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Video game thread
What are you playing this week?
I uninstalled Slay the Spire 1 and 2. I realized that the games (mainly sts2) took up a lot of time and capacity due to my need to play optimally, without giving me much joy in return.
Started and finished a Civ V game instead. I got around 30 wonders, because I was playing on a more relaxed difficulty than usual.
Tried out The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales (demo) briefly. Dismayed to find it has no ultrawide support. And they call it HD-2D yet all the characters are pixel art style. Might play it in 16:9 on my TV at some polnt. They've priced it very highly, and it has denuvo, so I might wait for a deep discount further down the road.
I've been playing 33 Immortals. It just came out, and is a multiplier roguelite thing sort of like a cross between Realm of the Mad God and Hades. 33 players get dropped into a map, and you shoot monsters and complete objectives, getting randomized upgrades along the way, fight a boss at the end, and then get meta-progression rewards.
I'm liking it a lot so far. It seems way less volatile and repetitive than Realm of the Mad God. Everyone starts a map at approximately the same time, so you're not dropped into a map where everyone is level 15 while you're level 1 trying to grow on your own. And the combat and dodging mechanics are a lot more modern and feel more satisfying and skillful than just pew pew pew. A match progresses naturally from wandering around getting loot, to fulfilling joint objectives in small groups (the chambers only admit 6 players at a time, but several pop up around the map), and then there are three larger objectives on the main map, and then everyone teleports to all fight the final boss together with all 33 (or whoever is left alive).
The fact that the game is balanced around so many people forces players of vastly different meta-progression states together, which can create some balance issues. On the dps side that's mostly fine because even if you're doing twice as much damage as someone else, the tougher enemies are balanced around being hit by lots of people, and the boss expects 33 people to wail on it, so it all kind of averages together. On the survival side it's a bit of an issue. I have not died once in the regular difficult mode since unlocking a shield perk that vastly increases my effective health.
That said, there are harder difficulty modes, but they take longer, largely because enemy healths do not scale with the number of surviving players, so if it's harder and half the people die then the objectives and final boss take twice as long to kill.
The majority of meta progress is in the form of achievements. You've got achievement blocks for each weapon, location, and several subcategories of things you can do. Each achievement gives you 10 xp towards your main level which increases your maximum health, and each block of achievement gives you some major unlock like new features, powering up the relevant weapon, or more stats or perk slots, alongside unlocking the next block of achievements (which take longer than the previous block, causing the meta-progress to slow down in a smooth way).
I suspect that the game will get stale eventually if they don't continue adding new content post release. I have 18 hours in it and suspect it'll stay fun for another 30-40. But I don't think it has enough content for hundreds of hours of replayability. Without that, the player base might drop off, which would be fatal to a game balanced around requiring 33 people to all queue up at the same time. Still, in its new state I have never run into matchmaking issues even when playing late at night, and it's a lot of fun.
Sounds like fun. I played some Dark and Darker for a while, which was pretty punishing, and has the PvPvE element, instead of just PvE as you've described, but it has much of the same issues with balance and skill. This looks a little more like Diablo and a little less like an extraction shooter.
I feel like in a PvP setting the issues would be vastly worse. Being in a squad of 6 people and your teammates just stomp the enemies and carry you is kind of dissatisfying as you get rewards that it doesn't feel like you earned, but you still get the rewards. Getting killed by someone way stronger than you and you lose everything feels way worse, which is why most PvP games avoid strong meta-progression this way and only have small upgrades or let you get through them quickly and max out so the game can be balanced around a maxed out meta.
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