the encounter is done. You don't become better at playing your character, at mastering the skills you have. Just at this very thing. Now there is always an element of memorization, but for instance From's games have become especially and guilty of this. Some bosses even have feints and fake-outs just to throw you off an animation's wind-up so you have to memorize that too instead of fluidly reacting to what you see.

For all the criticism I have of Eternal, that game only pulls that crap on the Marauder, and the last two bosses. Otherwise, the game relies on the same set of skills throughout, growing it steadily.

Also, I want to make it clear that I'm not attacking you. This is a very friendly community and I don't want to sound nor be hostile to anyone :).
 
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