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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   38760 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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My point is that modern forever games are so complex that it's implausible or at least unpleasant to learn to play them on your own. A late 90s game like, oh, Fallout or Morrowind for example, you can have a pleasant time muddling through the middling level of complexity and mastering it on your own. This learning process was what I really loved.

Modern games are like making a choice between doing a worksheet of fifth grade math problems with fancy graphics OR going through the Khan Academy course for multivariable calculus with a tutor giving you formulas to memorize.

The Internet has effectively outsourced tutorials for some games. Some of this is a natural progression of some games being so complex that watching a Let's Play is the most efficient way of learning. On the other hand, some of this is just lazy devs knowing fanmade wikis will document enough stuff that they think tutorials are a waste of time.

That said, I disagree on the characterization of modern gaming being a dichotomy of ruthless complexity vs braindead simplicity. There's plenty of games in the middleground. The Total War games are one example. Slay the Spire is another. Terraria is yet another, although it's certainly an offender of the "outsource the tutorial to the wiki" phenomenon.

sure, but none of the games you listed are "forever games", I don't think. Have you played Path of Exile, or Warframe?

I've beaten PoE twice (with years in between), and never needed to look things up. If you're just getting to the level cap and the end of the story, then you don't need a hyperoptimized build.

"beaten poe" is a pretty ambiguous phrase. the level cap is 100, and I've never gotten anywhere near it, even with fairly optimized builds. The end of the story is certainly not anything terribly hard to hit, but I'd call that the beginning of the game, not the end. The end is t16 maps and the uber bosses, and you need serious gear and a coherent build or you just run out of gas in, at best, early yellows.

the level cap is 100, and I've never gotten anywhere near it, even with fairly optimized builds.

Oops, I outleveled all of the story areas, so maybe that's why I though that? It's been two years since I've played.

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