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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 25th, 2023

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  • Rogue had you start from scratch with a new character in a random map every time.

    Rogue-like games initially meant you start from scratch in a new random world, but you incrementally improve your experience by small buffs you can buy, or changing your starting equipment / skills (sometimes by changing out which character you start as).

    Rogue-like has slowly changed to mean “start over regularly but slowly unlock new items/buffs/equipment/characters/etc to help you further explore a world which may or may not be random”

    So it applies to games like Risk of Rain (and 2), Balatro, Dead Cells, and Rogue Legacy, just to name a few examples (though 3 of those are 2d platformers with randomly generated worlds if I remember right…).

    But yeah it seems to have morphed into a broadly used term for games where you get better over time through purchasing permanent buffs and whatnot (as well as natural skill), but are forced to restart any time you die.

    Vampire Survivors and other similar style games have you constantly restarting when you die so I think the term fits as a partial descriptor.

    Maybe we could adopt the idle/clicker game term Prestige, but that’s more of a voluntary restart when you hit a wall and can’t progress, so I don’t think it quite works.




  • It’s not that seamless depending on the content you usually consume.

    I feel like I keep seeing the same single livestream trying to sell me a phone charger, and then roughly the same 5 or 6 videos trying to sell me a specific product over and over again.

    As long as I don’t report or say “I keep seeing this ad” it will show me the same ones so they are easy to skip.

    Usually it’s something I started watching until I realized it was an ad, but because I started watching it one time it thinks I’m interested so it will continually show it to me.

    Once you spot them they are easy to skip. (at least, until they get better at masking then and then it will get harder).





  • If the studio is already rather large and retains a number of employees then you’re either asking for them to divide into small teams and produce a bunch of projects in parallel (none of which will potentially sell well or be able to maintain the momentum the studio has with previous AAA title releases), or you’re essentially asking them to downsize into a smaller studio, laying off 80-90% of their workforce, to produce non-AAA titles again.

    Those smaller projects now have smaller marketing budgets (1/10th each). Smaller marketing budget generally means less sales, unless something goes viral (0.1% of the time or less, so really you need 1000 projects not just 10). Not to mention price point is going to be at $20 or maybe $30.

    Internally on each game you’ll need people to take up the roles of like art director, or whoever decides the look and feel of the art for the game. With AAA titles you used to have one of those (I assume), but now one person has to look after 10 projects, or other people have to step up (one for each project) to do that job. Should they get paid more? Now your smaller projects are costing more money.

    It’s sort of like saying 9 women can make a baby in 1 month. We know that’s impossible. AAA studios are not structured around creating 10 smaller projects.





  • You know what’s fascinating about that?

    I’m pretty sure that every CD had the entire game and all the art assets for every town / place you could enter on the world map. Every enemy. All the music.

    The only difference between each CD was the FMV cutscenes contained on them.

    At least that was the story / rumor at the time. For optimization they could have reduced the art assets and music to only areas you could enter at that point in the game, and only enemy models you would see, but supposedly that wasn’t the case.




  • You can find port crystals around the map or via quests. There are also some fixed ones on the map.

    You can place them anywhere… Outside I think? But maybe just anywhere.

    Once you find/place them you can use a Ferrystone while outside to travel to any one you have placed. There is almost always at least one Ferrystone for sale in each town, and it will refresh after a few days when you buy it. It will cost 10,000 gold.

    The number of port crystals you can place are limited (in the first game it was 8 or 9?). You can find roughly 5 per playthrough iirc. You can NewGame+ as many times as you want once far enough in the main quest (retaining most items, equipment, all vocation levels and experience…i imagine any vocation master skills too; generally just the quests and the world reset). I’m still on my first playthrough so haven’t tried.

    But there are no issues finding Port crystals and buying / finding Ferrystones. You DO NOT NEED MTX. That headline was so overblown.