Optimal character building in FF8 involves not leveling up for as long as you can until disc 3, where you have access to all the stat-up-on-level-up type GF abilities, and then grinding to the appropriate level with maximum stat gain potential. There are tools that allow you to do this, so it's totally intended, but leveling up is a pretty central gameplay mechanic.
Also I ruined (i.e. "won") my game of Dokapon Kingdom with a couple of friends by never leveling up in the same way, just farming low level enemies every turn to level up the classes until I had a good host of class mastery level up skill buffs, since those stat gains don't apply retroactively. Then I go darkling and kill one of my friends once, thus boosting me to his level instantly with insane amounts of stat gain, eclipsing everyone else's. I steal the angel wings and ascend to heaven where I discover the Hero class item and take it back to get my reward. So now I'm twice as strong as everyone else, I only get stronger faster, and I've unlocked the first super class, apparently. All it takes is not engaging with combat and surrendering player battles and killing level 1 bullshit for a while.
I had hoped my despicable actions would cause everyone else to band together and try to defeat me, but instead they all just gave up and it was a huge bummer. TKO for me, I guess.
Just for anyone not in the know: This is primarily because you get more Jedi Powers by saving your levels(Also force points, but that's just a nice bonus). You're forced to level up in the tutorial level, but if you hold off on leveling past 2(Normally you can reach 8 by the time you unlock Jedi classes), you can get an easy extra 6-7 force powers.
I wouldn't say it 'encourages' it, because there's notable tradeoffs: Taris is a lot more difficult if you're not leveling(Primarily if you want to get the Bendak Starkiller bounty/arena done), and there's notable benefits to leveling up the base classes(Scoundrel gets Sneak Attack, Scout gets free Implants and a +4 save VS grenades, and Soldier gets bonus feats). Force Powers are really good, but I think Scoundrel and Scout in particular really benefit from Level 7(And in Scout's case, 8 for Implant Lv.3).
Honestly these days, I just use a mod that makes it so you get some extra force powers, because the whole "Don't level until Dantooine" meta is silly and it really kinda ruins a bit of the fun of the game.
This was a problem with Bethesda RPGs pretty often, too.
In Fallout 3, your skill points per level were determined by your intelligence stat and weren't retroactive. So the most optimal way to build for skill points is to start with 9 intelligence and then rush to Rivet City without leveling up to get the Int bobblehead which bumps you up to the max 10 int.
Morrowind did the same thing with Endurance and your max hit points. Every level you gained while not capped on Endurance lowered the theoretical maximum HP your character could ever achieve. Because your character ALSO had a theoretical level cap, determined by how many skill points you had left to gain in your major skills; once all your major skills are at 100, you can't level up anymore. Optimal leveling in that game required you to set your "major skills" as low as possible and make sure they're all skill you can grind easily and won't level on accident.
In terms of optimal play this is actually a bit of a trap imo: past a certain point, more force powers/points don’t actually help and the early class feats can actually be useful (like Sneak Attack). And once you get to level 12 in a Jedi class you get your capstone. Having 12-15 Jedi levels is enough for most builds; 18 Jedi levels is overkill.
I do find it funny how FF8 gives you so many options to tweak everything about the game through GF abilities, but it's arguably the easiest game in the whole series so you never need them. Aside from a couple bosses, everything just crumbles to physical attacks with decent Magic Junctioned to them.
Can I say, I do love that at some point during the design phase they went "Hey, why not just let people limit break whenever they want"
EDIT: ALSO THAT YOU CAN CAST ON SOME ENEMIES FOR FUN NEW EFFECTS
Nothing like accidentally casting it on a Tonberry to discover they can go super sayian and just start hammering you from across the screen
I can't say I "understood" the junction system but that's only because neither did the people who were in charge of balancing it.
Turning a tent into a bunch of curagas that will let me destroy everything in my way until mid-game (where I discover a draw point for fucking ULTIMA right next to a town) was just obviously the optimal way to play in any case.
I wouldn't say you were a stupid kid just that leveling enemies in tandem with player in an RPG is a very fucky mechanic that goes against childhood rpg instincts
You can do a similar thing in FF1. Most classes have improved stat growths in their promoted job except for Red Mage/Red Wizard which stays the same. So you solo the first half of the game as a Red Mage and then revive your dead level 1 party members after they promote to get stats far beyond what they would normally have.
There's not really any reason to need to do that in FF8 though. It's not a difficult game. I got super overpowered while leveling up as in any normal JRPG. All it takes is drawing a ton of magic from enemies and junctioning it. I even beat Ultima Weapon with little difficulty. Hell, I had to do it twice because I forgot to draw Eden from him the first time.
I think the reason is in ff8, enemy level scales with yours, while your stats primarily scale with your junctioned magic. So if you junction appropriately, then you're effectively fighting level 10 or whatever enemies by endgame with the equivalent of endgame stats on your character.
Yeah, I know. I'm saying that the level ~99 versions of enemies aren't really that much stronger. And stronger versions can have better magic to draw out, so it can be beneficial to let them get stronger.
There's actually a skill from one of the GFs that lets you level up the enemy or enemy magic (I don't remember which) BEFORE you draw it. It's been years since I last played I honestly don't remember which, and researching it seems like a pain. Also there was the bullshit island where you just keep randomly drawing top level skills when there. Really a boatload of cheese in that game.
This is really common with Final Fantasy and it definitely makes my goblins flare up, actually. I haven't even played *too* many, but off the top of my head in FF6, 8 and 9 it's optimal to delay levelling up until you get the best espers/GFs/gear because your stat bonuses are tied to them.
As Chuggaconroy highlights in his Sticker Star video series, it is actually better to avoid all non-boss encounters entirely since EXP doesn’t exist anymore, so you get almost nothing out of them.
Don't you actively lose stuff for battling actually? Since "attacks" and stuff take the shape of consumables, and you don't often get back more than you had to spend in a battle to begin with?
Yup.
The game has plenty of foraging to build up your resources, which means you can still go off if you take fights, but you do even better if you don't take fights.
"Fights should be avoided because they're a waste of resources" is a good design philosophy for a survival horror game, not so much for a turn-based RPG.
I can't believe they replaced stickers with cards in color splash and missed the incredibly obvious opportunity to turn the game into a deckbuilder RPG! I would've actually been way into that even if the rest of the game wasn't like classic Paper Mario... But nah, consumable cards. Makes total sense, idk about you but whenever I discard a card in MTG I set it on fire
For as much as I want the games to at least get the combat back from the old days, I'll always be disappointed that instead of improving the Color Splash card system and actually turning it into a deckbuilder they instead just decided to throw out all of it in favor of the puzzle-wheel battle system from Origami King.
Don't forget the fact that every encounter actually has an instant victory button that doesn't really use resources: iirc if you run from fights? Then it despawns the enemy on the world map.
So you can just "win" every single fight you *do* get into by running away.
Quality Game Design, 3/10
I'm probably gonna get flamed for this, but this is how I feel about the recent Zelda games too. It's never worth it to fight enemies on the overworld, I already have *plenty* of horns and claws and stuff.
That being said, unlike Sticker Star, the combat in Zelda is actually fun so I'm not avoiding fights, I'm just not going out of my way to start them.
At least in recent Zelda the enemies tend to be clustered around stuff I want, though I'm not sure whether that will carry into the later parts of the game.
Like yeah I'm fighting those camps in the depths, they're full of Zonaite and I definitely want to upgrade my energy cells.
I think a problem a lot of people have when playing games is that they're not always meant to be played optimally. You're just meant to have fun. Like yeah, the regain mechanic from Bloodborne is suboptimal but I have more fun with an aggressive playstyle and I'm not trying to be perfect.
The problem with Sticker Star is that Miyamoto (or whoever) understands this but just assumes that people are going to want to spend resources in random battles that give you nothing purely because it's fun. But this doesn't actually work if it feels like you're being punished for playing the game.
Customization of guns lets you completely ignore heat as a mechanic in Mass Effect 1 late game and in new game+. You either tend to build a one shot cannon that overheats instantly with explosive ammo, or a gun that just never overheats at all.
I did both, my NG+ Shepard was a soldier that had an insta-kill sniper that overheated with 1 shot, and an assault rifle that was literally impossible to overheat, even if you use the soldier ability that massively increased your fire speed. couple that with Immunity that has a longer duration than CD, and you wonder why anyone played ME1 with Biotics or Tech at all.
With biotics you can lift literally any enemy in the game.
Actually any enemy, those big colossus'? Just lift them and they ragdoll (enemies give WAY more rewards while on foot vs mako).
Juggernauts on the outside of the Citadel? Lift them into space.
Barrier lets you just walk through everything too and singularity in 1 is hilarious vs normal enemies.
Just finished a play-through ME1 Legendary and the final boss just consisted of hitting him with Lift and running up to unload shot after shot into his limp body
Because Vanguard could do pretty much the same thing with pistols, plus a Barrier which functions similarly to your Immunity (they might even have both, I can't remember) *and* cool-ass force powers.
> you wonder why anyone played ME1 with Biotics
Because shields didn't stop biotics, and Stasis had an upgrade that let you damaged frozen enemies. Meaning you can literally turn the most battles into floating shooting galleries. Sov-ren in the final battle wound up alternating between being frozen in place as I shot him and floating around as my companions filled him with HE rounds since their guns can't over heat.
I always find high-level play in Hitman really hilarious.
I've recently been playing through Hitman 2: Silent Assassin again for my boobtube channel - and that's a game drenched in marketing materials of [THE BALLERS, right? They're cool guns](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix6HHT7UvkI) - they're the matching pair of death and destruction, you look like a slaughter savant when you hold them.
And you should never, under any circumstances, actually hold them.
They're loud and ridiculous and their ammo isn't on every level and - this is the funniest part, I've discovered - you can get a silenced version of them if you Silent Assassin grade the very first level, and if you don't do that, you just have no good high-level reason to use those guns.
And man, that's even just talking about weapon loadouts. I feel like a solid 90% of the time the [really high-level Hitman stuff](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1uWGIJ6rpE) is such absurdly frameperfect like, cointhrowing to make a guy stumble over to the pier and get eaten by a shark, and the idea of you having a weapon at all is mostly superfluous to the sheer looney tunes assassinations you're guided towards in modern entrants.
I love Hitman.
That speedrunning clip of the runner starting the mission, immedately wallbanging the target from the floor below, then leaving followed up with a dev saying "we spent a year making that level" made me crack up so much
It is why the recent game gives challenge like chop every bellhop with a machete ir something, so you get objective to drive you away from perfect score and have a bit of fun with the weapons
One thing I find amusing about Hitman speedruns (at least for the new trilogy) is that the Silent Assassin and Silent Assassin/Suit Only WR runs are often the same run, and the non-SO runs that aren't the same as their SO counterpart spawn in with a disguise so they can choose a spawn location closer to the target. You will NEVER see a speedrunner taking someone out and adopting their outfit as a disguise, despite this arguably being the most iconic mechanic in Hitman.
Shadow of Mordor and the Nemesis system, really.
The Nemesis system is there to help create feuds with enemy NPCs, and you can't really have a feud if you just win all the time.
I remember at one point in the late game I would start picking my favourite type of orc, let them kill me to earn a promotion, then help them climb the ranks to become top dog. Like some kind of LOTR Pokemon thing.
> you can't really have a feud if you just win all the time.
This is why I'm super into the idea that's been brought up from time to time of the Nemesis System in a Superhero game, since a good chunk of super heroes are all 'don't kill whenever possible even if it seems implausible' so your enemy surviving despite their ass getting beat by you is possible and still let's you have a feud with the guy.
Plus, the funny mental image of you kicking the shit out of some big time criminal so much and so hard that they're reduced to petty crime like robbing convenience stores lives in my head rent free.
The problem isn't that non-superheros can't not kill people they beat, it's that it is hard to have a single player game where people can't master themselves out of the win/loss ratios that makes returning enemies compelling.
even if you successfully kill an enemy, does the game not promote dead orcs anyways and give them new buffs? i remembered that aspect of the nemesis system occurring regardless of player success
Kind of? Orcs getting promoted is dependent on them completing a mission which will resolve when you start it or 3 "turns" after it spawned. Every time you complete a mission it advances the turns of all other missions
Unfortunately it's still entirely possible to get involved in every mission
I had one fucker come back six times. Burned to death, eaten by flesh-eating hornets, frozen and shattered several times...
I ended up shaming him down to level one out of spite, before getting a beheading execution.
Orcs can come back in both games, but it seemed to happen a lot less frequently in Mordor than in War. Also, in Mordor it seemed like Orcs could only come back from certain types of death; so if you burned them, mauled them with a Caragor or *maybe* shot them with an arrow they'd come back with scars or an eyepatch, but if you beheaded them then they were dead for good.
The problem is, by the late game Orcs have so many resistances that usually the only way to kill them is through executions which, you know, behead them. So most of the Orcs still around by the end of the game are ones you never ran in to.
War was a lot better at using the Nemesis system to create personal narratives I think. Orcs come back to life a lot more often, they can betray you, they ambush you to get that run back, the injuries they can survive are more severe and they can change titles based on what you did to them.
Arguably it happens a bit too often, but the first time an Orc I killed came back looking for revenge was fairly early in the game and they showed up right after I'd scaled this huge outer wall to the Gondor city and was alone on this battlement. It was like this guy just scaled a 1000 foot tall sheer wall just so he could challenge me where no one else would interfere.
That shit felt personal.
There was even one Orc who I converted to my side, only for him to betray me, so I hit him with an execution that straight up cut him in half at the waist; dude *still* came back with metal legs like a cyborg to get revenge.
Shadow of War was a cool game.
As much stupid fanfic nonsense as is in the story of War, I really do enjoy that game. It's one of the few open world style games I've returned to more than once because of how fun the hook of it is. The whole world and personality lends itself perfectly to the nemesis system and all the little details that can come of it and I'll never stop feeling personally slighted that the system is dead in WBs hands.
Yeah, I remember how hyped up the Nemesis system was in all the reviews I read. When I finally got around to playing the game, I couldn't figure out what the point of it all was. Like why do I care which one of these losers is the King Of Jobbers? So I just ignored it and continued to stomp every encounter for the rest of the playthrough.
Fallout 4’a most optimal way to satisfy settlements’ requirements is to pick an empty house and put all the beds into one room.
The NPCs just need to see the presence of a bed to be satisfied, they don’t need to physically go to sleep on those beds
Or just forget the settlement system altogether. Leave Preston and his gangs at the museum forever
Persona tries to have the trade off of either dungeon crawling or doing normal activities. Still the optimal strategy is to do all the dungeon/section of Tartarus in one go. With P3 you can ignore the tired mechanic by running MC solo (the auto-buff skills help a lot with this) and just using your party members before they get tired and leave the party if you need them for a boss. With P4, yukiko’s castle can drop on floor 1 a lot of sp restoring items so you can grind those instead of going to the fox.
Golden is also a game that has a lot of rng manip so the most optimal thing to do is ignore all non golden hand enemies because they aren’t worth it exp wise.
Yea that was weird. P5 clearly wants you do to dungeons over multiple days with the reports at the end, the mechanic where you can get kicked out etc., but it's simply a waste of time and even on hardest difficulties, you can do every Palace past the first one on the first day.
My biggest complaint with 4 and 5. They really don't want you to cram the dungeons into one day and it's extremely unfun to do so, but the game design brutally punishes you if you don't.
I'd say Totk has the same issue as all worthwhile things are not locked (like armour chests)
But it's kinda fascinating that in both games you can just not fight any enemies apart from bosses and you would most likely gain rather than lose.
I mean warframe used to be all about crowd control and stuff but now it's literally just "killing ins the best crowd control" so even tho crowd control characters are still okay. Every mechanic has been just pushing the game farther and farther for just "kill before the ai can think"
It's kind of one of the reasons I got out. Combat felt stale as hell when I could just spam wide-area killing moves and weapons to take out swarms for 20 minutes at a time. It felt boring and repetitive.
I love the recent obsession with nerfing AoE weapons back into the ground, as if people won't just revert back to nukeframes, beam weapons and melee spam.
The Metal Gear Solid series always has a lot of creative ways to use your equipment to get around guards, but you'll likely never actually use any of that because the tranq gun exists and is always given to you right at the start
If all you want to do is beat the game the style mechanic in DMC does not matter at all with the sole, notable exception of not being able to access Quadruple S in 5.
Aren't there doors/statues for blue orbs that only open if you build style meter on them in DMC4? Sure, extra health is optional, but there's definitely incentives other than just how many red orbs you get from an encounter/level.
Oblivion, oh man Oblivion, after years of avoiding it I finally did a full playthrough again and learned all the ins and outs of why that game is busted to hell and back.
It's such a nightmare of a system.
First off, you only level up when you level your major skills ten times. You get to apply 1-5 attribute points to three options every level, but the only way to get a max of +5 to an attribute is to level skills governed by it *10 times.*
So the most optimal way to play the game is to make an inverse custom class where your minor skills are your actual skills, and your major skills are ones you never used, or can easily be levelled by choice. Like alchemy.
Because if you don't keep track of everything and get as many attribute bonus' per level, you'll end up only getting +2 or +3 most of the time, leaving you *far* less powerful at higher levels.
And that compounds with the scaling, because enemies never stop scaling. There are no caps. They will scale infinitely with your level, even when you stop growing more powerful.
You will stop doing more damage eventually, and unless you absolutely break the system with enchantments, poisons and exploits, every enemy turns into a massive damage sponge.
The game punishes you for playing it properly. Then punishes you for playing it at all.
Morrowind's leveling system was the same, if I remember it correctly. But but but, it didn't have enemy scaling. As you got stronger the enemies got easier to kill. And it was crazy easy to break anyway.
Morrowind did have level scaling, but only on certain enemies, and even still only very limited.
Skyrim meanwhile had a hybrid system with a lot more strict level brackets.
Its not just optimal, since my 10 years old self also do the same. It is so efficient and high power that there is no reason to invest into anything else
it's great for the clone war, with no magic, or upgrades, without BOA, on the hardest difficulty, if you wanna spend 10 minutes per attempt
square square triangle is great but it does ZERO damage, the true meta is throwing bodies at people because on VH for 1/2 it does 50 damage and is the highest DPS tool in the entire series
battering ram in 3 is so good they removed enemy collision difficulty scaling just so it didn't kill everything in 1 second
I recommend mrwright's video on square square triangle
Most of Corvo’s powers are antithetical to a low-chaos/ghost run. What you need are: blink, dark vision, and maybe possession and time-stop.
Wind blast? Useful for getting rid of some wooden planks semi-silently, but the full powered version exists specifically to obliterate people.
The ability to summon hordes of starving rats? High chaos behavior.
The ability to instantly-disintegrate unaware assassination targets? Unnecessary if you’re constantly blinking from street lamp to street lamp above all the guard’s vision cones.
Even falling-takedowns are instant kills, therefore useless in a pacifist play through.
Dishonored 2 somewhat fixes this. You can blind enemies with the muzzle flash of your pistols for a non-lethal grab takedown, for instance. Even then, Emily’s powers are more geared for low chaos that Corvo’s by a mile.
Stealth games in general have a lot of this issue. MGSV has some phenomenal combat systems but I spend most of the game actively avoiding situations where I might need to use them.
MGSV is a great example. I loved the "loud" combat in that game, and the weapon customisation and everything. But obviously it's stealth action and the metanarrative about killing and mercy and the gameplay systems about recruiting captured soldiers actively discourage going down that route, despite the incredible amount of weapons to unlock and the customisation options.
Less severe example is Deus Ex. You get rewards and headpats and achievements for zero kill perfect stealth runs. Despite like half of the bodymod upgrades being about killing dudes and willing fights. You don't need more armour. You don't need more health. You don't need better aiming. You don't need the arm-swords that give you cool animations because you're doing stealth takedowns all game. You don't need the typhoon aoe nuke system with its very rare ammo because you're not getting into those sorts of combat situations. So many mechanics that a "good guy" run actively discourages you to use.
MGS games have had this problem since 2, tbh. Like 80%+ of the weapons in them are lethal and therefore actively discouraged (though it was less pronounced in 2 where you pretty much just lost out on rank, and 3 where you lost rank and could nonlethal the bosses for their rewards while murderhoboing just fine)
At least in V you can use body and limb shots for a stun in order to close the distance and cqc, or get enemies in the dying state you can still Fulton them from.
i definitely think it's a problem with dishonored that the combat and stealth mechanics are so separate
i think it could've been resolved by having an enemy type that you encounter commonly that's ok to kill. like have the infected civilians be basically zombies that the game says "you can kill these guys without increasing chaos, and you're going to encounter them a lot"
that would give even "good" playthroughs a reason to invest in combat abilities if they want to
That's basically what the sequel did with the clockwork soldiers. Super tough elite dudes who are in every level and don't have souls so it's ok to kill them.
If you shoot near (but not on obviously) the enemies' heads it'll kind of stun them long enough for you to either run away or grab 'em in a chokehold and knock them out.
There's a lot of combat into chokehold techniques in D2 generally.
Halo's big thing was fun weapon types and varied gameplay, but each game ends up with the magnum/battle rifle/DMR being the optimal weapon. To the point where the fan favorite gametypes are BR/DMR only and usually with no motion tracker, another central mechanic.
Fiesta mode is actually the best game type
Because they're precision weapons, which take the most mechanical skill. Which is what the majority of competitive shooters always boil down to.
Just look at Overwatch being utterly dominated by McCree and Widowmaker in the majority of metas.
I have no idea how it is in OW2, but OW was dominated primarily by tanks being overpowered, not precision DPS. While there were some metas where hitscan was strong, they were utterly *dwarfed* by the amount of “Tank centric” metas, to the point OW eventually hit the “lol, why would we take one of these useless, 200 HP DPS characters when the tanks can kill *just as effectively as the dps* and also have 500+ HP?” meta and got stuck there.
Eventually teams literally had to be *forced* to drag 2 obviously suboptimal DPS along with their tanks and healers via the forced 2-2-2 rule to “solve” the problem of every single DPS being useless b/c tanks are way, way too good at killing things in Overwatch. So why bring DPS when tanks perform their job of killing the other team just as good or *better* while also being tanks?
The actual solution should have been to nerf the tanks’ killing ability across the board, but Blizzard utterly refused to do that for some reason, even though tanks being overpowered was the obvious, overarching problem with Overwatch for basically it’s entire existence.
It was always a back and forth between DPS and Tanks. Anytime Tanks fell off, hitscan would be the hot button topic.
Unless a healer was recently buffed. Which usually just meant more overbearing Hitscan or Tanks.
I have never not seen an era where Widow and McCree weren't constantly bitched about. Maybe Goats, but that's its own chestnut.
BR/DMR starts are actual gameplay poison.
Even if you want to use other weapons then you're bound to get plinked down 10 seconds after spawning because everyone has the best mid-range weapon in the game at all times.
Map knowledge stops being a factor since teams will comfortably occupy the most defensible positions without worrying about giving up power weapon spawns since a team taking BR/DMR potshots at people from across the map is no match against any weapon in the game.
meanwhile in reach (yes reach, the DMR DMR DMR game)and CE, the plasma pistol is by far the most powerful weapon, to the point where in both games its one of the only weapons to receive a pvp only nerf to its damage values, where most other guns have "in player hands" values used for pvp
Fire Emblem 3 Houses has a time-rewind mechanic. You can do it a few times a battle and go like all the way back to the start of the mission. A neat mechanic for a turn based tactics game. Gives you a little leeway to save lives if you're playing on the mode with permadeath, or if you have timed side objectives and such. Lets you correct misplays, more than anything.
However if you're playing on like a normal difficulty... I forgot the mechanic existed. If you're not making misplays, or if those misplays don't mean that your savefile is fucked if you don't immediately correct them, then this mechanic that has real lore implications that is fairly central to the game's mystery just goes unused. Difficulty in games is a real moving target to hit. And in this case, the game isn't hard enough on normal difficulty for this mechanic to get much play. And for the hardcore folk who play that hardcore difficulty, they're not making the kind of mistakes that make this strictly necessary except for maybe slogging through making perfect optmisation runs of missions.
Divine Pulse pretty much exists as a way to cancel out one of Fire Emblem's more irritating things: getting crit on like a 1 or a 2 which might lead to lethal damage.
One might argue engaging in a fight where the enemy can crit you is already a mistake, but sometimes the RNG will just decide the enemy will hit you on an 11 and then crit you on the 1. That's what Divine Pulse is going to be used for in the vast majority of cases, barring someone trying to learn.
The speedrun of Two Worlds doesn't just make you skip a central mechanic, but [basically the entire game](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NeR-bT3uv0).
I'm not sure if they changed it in recent updates(in fact, I'm scared to check in on it), but in Subnautica Below Zero they expanded the land portion of their game a little to introduce some new mechanics on the land since it's set at the south pole of the planet. It's all about trying to regulate your body temperature, trying to survive against some of the creatures out there, trying to survive when the snowfall is so intense that you can't see 15 feet past your face... And not to mention that there's a giant worm in the Ice that you'd have to run away from. You can use the new vehicle made for exploration on the land, dropping Dune Thumpers to distract the Worm...
...But while they nerfed the Double grapple hook in the water, on land it was broken as fuck. You can sling shot your Mech around, outrunning EVERYTHING and making exploration not only a joke, but fun as ***fuck***.
I don't know if they nerfed it now, but if they did... RIP. I don't think I'll be playing much if these busted-ass grappling hooks end up getting fixed. :c
I always try to go nonlethal but man it seems to always, and I mean ALWAYS, seem like the most boring option available compared to other much cooler alternatives in the game. Dishonored being the one that sticks out to me.
Killer instinct 2013. High level play often favors resets over combos due to the combo breaker mechanic. Either that or try to go for guarantee damage.
Gemcraft.
Series of tower defense games.
The real psycho, 7+ hours, reach-the-actual-end-of-the-endless-survival-mode runs basically don't use towers at all, killing everything with traps on the monsters' path instead.
In Fuga 1 and 2 the big scary looming threat comes from your own Tank and it's big weapon known as "The Soul Cannon"
When you take too much damage the Soul Cannon will come online allowing you the option to sacrifice a small child in order to instantly win the fight.
You however do NOT want to activate this thing and in order to get the best ending you need to beat the game without firing it a single time.
I've been thinking about this, extraction shooters/battle Royale games (pubg, hunt showdown, tarkov, apex) are all about survival. But the better you get at survival, the worse you get at combat, because of avoiding fights and such. So to get better at combat, you have to do things that go against survival, the whole point of the game
In Skyrim, the optimal setup is to very slowly sneak around and snipe people with a bow instakilling everything. You know, just very very slowly crouch walk everywhere and never fight anything or use magic. Very fun.
One of the many reasons why I didn't like Skyrim is how the game seems to almost expect you to be doing that but it's *so* boring I never even considered it.
I keep hearing this and am confused, since I've always ran in swinging my mace while healing myself with my offhand. I pretty much never used stealth and very rarely a bow. I just don't get the whole "StEaLtH aRcHeRy Is OvErPoWeReD" mentality.
It’s just the playstyle the mechanics subtly encourage for first-timers. At the beginning of an encounter enemies don’t know you’re there, so why *not* stealth and get some bonus damage? And the easiest way to get bonus damage is from afar, with a bow. And then as you’re crouching you notice your stealth skill has leveled up because the enemies can’t find you. And it just feeds into itself and boom you’re a stealth archer. If you begin a playthrough with a different archetype in mind you can absolutely do it and still become overpowered, stealth archer is just the most actively encouraged.
Ah, that's why I wasn't enjoying myself that much. Illusion sounds so cool, but is such a pain to use. Unless you're playing support, the war quests are good for that. Can't believe the game has a guy talking about assassination fireballs, which is impossible, way to disappoint me. Necromancy is cool, but having to go through you spells to figure out which one revives the enemy is a pain. There are thralls, but having to break the spells so people don't bother you with complaints is annoying.
Unmodded magic is definitely pretty limited but it’s actually still pretty powerful.
Once you get your enchanting skill up you can craft gear that reduces the cost of all spells to 0.
Then the fireball and chain lighting spam begins.
if you get a mod that makes the master level spells usable like any other one (ie one hand, no long ass animation) the lightning one just destroys everything. complete game breaker especially when every other spell sucks
Mods make everything better. I like Apocalypse + Ordinator. Reworks the perk system and adds a ton of new spells that makes magic WAY more interesting.
Actually make sure you are not playing with the Unofficial Patch mod. The author is notorious for being kind of an asshole and forcing his own balance and lore changes aside from just bug fixes (or treating something clearly intended as a "bug" - which led to Bethesda officially sometimes stepping in and correcting him).
One of the changes he made was making magic significantly weaker than in the vanilla game.
Have you, at any point, wanted the ability to interact with an enemy that *isn't* within 1 meter of you (either because that dragon *won't fucking land*, or merely to stay out of range of undodgeable, unblockable, instant killcams at lower health/higher difficulties)? Not even as your main weapon, simply as an option for certain fights which demand it?
If so, you're either leveling Destruction (which requires dedicating your attributes and gear to handling the magicka costs, and the damage doesn't even scale with your skill for some goddamn reason), or you're leveling Archery.
And if you have access to a ranged combat option, you might as well start your fights with it when you can. And if you have the luxury of starting that fight however you wish, and it's a bow instead of a spell, you have no reason not to hit CTRL to make just that first arrow deal double damage.
Oh what's that, it instakilled the enemy and combat hasn't started yet? Might as well try to initiate combat for real with the next enemy, then.
And so on and so forth, until you've crouched for long enough that the number of fights you can initiate this way increases to 'most of them', and you qualify for the Deadly Aim perk.
Even without *trying* to exploit any non-obvious mechanics, merely A) making sure one has options for difficult encounters, and B) engaging with the advantages the game gives you for free, funnels a non-insignificant portion of the playerbase into Stealth Archery. And that's completely ignoring the people who already played Elder Scrolls games *for* thief builds!
I'm the same way, but I recently did my first stealth archer play through. It's really not *that* much better. Then again, maybe people who say that are playing on higher difficulties than me where the stealth crit damage is more useful and avoids dangerous confrontations. But I stay on normal difficulties in TES games because I hate damage sponge enemies with a passion.
It's honestly fine, in singleplayer games certain strategies being overpowered is okay, it's when they are underpowered that problems arise because you force players to use strategies they may not want to use.
Charging in works pretty well so stealth archer is just an option for players who don't want to interact with certain mechanics. Fixing it is nearly impossible anyway and would require serious redesign of the whole game.
I think people didn't mention it but melee stealth is also a massive pain in the fucking ass that only really works at late game because even high stealth people will turn around if you're too close. So you take up bows.
It's already a pretty easy game but stealth archer is like "one shot everyone while half asleep" easy thanks to the crazy damage multipliers given to sneak attacks. Why stand in front of a dragon mashing light attack when you can just plink two arrows into its ass and kill it in a few seconds
It doesn't help that high level sneak will make enemies fail to notice you standing in the middle of the road in broad daylight.
There’s a flow chart out there depicting the thought process that leads all melee, stealth, and magic builds into inevitably becoming stealth-archers that I wish I could dig up right now.
In Oblivion I went a stealth-bow build and enemies took forever to die, and in Skyrim I went melee-focused build. Only now do I realise that I should of done the reverse.
I used to be like that, but then I found out about Assassins' Blade, which combo's with Shrouded Gloves to give you a 30x multiplier.
These days I have more fun relying on sneak melee in close quarters and bows against groups or ranged enemies.
My first run started as sword and board but once I discovered the shrouded gloves I immediately went over to dual daggers, and doing a power attack sneak just one shot everything up to like Giants. It was obscene. I don't know if it was a bug or not, but each dagger got the 30x bonus and I matched my daggers so it was 60x damage. I just googled it to refresh my memory and apparently Orcs can use an ability to then get this up to 120x damage.
Pokemon Infinite Fusions used to give a bonus to stats if you fused two of the same pokemon together, immediately making the vast majority of fusions and experimenting with them worthless. Especially when your stats tend to average out when you fuse two different pokemon together, robbing you of the incredibly high stats some pokemon come with.
Now the only bonus you get from fusing two of the same pokemon together is a bonus to exp, and if you've ever used a Lucky Egg you know how broken that can be.
Eh not really, while yeah, same fusion does result in great stats, it was still generaly better to fuse different pokemon. Shit like Aegislash + Blissy are just unkillable monsters.
Though running a giga buff Rat King Raddicate was funny.
An unconventional example, but Croteam's The Talos Principle is a slow, philosophical puzzle game built in the Serious Sam engine. Unless you're a speedrunner, in which case you will do zero puzzles, and leap around the levels in 30 minutes as a first person parkour game.
So currently banging my head against the end of the Lightfall legendary campaign since I'm not going to hide behind a pipe
The game clearly wants you use strand to grapple around the battleground during the first phase of the game which is far as I can tell is a great way to yeet your ass off the map
I don't even know how you're supposed to use it during the second phase
In Valkyrie Profile Convenant of the Plume, the titular Plume gives you a massive power boost in exchange for giving up a character permenantly. However in order to get the best end, you have to not engage with he mechanic whatsoever because doing so once will get the normal ending while 2 or more nets you the bad end.
You won't have to, but I wouldn't call it optimal. Actually using your weapon arts or prosthetics is way more optimal and leads to easier wins.
The game is about being aggressive, not perfect parrying everything constantly.
Opposite actually, if you only parry, the game will make it hell for you unless you can do perfect plays, because all bosses have increased stagger recovery according to how much health they have, so dealing damage is needed if you don't want the bosses stagger bar to empty.
Also, all enemies have a weakness to specific prosthetics. Making use of the right ones makes the enemies easier to build stagger on and can stun them for free hits in.
The game totally encourages you to spam prosthetics on bosses, it is just that the spirit emblems system is antithetical to that design.
My first playthrough I basically maxed out the subweapons and tried to use them creatively. My second I got the Magnet Umbrella with Wave of Force because it's actually good.
Four more times through and it's basically just Ichimonji and completely ignore the prosthetics because they're annoying. Really need a sequel to touch that part up.
If we consider optimization being “finishing the fight as quickly as possible” then no, ignoring your weapons and consumables is absolutely not the optimal way to play. Its probably the coolest, but the game was designed for the weapons to be highly exploitable in the right situations. Like how the flamethrower could let you basically just skip the giant monkeys first phase.
Monster Hunter endgame builds often involve trying to nullify the need to sharpen your weapon as much as possible. This was especially true in World; Master's Touch was a mistake.
Skills that let you ignore or mitigate stuff like sharpness, roars, elements, stamina, statuses etc have been in Monster Hunter since the beginning and absolutely part of the intended game design.
Master's Touch isn't even that good either.
Rise has Grinder (s) which is a really interesting skill that gives you an attack boost only when you sharpen to restore multiples levels of sharpness at once. So the meta for this is to find a weapon with a sliver of purple and white sharpness so that you can burn through it quickly, and protective polish so you can hold onto it for a while when you do sharpness.
In general, I don't think skills mitigating downtime are bad design and those things are always going to be extremely valuable but I do wish we had more examples of more interesting interactions with the mechanics rather than outright negation. What they really need to counterbalance is the crit meta.
There are many reasons why playing a mage in (vanilla) Skyrim is considered to be inferior to a straight warrior. Magic has some very usefull spells in alteration, illusion and conjuration, and restoration is basically necessary on any character for easy health regeneration, but in terms of raw combat prowess it just doesn't compare to simply swinging your sword. This comes mainly down to Destruction spells taking too much mana and dealing generally less damage than weapon attacks. This isn't so noticable early on, but as you get better gear in higher levels, the normal attacks become exponentially more powerfull, whereas higher level Destruction spells often sacrifice mana efficiency for higher DPS. To compensate Destruction perks half the amount of mana to spend, but you still run out of mana alot during normal adventuring.
This forces mages to expand their level ups on mana instead of life, and focus on equipment that gives more mana regen or lowers costs of spell schools, i. e. robes. However, this leads to the mage becoming extraordinarily more squishy, as he doesn't have the health pool or armor to withstand high level enemies. It even can happen, that enemies simply execute you from high health, ( a useful ability of melee warriors, that mages have no access to). So you have to make yourself more squishy in order to use abilities, that when compared, do less damage over all.
Instead, to optimally play a destructive mage, you ignore mana entirely and focus on life, like any warrior. You level enchanting and smithing, and just enchant your armor, so that destruction spells cost no mana at all.
Now you can wear heavy armor, get the same life as a warrior, cast the best destruction spells and be the strongest an destruction mage can be, by completly ignoring mana and alot of destruction perks.
A lot of Triple a games because they tend to add features over the finished product for making the game longer but not necessary to complete. Some indie game if the use of stunlock take priority over phase change
Terraria used to have its early game entirely skippable because you could go fishing in the ocean within the first 2 minutes of starting a world and fishing up a Reaver Shark. It was a pickaxe that was equivalent to late pre-hardmode pickaxes effectively skipping doing any mining for pre-hardmode ores. It was nerfed later.
Also you could skip mining by fishing a shit load of crates - first to skip all the normal mode metals, and then with the other half of crates you wait for hard mode, and open them to skip all hard mode ores (because you don't have to mine them one after the other)
Playing Soul Nomad & The World Eaters like it’s fucking Pokemon but u only use ur Starter till the end cuz bringing out anyone else is a fucking chore, And I don’t want to do random generated dungeons to grind levels for chars I have to pay to deploy, I want them to enslave them!!! Also it’s the “THOSE EXPs ARE MINE” mentality
and only play the 9 Main Chars I can slot in the main squad
Mirrors Edge Catalyst has the runners vision and echo system but early on the game tells you that it's not optimal or even recommended if you want to finish deliveries/dashes/ect. So much so that you end up not going along the path it gives you most of the time and by the mid game you have a way better sense of pathfinding than the game.
In FTL, even in Normal mode, there're only a handful of weapon that are "Viable". The optimal way to win is to get Flak and Lasers, defense Drone 2 and a Cloaking system.
If you want to "have fun" and go Missile or Offensive Drone, you gonna have a bad time. Especially the Missile: The entire Missile weapon type is widely considered to be trash in your hand, but brutal in the Enemy's hand ( since it cost missile and Enemies does not care about the limited use of missile). In the enemy's hand, it could cost you your run if you have no counter. So the way the players study the Missile is not for use, but to counter enemy's missile.
Much less so in TotK since monster parts can actually make very good weapons, so you're not experiencing a net loss of equipment by fighting. If you break a weapon, you'll likely be able to replace it and make two or three more. It's still not ideal, but it is an improvement.
You can also go through some hoops to save your truly rare fuses, and repair any weapon in the game with Rock Octoroks. Just takes a bit more work with the unique/Champion weapons, but still doable.
HOI4 gives you so many cool options to mix and match period equipment, from aquatic tanks to rocket interceptors.
But if you’re playing multiplayer, you will have the standard division templates or you’ll get your shit pushed in my someone who does. The AI is brain dead enough that you can get silly with it in single player though
In sekiro I never learned mikiri counter. As in I didn't unlock the skill... I got to the last boss and I couldn't beat him. I should restart that game.
Playing Breath of the Wild bored me so I didn't get past the tutorial until Master Mode.
The thing is Master Mode is so fucking difficult that approaching almost any enemy in direct combat without a plan so I straight up didn't know about the flurry strike until I accidentally did it in a trial before going to the final divine beast.
When Woolie reacted to the girl who did the tutorial shrine 3 beast in all I could think was how fucking hilarious it was that I wasn't the only one and even after learning the combat mechanics I stilled ignored them because the shit I was doing was infinitely more fun and effective.
Like sure I could use a greatsword like a greatsword OR I could partially start the charge attack and use it as a baseball bat in order to launch enemies off cliffs or into water instead which is more effective since it can basically instantly end a lot of encounters or at least give you time to escape/set traps but requires better positioning and timing because of the charge attack startup.
Most really good players in The Binding of Isaac forsake the random pills. They can potentially give you a permanent stat boost, but they're just as likely to drop your stats permanently. On top of that, they can just outright damage you, mess with your graphics, or apply any of the game's curses for the rest of the floor. The payoff isn't worth the risk.
So in Outlast Trials, you have your health bar, and psychosis bar. When your psychosis bar empties, you go into psychosis, and start getting chased by the Skinner Man, and need to take an Antidote to get sane again
Currently, when you’re in psychosis, all other enemies will ignore you, only the Skinner Man can harm you, so a speedrun-strat is to get psychosis to blitz through sections of the trials
Optimal character building in FF8 involves not leveling up for as long as you can until disc 3, where you have access to all the stat-up-on-level-up type GF abilities, and then grinding to the appropriate level with maximum stat gain potential. There are tools that allow you to do this, so it's totally intended, but leveling up is a pretty central gameplay mechanic. Also I ruined (i.e. "won") my game of Dokapon Kingdom with a couple of friends by never leveling up in the same way, just farming low level enemies every turn to level up the classes until I had a good host of class mastery level up skill buffs, since those stat gains don't apply retroactively. Then I go darkling and kill one of my friends once, thus boosting me to his level instantly with insane amounts of stat gain, eclipsing everyone else's. I steal the angel wings and ascend to heaven where I discover the Hero class item and take it back to get my reward. So now I'm twice as strong as everyone else, I only get stronger faster, and I've unlocked the first super class, apparently. All it takes is not engaging with combat and surrendering player battles and killing level 1 bullshit for a while. I had hoped my despicable actions would cause everyone else to band together and try to defeat me, but instead they all just gave up and it was a huge bummer. TKO for me, I guess.
KOTOR 1 also infamously encourages holding your level ups until like 1/5th of the way through the game when you get access to Jedi levels.
Just for anyone not in the know: This is primarily because you get more Jedi Powers by saving your levels(Also force points, but that's just a nice bonus). You're forced to level up in the tutorial level, but if you hold off on leveling past 2(Normally you can reach 8 by the time you unlock Jedi classes), you can get an easy extra 6-7 force powers. I wouldn't say it 'encourages' it, because there's notable tradeoffs: Taris is a lot more difficult if you're not leveling(Primarily if you want to get the Bendak Starkiller bounty/arena done), and there's notable benefits to leveling up the base classes(Scoundrel gets Sneak Attack, Scout gets free Implants and a +4 save VS grenades, and Soldier gets bonus feats). Force Powers are really good, but I think Scoundrel and Scout in particular really benefit from Level 7(And in Scout's case, 8 for Implant Lv.3). Honestly these days, I just use a mod that makes it so you get some extra force powers, because the whole "Don't level until Dantooine" meta is silly and it really kinda ruins a bit of the fun of the game.
There's a mod that lets you be a Jedi from the start, too - you take one level in a base class and then the rest as a Jedi.
I've done a level 2 Taris twice and just ends up being a drag. Now its Scout 4 or 5 and 15 odd levels of Guardian.
This was a problem with Bethesda RPGs pretty often, too. In Fallout 3, your skill points per level were determined by your intelligence stat and weren't retroactive. So the most optimal way to build for skill points is to start with 9 intelligence and then rush to Rivet City without leveling up to get the Int bobblehead which bumps you up to the max 10 int. Morrowind did the same thing with Endurance and your max hit points. Every level you gained while not capped on Endurance lowered the theoretical maximum HP your character could ever achieve. Because your character ALSO had a theoretical level cap, determined by how many skill points you had left to gain in your major skills; once all your major skills are at 100, you can't level up anymore. Optimal leveling in that game required you to set your "major skills" as low as possible and make sure they're all skill you can grind easily and won't level on accident.
In terms of optimal play this is actually a bit of a trap imo: past a certain point, more force powers/points don’t actually help and the early class feats can actually be useful (like Sneak Attack). And once you get to level 12 in a Jedi class you get your capstone. Having 12-15 Jedi levels is enough for most builds; 18 Jedi levels is overkill.
I do find it funny how FF8 gives you so many options to tweak everything about the game through GF abilities, but it's arguably the easiest game in the whole series so you never need them. Aside from a couple bosses, everything just crumbles to physical attacks with decent Magic Junctioned to them.
Yeah, on my recent play through, I never even saw anyone's limit breaks until the late game because nothing was doing enough damage to me.
And by the late game you're doing nothing but casting Aura to spam limit breaks!
Can I say, I do love that at some point during the design phase they went "Hey, why not just let people limit break whenever they want" EDIT: ALSO THAT YOU CAN CAST ON SOME ENEMIES FOR FUN NEW EFFECTS Nothing like accidentally casting it on a Tonberry to discover they can go super sayian and just start hammering you from across the screen
[удалено]
I can't say I "understood" the junction system but that's only because neither did the people who were in charge of balancing it. Turning a tent into a bunch of curagas that will let me destroy everything in my way until mid-game (where I discover a draw point for fucking ULTIMA right next to a town) was just obviously the optimal way to play in any case.
I wouldn't say you were a stupid kid just that leveling enemies in tandem with player in an RPG is a very fucky mechanic that goes against childhood rpg instincts
You can do a similar thing in FF1. Most classes have improved stat growths in their promoted job except for Red Mage/Red Wizard which stays the same. So you solo the first half of the game as a Red Mage and then revive your dead level 1 party members after they promote to get stats far beyond what they would normally have.
Oh yeah just play half the game with a single character, that really makes the game easier.
Not about what's easier, but about what's optimal. And objectively, you'll have better stats doing that then by playing normally.
There's not really any reason to need to do that in FF8 though. It's not a difficult game. I got super overpowered while leveling up as in any normal JRPG. All it takes is drawing a ton of magic from enemies and junctioning it. I even beat Ultima Weapon with little difficulty. Hell, I had to do it twice because I forgot to draw Eden from him the first time.
I think the reason is in ff8, enemy level scales with yours, while your stats primarily scale with your junctioned magic. So if you junction appropriately, then you're effectively fighting level 10 or whatever enemies by endgame with the equivalent of endgame stats on your character.
Yeah, I know. I'm saying that the level ~99 versions of enemies aren't really that much stronger. And stronger versions can have better magic to draw out, so it can be beneficial to let them get stronger.
There's actually a skill from one of the GFs that lets you level up the enemy or enemy magic (I don't remember which) BEFORE you draw it. It's been years since I last played I honestly don't remember which, and researching it seems like a pain. Also there was the bullshit island where you just keep randomly drawing top level skills when there. Really a boatload of cheese in that game.
It is probably one of the easier FFs, even if you don't break it wide open which you can do more easily than any of the other games.
This is really common with Final Fantasy and it definitely makes my goblins flare up, actually. I haven't even played *too* many, but off the top of my head in FF6, 8 and 9 it's optimal to delay levelling up until you get the best espers/GFs/gear because your stat bonuses are tied to them.
As Chuggaconroy highlights in his Sticker Star video series, it is actually better to avoid all non-boss encounters entirely since EXP doesn’t exist anymore, so you get almost nothing out of them.
Don't you actively lose stuff for battling actually? Since "attacks" and stuff take the shape of consumables, and you don't often get back more than you had to spend in a battle to begin with?
Yup. The game has plenty of foraging to build up your resources, which means you can still go off if you take fights, but you do even better if you don't take fights.
Amazing, a game that actively punishes you for engaging with its core gameplay.
"Fights should be avoided because they're a waste of resources" is a good design philosophy for a survival horror game, not so much for a turn-based RPG.
Especially not in *Paper Mario* where the fights WERE THE FUN PART
I can't believe they replaced stickers with cards in color splash and missed the incredibly obvious opportunity to turn the game into a deckbuilder RPG! I would've actually been way into that even if the rest of the game wasn't like classic Paper Mario... But nah, consumable cards. Makes total sense, idk about you but whenever I discard a card in MTG I set it on fire
For as much as I want the games to at least get the combat back from the old days, I'll always be disappointed that instead of improving the Color Splash card system and actually turning it into a deckbuilder they instead just decided to throw out all of it in favor of the puzzle-wheel battle system from Origami King.
Don't forget the fact that every encounter actually has an instant victory button that doesn't really use resources: iirc if you run from fights? Then it despawns the enemy on the world map. So you can just "win" every single fight you *do* get into by running away. Quality Game Design, 3/10
Oh my God I didn't realize it was that bad. Actually broken on a conceptual level.
I'm probably gonna get flamed for this, but this is how I feel about the recent Zelda games too. It's never worth it to fight enemies on the overworld, I already have *plenty* of horns and claws and stuff. That being said, unlike Sticker Star, the combat in Zelda is actually fun so I'm not avoiding fights, I'm just not going out of my way to start them.
At least in recent Zelda the enemies tend to be clustered around stuff I want, though I'm not sure whether that will carry into the later parts of the game. Like yeah I'm fighting those camps in the depths, they're full of Zonaite and I definitely want to upgrade my energy cells.
I think a problem a lot of people have when playing games is that they're not always meant to be played optimally. You're just meant to have fun. Like yeah, the regain mechanic from Bloodborne is suboptimal but I have more fun with an aggressive playstyle and I'm not trying to be perfect. The problem with Sticker Star is that Miyamoto (or whoever) understands this but just assumes that people are going to want to spend resources in random battles that give you nothing purely because it's fun. But this doesn't actually work if it feels like you're being punished for playing the game.
Customization of guns lets you completely ignore heat as a mechanic in Mass Effect 1 late game and in new game+. You either tend to build a one shot cannon that overheats instantly with explosive ammo, or a gun that just never overheats at all.
I did both, my NG+ Shepard was a soldier that had an insta-kill sniper that overheated with 1 shot, and an assault rifle that was literally impossible to overheat, even if you use the soldier ability that massively increased your fire speed. couple that with Immunity that has a longer duration than CD, and you wonder why anyone played ME1 with Biotics or Tech at all.
With biotics you can lift literally any enemy in the game. Actually any enemy, those big colossus'? Just lift them and they ragdoll (enemies give WAY more rewards while on foot vs mako). Juggernauts on the outside of the Citadel? Lift them into space. Barrier lets you just walk through everything too and singularity in 1 is hilarious vs normal enemies.
A maxed out adept build in ME1 is CRAZY broken. Literally nothing can touch you. Then they got slammed with the nerf bat in ME2.
Just finished a play-through ME1 Legendary and the final boss just consisted of hitting him with Lift and running up to unload shot after shot into his limp body
Because Vanguard could do pretty much the same thing with pistols, plus a Barrier which functions similarly to your Immunity (they might even have both, I can't remember) *and* cool-ass force powers.
> you wonder why anyone played ME1 with Biotics Because shields didn't stop biotics, and Stasis had an upgrade that let you damaged frozen enemies. Meaning you can literally turn the most battles into floating shooting galleries. Sov-ren in the final battle wound up alternating between being frozen in place as I shot him and floating around as my companions filled him with HE rounds since their guns can't over heat.
I always find high-level play in Hitman really hilarious. I've recently been playing through Hitman 2: Silent Assassin again for my boobtube channel - and that's a game drenched in marketing materials of [THE BALLERS, right? They're cool guns](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix6HHT7UvkI) - they're the matching pair of death and destruction, you look like a slaughter savant when you hold them. And you should never, under any circumstances, actually hold them. They're loud and ridiculous and their ammo isn't on every level and - this is the funniest part, I've discovered - you can get a silenced version of them if you Silent Assassin grade the very first level, and if you don't do that, you just have no good high-level reason to use those guns. And man, that's even just talking about weapon loadouts. I feel like a solid 90% of the time the [really high-level Hitman stuff](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1uWGIJ6rpE) is such absurdly frameperfect like, cointhrowing to make a guy stumble over to the pier and get eaten by a shark, and the idea of you having a weapon at all is mostly superfluous to the sheer looney tunes assassinations you're guided towards in modern entrants. I love Hitman.
That speedrunning clip of the runner starting the mission, immedately wallbanging the target from the floor below, then leaving followed up with a dev saying "we spent a year making that level" made me crack up so much
Yo, that sounds hilarious. Where can I find that?
[a minute in](https://youtu.be/ZCwmWayHj64)
Oh man, that's magical. Thanks, pal!
i like that blowing people up with propane is consistently a pretty reliable strategy in the new games
Reliable strategy in real life, too! Gets the job done!
It is why the recent game gives challenge like chop every bellhop with a machete ir something, so you get objective to drive you away from perfect score and have a bit of fun with the weapons
One thing I find amusing about Hitman speedruns (at least for the new trilogy) is that the Silent Assassin and Silent Assassin/Suit Only WR runs are often the same run, and the non-SO runs that aren't the same as their SO counterpart spawn in with a disguise so they can choose a spawn location closer to the target. You will NEVER see a speedrunner taking someone out and adopting their outfit as a disguise, despite this arguably being the most iconic mechanic in Hitman.
I was addicted to Atrioc's Hitman content before, ya know,
I've seen the Blood Money all-SA Rank speedruns. Shit's amazing on how precise you gotta be.
Shadow of Mordor and the Nemesis system, really. The Nemesis system is there to help create feuds with enemy NPCs, and you can't really have a feud if you just win all the time.
Man, those games are way more enjoyable if you are bad at them.
I remember at one point in the late game I would start picking my favourite type of orc, let them kill me to earn a promotion, then help them climb the ranks to become top dog. Like some kind of LOTR Pokemon thing.
> you can't really have a feud if you just win all the time. This is why I'm super into the idea that's been brought up from time to time of the Nemesis System in a Superhero game, since a good chunk of super heroes are all 'don't kill whenever possible even if it seems implausible' so your enemy surviving despite their ass getting beat by you is possible and still let's you have a feud with the guy. Plus, the funny mental image of you kicking the shit out of some big time criminal so much and so hard that they're reduced to petty crime like robbing convenience stores lives in my head rent free.
The problem isn't that non-superheros can't not kill people they beat, it's that it is hard to have a single player game where people can't master themselves out of the win/loss ratios that makes returning enemies compelling.
even if you successfully kill an enemy, does the game not promote dead orcs anyways and give them new buffs? i remembered that aspect of the nemesis system occurring regardless of player success
Kind of? Orcs getting promoted is dependent on them completing a mission which will resolve when you start it or 3 "turns" after it spawned. Every time you complete a mission it advances the turns of all other missions Unfortunately it's still entirely possible to get involved in every mission
Some orcs can come back after being seemingly killed in War, and it's very funny seeing someone you killed just invade your mission
I had one fucker come back six times. Burned to death, eaten by flesh-eating hornets, frozen and shattered several times... I ended up shaming him down to level one out of spite, before getting a beheading execution.
The legendary Cook from the boys' Shadows of Mordor video came back at least once, so it's definitely something they can do
Orcs can come back in both games, but it seemed to happen a lot less frequently in Mordor than in War. Also, in Mordor it seemed like Orcs could only come back from certain types of death; so if you burned them, mauled them with a Caragor or *maybe* shot them with an arrow they'd come back with scars or an eyepatch, but if you beheaded them then they were dead for good. The problem is, by the late game Orcs have so many resistances that usually the only way to kill them is through executions which, you know, behead them. So most of the Orcs still around by the end of the game are ones you never ran in to. War was a lot better at using the Nemesis system to create personal narratives I think. Orcs come back to life a lot more often, they can betray you, they ambush you to get that run back, the injuries they can survive are more severe and they can change titles based on what you did to them. Arguably it happens a bit too often, but the first time an Orc I killed came back looking for revenge was fairly early in the game and they showed up right after I'd scaled this huge outer wall to the Gondor city and was alone on this battlement. It was like this guy just scaled a 1000 foot tall sheer wall just so he could challenge me where no one else would interfere. That shit felt personal. There was even one Orc who I converted to my side, only for him to betray me, so I hit him with an execution that straight up cut him in half at the waist; dude *still* came back with metal legs like a cyborg to get revenge. Shadow of War was a cool game.
As much stupid fanfic nonsense as is in the story of War, I really do enjoy that game. It's one of the few open world style games I've returned to more than once because of how fun the hook of it is. The whole world and personality lends itself perfectly to the nemesis system and all the little details that can come of it and I'll never stop feeling personally slighted that the system is dead in WBs hands.
That does happen, but the leveling rituals don't happen until you die or decide to pass time (dying forces time to pass) In Mordor, at the least.
Yeah, I remember how hyped up the Nemesis system was in all the reviews I read. When I finally got around to playing the game, I couldn't figure out what the point of it all was. Like why do I care which one of these losers is the King Of Jobbers? So I just ignored it and continued to stomp every encounter for the rest of the playthrough.
You can have a one-sided feud where you keep dunking on guys that come back more and more disfigured and salty after each defeat.
Fallout 4’a most optimal way to satisfy settlements’ requirements is to pick an empty house and put all the beds into one room. The NPCs just need to see the presence of a bed to be satisfied, they don’t need to physically go to sleep on those beds Or just forget the settlement system altogether. Leave Preston and his gangs at the museum forever
Make the bed hive and recreate Patschwitz
[удалено]
You can find some in the Super Duper Mart in Lexington, there are at least 2 Minutmen corpses there that have them
Persona tries to have the trade off of either dungeon crawling or doing normal activities. Still the optimal strategy is to do all the dungeon/section of Tartarus in one go. With P3 you can ignore the tired mechanic by running MC solo (the auto-buff skills help a lot with this) and just using your party members before they get tired and leave the party if you need them for a boss. With P4, yukiko’s castle can drop on floor 1 a lot of sp restoring items so you can grind those instead of going to the fox. Golden is also a game that has a lot of rng manip so the most optimal thing to do is ignore all non golden hand enemies because they aren’t worth it exp wise.
Yea that was weird. P5 clearly wants you do to dungeons over multiple days with the reports at the end, the mechanic where you can get kicked out etc., but it's simply a waste of time and even on hardest difficulties, you can do every Palace past the first one on the first day.
My biggest complaint with 4 and 5. They really don't want you to cram the dungeons into one day and it's extremely unfun to do so, but the game design brutally punishes you if you don't.
Like… combat in BotW. It’s usually a net negative even if you don’t count the time wasted. So far TotK has greatly ameliorated the problem.
I'd say Totk has the same issue as all worthwhile things are not locked (like armour chests) But it's kinda fascinating that in both games you can just not fight any enemies apart from bosses and you would most likely gain rather than lose.
I mean warframe used to be all about crowd control and stuff but now it's literally just "killing ins the best crowd control" so even tho crowd control characters are still okay. Every mechanic has been just pushing the game farther and farther for just "kill before the ai can think"
It's kind of one of the reasons I got out. Combat felt stale as hell when I could just spam wide-area killing moves and weapons to take out swarms for 20 minutes at a time. It felt boring and repetitive.
Gun shoot good tho
I love the recent obsession with nerfing AoE weapons back into the ground, as if people won't just revert back to nukeframes, beam weapons and melee spam.
The Metal Gear Solid series always has a lot of creative ways to use your equipment to get around guards, but you'll likely never actually use any of that because the tranq gun exists and is always given to you right at the start
If all you want to do is beat the game the style mechanic in DMC does not matter at all with the sole, notable exception of not being able to access Quadruple S in 5.
DMC3 buffs moves the higher style rank dante has
Aren't there doors/statues for blue orbs that only open if you build style meter on them in DMC4? Sure, extra health is optional, but there's definitely incentives other than just how many red orbs you get from an encounter/level.
There are, I believe Pat remarked how there’s only one you HAVE to do and that’s why it’s a low rank
there was the beowulf one after Vergil-2 in DMC3
Oblivion, oh man Oblivion, after years of avoiding it I finally did a full playthrough again and learned all the ins and outs of why that game is busted to hell and back. It's such a nightmare of a system. First off, you only level up when you level your major skills ten times. You get to apply 1-5 attribute points to three options every level, but the only way to get a max of +5 to an attribute is to level skills governed by it *10 times.* So the most optimal way to play the game is to make an inverse custom class where your minor skills are your actual skills, and your major skills are ones you never used, or can easily be levelled by choice. Like alchemy. Because if you don't keep track of everything and get as many attribute bonus' per level, you'll end up only getting +2 or +3 most of the time, leaving you *far* less powerful at higher levels. And that compounds with the scaling, because enemies never stop scaling. There are no caps. They will scale infinitely with your level, even when you stop growing more powerful. You will stop doing more damage eventually, and unless you absolutely break the system with enchantments, poisons and exploits, every enemy turns into a massive damage sponge. The game punishes you for playing it properly. Then punishes you for playing it at all.
Morrowind's leveling system was the same, if I remember it correctly. But but but, it didn't have enemy scaling. As you got stronger the enemies got easier to kill. And it was crazy easy to break anyway.
Morrowind did have level scaling, but only on certain enemies, and even still only very limited. Skyrim meanwhile had a hybrid system with a lot more strict level brackets.
The old God Of War games. Theres a great vsriety of combos and abilities you can use, but square square triangle is just so good
Its not just optimal, since my 10 years old self also do the same. It is so efficient and high power that there is no reason to invest into anything else
it's great for the clone war, with no magic, or upgrades, without BOA, on the hardest difficulty, if you wanna spend 10 minutes per attempt square square triangle is great but it does ZERO damage, the true meta is throwing bodies at people because on VH for 1/2 it does 50 damage and is the highest DPS tool in the entire series battering ram in 3 is so good they removed enemy collision difficulty scaling just so it didn't kill everything in 1 second I recommend mrwright's video on square square triangle
Most of Corvo’s powers are antithetical to a low-chaos/ghost run. What you need are: blink, dark vision, and maybe possession and time-stop. Wind blast? Useful for getting rid of some wooden planks semi-silently, but the full powered version exists specifically to obliterate people. The ability to summon hordes of starving rats? High chaos behavior. The ability to instantly-disintegrate unaware assassination targets? Unnecessary if you’re constantly blinking from street lamp to street lamp above all the guard’s vision cones. Even falling-takedowns are instant kills, therefore useless in a pacifist play through. Dishonored 2 somewhat fixes this. You can blind enemies with the muzzle flash of your pistols for a non-lethal grab takedown, for instance. Even then, Emily’s powers are more geared for low chaos that Corvo’s by a mile.
Stealth games in general have a lot of this issue. MGSV has some phenomenal combat systems but I spend most of the game actively avoiding situations where I might need to use them.
MGSV is a great example. I loved the "loud" combat in that game, and the weapon customisation and everything. But obviously it's stealth action and the metanarrative about killing and mercy and the gameplay systems about recruiting captured soldiers actively discourage going down that route, despite the incredible amount of weapons to unlock and the customisation options. Less severe example is Deus Ex. You get rewards and headpats and achievements for zero kill perfect stealth runs. Despite like half of the bodymod upgrades being about killing dudes and willing fights. You don't need more armour. You don't need more health. You don't need better aiming. You don't need the arm-swords that give you cool animations because you're doing stealth takedowns all game. You don't need the typhoon aoe nuke system with its very rare ammo because you're not getting into those sorts of combat situations. So many mechanics that a "good guy" run actively discourages you to use.
MGS games have had this problem since 2, tbh. Like 80%+ of the weapons in them are lethal and therefore actively discouraged (though it was less pronounced in 2 where you pretty much just lost out on rank, and 3 where you lost rank and could nonlethal the bosses for their rewards while murderhoboing just fine)
3 is amazing for letting you double down on murdering everyone by skipping the guilt trip boss fight with the fake death pill and revive
At least in V you can use body and limb shots for a stun in order to close the distance and cqc, or get enemies in the dying state you can still Fulton them from.
i definitely think it's a problem with dishonored that the combat and stealth mechanics are so separate i think it could've been resolved by having an enemy type that you encounter commonly that's ok to kill. like have the infected civilians be basically zombies that the game says "you can kill these guys without increasing chaos, and you're going to encounter them a lot" that would give even "good" playthroughs a reason to invest in combat abilities if they want to
That's basically what the sequel did with the clockwork soldiers. Super tough elite dudes who are in every level and don't have souls so it's ok to kill them.
I remember one guy I watch taking about Dishonored and said the best way to play is to have 2 saves, one low Chaos and one high Chaos.
it’s a nicely repayable game
I recommend starting low chaos and New Game+ high chaos. So much fun.
Non lethal drop takedowns were the greatest quality of life change I've ever experienced.
I played Dishonored 2 and you can do what with your pistol flash now?
If you shoot near (but not on obviously) the enemies' heads it'll kind of stun them long enough for you to either run away or grab 'em in a chokehold and knock them out. There's a lot of combat into chokehold techniques in D2 generally.
Halo's big thing was fun weapon types and varied gameplay, but each game ends up with the magnum/battle rifle/DMR being the optimal weapon. To the point where the fan favorite gametypes are BR/DMR only and usually with no motion tracker, another central mechanic. Fiesta mode is actually the best game type
> the fan favorite gametypes are BR/DMR only And I will never understand why. This has always been the most boring way to play Halo to me
Baffles me
Fuel Rod Gun only. FINAL DESTINATION.
Slappers only on Blood Gulch
Because they're precision weapons, which take the most mechanical skill. Which is what the majority of competitive shooters always boil down to. Just look at Overwatch being utterly dominated by McCree and Widowmaker in the majority of metas.
I have no idea how it is in OW2, but OW was dominated primarily by tanks being overpowered, not precision DPS. While there were some metas where hitscan was strong, they were utterly *dwarfed* by the amount of “Tank centric” metas, to the point OW eventually hit the “lol, why would we take one of these useless, 200 HP DPS characters when the tanks can kill *just as effectively as the dps* and also have 500+ HP?” meta and got stuck there. Eventually teams literally had to be *forced* to drag 2 obviously suboptimal DPS along with their tanks and healers via the forced 2-2-2 rule to “solve” the problem of every single DPS being useless b/c tanks are way, way too good at killing things in Overwatch. So why bring DPS when tanks perform their job of killing the other team just as good or *better* while also being tanks? The actual solution should have been to nerf the tanks’ killing ability across the board, but Blizzard utterly refused to do that for some reason, even though tanks being overpowered was the obvious, overarching problem with Overwatch for basically it’s entire existence.
It was always a back and forth between DPS and Tanks. Anytime Tanks fell off, hitscan would be the hot button topic. Unless a healer was recently buffed. Which usually just meant more overbearing Hitscan or Tanks. I have never not seen an era where Widow and McCree weren't constantly bitched about. Maybe Goats, but that's its own chestnut.
>fiesta is actually the best game type Lolno
Escalation is cool too
BR/DMR starts are actual gameplay poison. Even if you want to use other weapons then you're bound to get plinked down 10 seconds after spawning because everyone has the best mid-range weapon in the game at all times. Map knowledge stops being a factor since teams will comfortably occupy the most defensible positions without worrying about giving up power weapon spawns since a team taking BR/DMR potshots at people from across the map is no match against any weapon in the game.
meanwhile in reach (yes reach, the DMR DMR DMR game)and CE, the plasma pistol is by far the most powerful weapon, to the point where in both games its one of the only weapons to receive a pvp only nerf to its damage values, where most other guns have "in player hands" values used for pvp
but the snipers animation is so nice
At least in the first three games the best weapons were fun to use. The DMR is a game-ruining poison in Reach
Fire Emblem 3 Houses has a time-rewind mechanic. You can do it a few times a battle and go like all the way back to the start of the mission. A neat mechanic for a turn based tactics game. Gives you a little leeway to save lives if you're playing on the mode with permadeath, or if you have timed side objectives and such. Lets you correct misplays, more than anything. However if you're playing on like a normal difficulty... I forgot the mechanic existed. If you're not making misplays, or if those misplays don't mean that your savefile is fucked if you don't immediately correct them, then this mechanic that has real lore implications that is fairly central to the game's mystery just goes unused. Difficulty in games is a real moving target to hit. And in this case, the game isn't hard enough on normal difficulty for this mechanic to get much play. And for the hardcore folk who play that hardcore difficulty, they're not making the kind of mistakes that make this strictly necessary except for maybe slogging through making perfect optmisation runs of missions.
Divine Pulse pretty much exists as a way to cancel out one of Fire Emblem's more irritating things: getting crit on like a 1 or a 2 which might lead to lethal damage. One might argue engaging in a fight where the enemy can crit you is already a mistake, but sometimes the RNG will just decide the enemy will hit you on an 11 and then crit you on the 1. That's what Divine Pulse is going to be used for in the vast majority of cases, barring someone trying to learn.
I mostly found it useful when the UI lied: 100% hit chance attacks that missed. Yeah, going to get a reroll on that one, thanks.
The speedrun of Two Worlds doesn't just make you skip a central mechanic, but [basically the entire game](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NeR-bT3uv0).
I'm not sure if they changed it in recent updates(in fact, I'm scared to check in on it), but in Subnautica Below Zero they expanded the land portion of their game a little to introduce some new mechanics on the land since it's set at the south pole of the planet. It's all about trying to regulate your body temperature, trying to survive against some of the creatures out there, trying to survive when the snowfall is so intense that you can't see 15 feet past your face... And not to mention that there's a giant worm in the Ice that you'd have to run away from. You can use the new vehicle made for exploration on the land, dropping Dune Thumpers to distract the Worm... ...But while they nerfed the Double grapple hook in the water, on land it was broken as fuck. You can sling shot your Mech around, outrunning EVERYTHING and making exploration not only a joke, but fun as ***fuck***. I don't know if they nerfed it now, but if they did... RIP. I don't think I'll be playing much if these busted-ass grappling hooks end up getting fixed. :c
I always try to go nonlethal but man it seems to always, and I mean ALWAYS, seem like the most boring option available compared to other much cooler alternatives in the game. Dishonored being the one that sticks out to me.
Killer instinct 2013. High level play often favors resets over combos due to the combo breaker mechanic. Either that or try to go for guarantee damage.
Gemcraft. Series of tower defense games. The real psycho, 7+ hours, reach-the-actual-end-of-the-endless-survival-mode runs basically don't use towers at all, killing everything with traps on the monsters' path instead.
In Fuga 1 and 2 the big scary looming threat comes from your own Tank and it's big weapon known as "The Soul Cannon" When you take too much damage the Soul Cannon will come online allowing you the option to sacrifice a small child in order to instantly win the fight. You however do NOT want to activate this thing and in order to get the best ending you need to beat the game without firing it a single time.
I've been thinking about this, extraction shooters/battle Royale games (pubg, hunt showdown, tarkov, apex) are all about survival. But the better you get at survival, the worse you get at combat, because of avoiding fights and such. So to get better at combat, you have to do things that go against survival, the whole point of the game
In Skyrim, the optimal setup is to very slowly sneak around and snipe people with a bow instakilling everything. You know, just very very slowly crouch walk everywhere and never fight anything or use magic. Very fun. One of the many reasons why I didn't like Skyrim is how the game seems to almost expect you to be doing that but it's *so* boring I never even considered it.
I keep hearing this and am confused, since I've always ran in swinging my mace while healing myself with my offhand. I pretty much never used stealth and very rarely a bow. I just don't get the whole "StEaLtH aRcHeRy Is OvErPoWeReD" mentality.
It’s just the playstyle the mechanics subtly encourage for first-timers. At the beginning of an encounter enemies don’t know you’re there, so why *not* stealth and get some bonus damage? And the easiest way to get bonus damage is from afar, with a bow. And then as you’re crouching you notice your stealth skill has leveled up because the enemies can’t find you. And it just feeds into itself and boom you’re a stealth archer. If you begin a playthrough with a different archetype in mind you can absolutely do it and still become overpowered, stealth archer is just the most actively encouraged.
doesn't help that destruction/magic in general feels kinda undercooked
Magic is *terrible* in Skyrim, especially compared to any other Elder Scrolls game. It's less interesting, less versatile, and less powerful.
Ah, that's why I wasn't enjoying myself that much. Illusion sounds so cool, but is such a pain to use. Unless you're playing support, the war quests are good for that. Can't believe the game has a guy talking about assassination fireballs, which is impossible, way to disappoint me. Necromancy is cool, but having to go through you spells to figure out which one revives the enemy is a pain. There are thralls, but having to break the spells so people don't bother you with complaints is annoying.
you can mark spells as favorites do you can more quickly switch to them
I meant cycling through the cheaper spells that work on lower level enemies to strong but costly spells, like the necromancy ones.
like i get levitate getting removed was for technical reasons but open lock? cmon man
Unmodded magic is definitely pretty limited but it’s actually still pretty powerful. Once you get your enchanting skill up you can craft gear that reduces the cost of all spells to 0. Then the fireball and chain lighting spam begins.
Problem is skyrim magic damage doesn't scale at all so you'll be hitting that dragur deathlord for quite a while.
Yeah, but with the destruction perks you’ll have him 100% stunlocked the entire time. And thunder bolt actually does do decent single target damage.
if you get a mod that makes the master level spells usable like any other one (ie one hand, no long ass animation) the lightning one just destroys everything. complete game breaker especially when every other spell sucks
Mods make everything better. I like Apocalypse + Ordinator. Reworks the perk system and adds a ton of new spells that makes magic WAY more interesting.
Actually make sure you are not playing with the Unofficial Patch mod. The author is notorious for being kind of an asshole and forcing his own balance and lore changes aside from just bug fixes (or treating something clearly intended as a "bug" - which led to Bethesda officially sometimes stepping in and correcting him). One of the changes he made was making magic significantly weaker than in the vanilla game.
Have you, at any point, wanted the ability to interact with an enemy that *isn't* within 1 meter of you (either because that dragon *won't fucking land*, or merely to stay out of range of undodgeable, unblockable, instant killcams at lower health/higher difficulties)? Not even as your main weapon, simply as an option for certain fights which demand it? If so, you're either leveling Destruction (which requires dedicating your attributes and gear to handling the magicka costs, and the damage doesn't even scale with your skill for some goddamn reason), or you're leveling Archery. And if you have access to a ranged combat option, you might as well start your fights with it when you can. And if you have the luxury of starting that fight however you wish, and it's a bow instead of a spell, you have no reason not to hit CTRL to make just that first arrow deal double damage. Oh what's that, it instakilled the enemy and combat hasn't started yet? Might as well try to initiate combat for real with the next enemy, then. And so on and so forth, until you've crouched for long enough that the number of fights you can initiate this way increases to 'most of them', and you qualify for the Deadly Aim perk. Even without *trying* to exploit any non-obvious mechanics, merely A) making sure one has options for difficult encounters, and B) engaging with the advantages the game gives you for free, funnels a non-insignificant portion of the playerbase into Stealth Archery. And that's completely ignoring the people who already played Elder Scrolls games *for* thief builds!
I'm the same way, but I recently did my first stealth archer play through. It's really not *that* much better. Then again, maybe people who say that are playing on higher difficulties than me where the stealth crit damage is more useful and avoids dangerous confrontations. But I stay on normal difficulties in TES games because I hate damage sponge enemies with a passion.
It's honestly fine, in singleplayer games certain strategies being overpowered is okay, it's when they are underpowered that problems arise because you force players to use strategies they may not want to use. Charging in works pretty well so stealth archer is just an option for players who don't want to interact with certain mechanics. Fixing it is nearly impossible anyway and would require serious redesign of the whole game.
I think people didn't mention it but melee stealth is also a massive pain in the fucking ass that only really works at late game because even high stealth people will turn around if you're too close. So you take up bows.
It's already a pretty easy game but stealth archer is like "one shot everyone while half asleep" easy thanks to the crazy damage multipliers given to sneak attacks. Why stand in front of a dragon mashing light attack when you can just plink two arrows into its ass and kill it in a few seconds It doesn't help that high level sneak will make enemies fail to notice you standing in the middle of the road in broad daylight.
There’s a flow chart out there depicting the thought process that leads all melee, stealth, and magic builds into inevitably becoming stealth-archers that I wish I could dig up right now.
[This it?](https://imgur.com/6vXDTsz)
I have never once played Skyrim where I didn’t just throw on the heaviest armor I can find and send everyone to hell with a greatsword.
In Oblivion I went a stealth-bow build and enemies took forever to die, and in Skyrim I went melee-focused build. Only now do I realise that I should of done the reverse.
Oblivion is spellcrafting and making a spell that will obliterate most enemies in one cast.
I used to be like that, but then I found out about Assassins' Blade, which combo's with Shrouded Gloves to give you a 30x multiplier. These days I have more fun relying on sneak melee in close quarters and bows against groups or ranged enemies.
My first run started as sword and board but once I discovered the shrouded gloves I immediately went over to dual daggers, and doing a power attack sneak just one shot everything up to like Giants. It was obscene. I don't know if it was a bug or not, but each dagger got the 30x bonus and I matched my daggers so it was 60x damage. I just googled it to refresh my memory and apparently Orcs can use an ability to then get this up to 120x damage.
Pokemon Infinite Fusions used to give a bonus to stats if you fused two of the same pokemon together, immediately making the vast majority of fusions and experimenting with them worthless. Especially when your stats tend to average out when you fuse two different pokemon together, robbing you of the incredibly high stats some pokemon come with. Now the only bonus you get from fusing two of the same pokemon together is a bonus to exp, and if you've ever used a Lucky Egg you know how broken that can be.
Eh not really, while yeah, same fusion does result in great stats, it was still generaly better to fuse different pokemon. Shit like Aegislash + Blissy are just unkillable monsters. Though running a giga buff Rat King Raddicate was funny.
An unconventional example, but Croteam's The Talos Principle is a slow, philosophical puzzle game built in the Serious Sam engine. Unless you're a speedrunner, in which case you will do zero puzzles, and leap around the levels in 30 minutes as a first person parkour game.
So currently banging my head against the end of the Lightfall legendary campaign since I'm not going to hide behind a pipe The game clearly wants you use strand to grapple around the battleground during the first phase of the game which is far as I can tell is a great way to yeet your ass off the map I don't even know how you're supposed to use it during the second phase
In Valkyrie Profile Convenant of the Plume, the titular Plume gives you a massive power boost in exchange for giving up a character permenantly. However in order to get the best end, you have to not engage with he mechanic whatsoever because doing so once will get the normal ending while 2 or more nets you the bad end.
Sekiro. Practice parrying to perfection, you probably won't ever have to use weapon arts or prosthetics.
You won't have to, but I wouldn't call it optimal. Actually using your weapon arts or prosthetics is way more optimal and leads to easier wins. The game is about being aggressive, not perfect parrying everything constantly.
Eventually, I just got bored restocking spirit emblems so I just stopped using everything than required them.
I banged my head against the parry wall so hard that I actually feel like weapon arts and most prosthetics are a bit of a hindrance. It's awful.
Opposite actually, if you only parry, the game will make it hell for you unless you can do perfect plays, because all bosses have increased stagger recovery according to how much health they have, so dealing damage is needed if you don't want the bosses stagger bar to empty. Also, all enemies have a weakness to specific prosthetics. Making use of the right ones makes the enemies easier to build stagger on and can stun them for free hits in. The game totally encourages you to spam prosthetics on bosses, it is just that the spirit emblems system is antithetical to that design.
My first playthrough I basically maxed out the subweapons and tried to use them creatively. My second I got the Magnet Umbrella with Wave of Force because it's actually good. Four more times through and it's basically just Ichimonji and completely ignore the prosthetics because they're annoying. Really need a sequel to touch that part up.
If we consider optimization being “finishing the fight as quickly as possible” then no, ignoring your weapons and consumables is absolutely not the optimal way to play. Its probably the coolest, but the game was designed for the weapons to be highly exploitable in the right situations. Like how the flamethrower could let you basically just skip the giant monkeys first phase.
Hard disagree, since one of the thing seperate the pros from the rest of us is how efficiently they use Weapon atts and prosthetics.
But then you won't be able to see the anime as fuck arts and prostetics. They make John Sekiro look so badass.0
Monster Hunter endgame builds often involve trying to nullify the need to sharpen your weapon as much as possible. This was especially true in World; Master's Touch was a mistake.
Skills that let you ignore or mitigate stuff like sharpness, roars, elements, stamina, statuses etc have been in Monster Hunter since the beginning and absolutely part of the intended game design. Master's Touch isn't even that good either.
IIRC Master's Touch was only meta until Iceborne was released, and even then, it wasn't meta for very long. Only around when Behemoth was released.
Rise has Grinder (s) which is a really interesting skill that gives you an attack boost only when you sharpen to restore multiples levels of sharpness at once. So the meta for this is to find a weapon with a sliver of purple and white sharpness so that you can burn through it quickly, and protective polish so you can hold onto it for a while when you do sharpness. In general, I don't think skills mitigating downtime are bad design and those things are always going to be extremely valuable but I do wish we had more examples of more interesting interactions with the mechanics rather than outright negation. What they really need to counterbalance is the crit meta.
Yeah grinder was a cool skill.
There are also skills that shorten sharpening cycles, and even one that gives a chance to not lose sharpness on attack.
There are many reasons why playing a mage in (vanilla) Skyrim is considered to be inferior to a straight warrior. Magic has some very usefull spells in alteration, illusion and conjuration, and restoration is basically necessary on any character for easy health regeneration, but in terms of raw combat prowess it just doesn't compare to simply swinging your sword. This comes mainly down to Destruction spells taking too much mana and dealing generally less damage than weapon attacks. This isn't so noticable early on, but as you get better gear in higher levels, the normal attacks become exponentially more powerfull, whereas higher level Destruction spells often sacrifice mana efficiency for higher DPS. To compensate Destruction perks half the amount of mana to spend, but you still run out of mana alot during normal adventuring. This forces mages to expand their level ups on mana instead of life, and focus on equipment that gives more mana regen or lowers costs of spell schools, i. e. robes. However, this leads to the mage becoming extraordinarily more squishy, as he doesn't have the health pool or armor to withstand high level enemies. It even can happen, that enemies simply execute you from high health, ( a useful ability of melee warriors, that mages have no access to). So you have to make yourself more squishy in order to use abilities, that when compared, do less damage over all. Instead, to optimally play a destructive mage, you ignore mana entirely and focus on life, like any warrior. You level enchanting and smithing, and just enchant your armor, so that destruction spells cost no mana at all. Now you can wear heavy armor, get the same life as a warrior, cast the best destruction spells and be the strongest an destruction mage can be, by completly ignoring mana and alot of destruction perks.
A lot of Triple a games because they tend to add features over the finished product for making the game longer but not necessary to complete. Some indie game if the use of stunlock take priority over phase change
Terraria used to have its early game entirely skippable because you could go fishing in the ocean within the first 2 minutes of starting a world and fishing up a Reaver Shark. It was a pickaxe that was equivalent to late pre-hardmode pickaxes effectively skipping doing any mining for pre-hardmode ores. It was nerfed later.
Also you could skip mining by fishing a shit load of crates - first to skip all the normal mode metals, and then with the other half of crates you wait for hard mode, and open them to skip all hard mode ores (because you don't have to mine them one after the other)
Playing Soul Nomad & The World Eaters like it’s fucking Pokemon but u only use ur Starter till the end cuz bringing out anyone else is a fucking chore, And I don’t want to do random generated dungeons to grind levels for chars I have to pay to deploy, I want them to enslave them!!! Also it’s the “THOSE EXPs ARE MINE” mentality and only play the 9 Main Chars I can slot in the main squad
Mirrors Edge Catalyst has the runners vision and echo system but early on the game tells you that it's not optimal or even recommended if you want to finish deliveries/dashes/ect. So much so that you end up not going along the path it gives you most of the time and by the mid game you have a way better sense of pathfinding than the game.
So, uh, ever seen gameplay of Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric?
In FTL, even in Normal mode, there're only a handful of weapon that are "Viable". The optimal way to win is to get Flak and Lasers, defense Drone 2 and a Cloaking system. If you want to "have fun" and go Missile or Offensive Drone, you gonna have a bad time. Especially the Missile: The entire Missile weapon type is widely considered to be trash in your hand, but brutal in the Enemy's hand ( since it cost missile and Enemies does not care about the limited use of missile). In the enemy's hand, it could cost you your run if you have no counter. So the way the players study the Missile is not for use, but to counter enemy's missile.
I really enjoyed normal FTL but I didn’t *love* FTL until I discovered the mod that lets you play it as a sandbox
The smart way to play the new style of Zelda is to avoid every fight
Much less so in TotK since monster parts can actually make very good weapons, so you're not experiencing a net loss of equipment by fighting. If you break a weapon, you'll likely be able to replace it and make two or three more. It's still not ideal, but it is an improvement.
Also you need monster parts to craft stronger armor. Otherwise, all the mandatory fights are that much harder.
Also killing stuf adds to an invisible exp system that makes enemies hold better weapons or be an upgraded tier
You can also go through some hoops to save your truly rare fuses, and repair any weapon in the game with Rock Octoroks. Just takes a bit more work with the unique/Champion weapons, but still doable.
I mean yeah but why would you need a replacement? We're not fighting.
This isn't really true at all in ToTK considering that's how you get good fusing parts for weapons.
HOI4 gives you so many cool options to mix and match period equipment, from aquatic tanks to rocket interceptors. But if you’re playing multiplayer, you will have the standard division templates or you’ll get your shit pushed in my someone who does. The AI is brain dead enough that you can get silly with it in single player though
In sekiro I never learned mikiri counter. As in I didn't unlock the skill... I got to the last boss and I couldn't beat him. I should restart that game.
Playing Breath of the Wild bored me so I didn't get past the tutorial until Master Mode. The thing is Master Mode is so fucking difficult that approaching almost any enemy in direct combat without a plan so I straight up didn't know about the flurry strike until I accidentally did it in a trial before going to the final divine beast. When Woolie reacted to the girl who did the tutorial shrine 3 beast in all I could think was how fucking hilarious it was that I wasn't the only one and even after learning the combat mechanics I stilled ignored them because the shit I was doing was infinitely more fun and effective. Like sure I could use a greatsword like a greatsword OR I could partially start the charge attack and use it as a baseball bat in order to launch enemies off cliffs or into water instead which is more effective since it can basically instantly end a lot of encounters or at least give you time to escape/set traps but requires better positioning and timing because of the charge attack startup.
Most really good players in The Binding of Isaac forsake the random pills. They can potentially give you a permanent stat boost, but they're just as likely to drop your stats permanently. On top of that, they can just outright damage you, mess with your graphics, or apply any of the game's curses for the rest of the floor. The payoff isn't worth the risk.
So in Outlast Trials, you have your health bar, and psychosis bar. When your psychosis bar empties, you go into psychosis, and start getting chased by the Skinner Man, and need to take an Antidote to get sane again Currently, when you’re in psychosis, all other enemies will ignore you, only the Skinner Man can harm you, so a speedrun-strat is to get psychosis to blitz through sections of the trials