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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   1960 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 5, 2026

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What are you buying during the Steam summer sale? I picked up Persona 4, Noita, Witcher 3, Halo 3 collection, and the Prey Mooncrash DLC.

It's ending in a couple days so I'm considering picking up another couple games on sale like God of War, Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon, or Into the Breach.

Tell me what you're buying, or try to convince me to buy one of the games on my list!

I bought Expedition 33. It's really good, with a spectacular turn-based battle system and an even better system for upgrades and finding upgrades. But I am a little confused why people hold up E33 as why the FF7Rs are mot good enough, especially since there is universal agreement that the FF7 combat, especially Rebirth, is great. It seems to me like these are two obviously great rpgs with somewhat flawed storytelling and a few shortcomings in world design. (Rebirth has the excessive quest issue abd badly erred by saving too much story for part 3, while E33 is too empty.)

Fucking love that game man is so beautiful. The music is a masterpiece.

But I am a little confused why people hold up E33 as why the FF7Rs are mot good enough, especially since there is universal agreement that the FF7 combat, especially Rebirth, is great.

There's nowhere near universal agreement on that. I didn't play E33, but from the criticisms that I've seen, it's that E33 decided to keep the traditional turn-based RPG approach while adding the parry system to it, which proved that it was possible to make a turn-based RPG whose gameplay appealed to people. Which was in contrast to Square Enix's apparent approach with FF7R which was declaring that turn-based RPG systems like that of the original FF7 were dead and creating a real-time system that had aspects of the turn-based system stapled on. As someone who never enjoyed the original FF7 combat system - or any turn-based RPG - when I was playing FF7R, I often found myself wishing they'd just done that, since what they actually produced was the worst of both worlds, something that was unsatisfying in its real-time controls due to the reliance on ATB, while losing almost none of what made turn-based combat unfun with the heavy reliance on stats and gear/tactics.

Hmm, I found E33's parry system totally uninteresting, but that may be because it is too hard for me; I only dodge, and badly. On FF7R, I'm a sucker for teamup attacks, so the synergy attacks of Rebirth totally got me... I just wish FFs would have a better system for activating limit breaks than "get hit a lot".

I'll also add my two cents that I've always felt like I'm supposed to enjoy FF games due to their genre, extensive worldbuilding and high production quality, but for the most part always stopped playing them somewhere in the middle due to the combat system. It always gives the superficial illusion of difficulty and diversity but is in practice gimmicky and one-dimensional. FF7 was no exception.

especially since there is universal agreement that the FF7 combat, especially Rebirth, is great

Very much no. I hated the battle system in FF7R. It wasn't fun to play, and also suffered from terrible boss design where fights would last 10 minutes because they had way the hell too much HP (not exaggerating, that's how long it took me to beat Air Buster even though I was doing nothing but hitting him with stagger and lightning moves to stagger him, then dumping in limit breaks when he was staggered). I know some people enjoy it and I don't expect them to stop, but their opinion is not remotely universal.

Antichamber, Aragami, MiniLAW, Transistor, Neon STRUCT. Largely based on the criteria of not paying more than €5 for any individual game.

Over on GOG I picked up Second Sight and Kane and Lynch: Dead Men (both for nostalgia's sake; curious how the latter will hold up) and Broken Pieces.

If you grabbed P4, I would strongly recommend Metaphor ReFantazio, if you don't already have it.

I finally got Valheim and enjoyed it for a while but lately have been drowning in so many bears that it's not fun any more. Literally about half my time is spent fighting bears, and as soon as one's gone another seems to take its place almost immediately. Can't go anywhere or do anything. Also, the bears don't drop anything I want, so it's pretty much purely a pain in the ass.

Let's be clear that it's not a skill issue; I can fight them just fine. It just takes too long and their spawn rate is insane.

My more experienced friends tell me I should probably just build a new house somewhere else. Apparently the problem I'm having may be a quirk of two small black forest biomes near my house. The game seems to want a bear in each of them at all times, whereas when I go and explore larger black forest biomes bears don't seem very common at all.

For several reasons I'm thinking I may just want to start fresh with a new character and world.

My more experienced friends tell me I should probably just build a new house somewhere else. Apparently the problem I'm having may be a quirk of two small black forest biomes near my house. The game seems to want a bear in each of them at all times, whereas when I go and explore larger black forest biomes bears don't seem very common at all.

I would agree with them, I just got back into valheim, I do not encounter a time consuming amount of bears in the meadows or BF. I'm a bit past those biomes now, but my lumber yard is in a BF biome and I still sail through a BF to get back to my original safe meadows base. Not a lot of bear encounters...

I admit it's been a long time since I cracked open Valheim, but can't you just make a new world and move your existing character over to it? I seem to recall doing that a number of times to help friends take down some of the bosses.

Definitely could, but I'd like the experience of starting from scratch again, this time knowing how things work.

I bought P5R (been feeling the itch for another playthrough and I don't really feel like using my PS4) and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Not much that piqued my interest, in all honesty.

With P4, just making sure you know there's a remake coming out in Feb. Jury is out on whether it'll be good, but it is probably worth holding off playing P4G until there is some consensus on how the remake compares.

I've always been a P fan but I don't like the look of the new screenshots from the P4 remake. They've messed up the art style.

Personally I'm holding out to see if they mess up the music (I saw a video with a version of Your Affection which was absolutely atrocious, they turned the breezy J-pop song into a techno track, and I'm hoping that is not going to be the summer town music cause I can't stand it). The P4 soundtrack is really good (the singer's ability to pronounce English aside), and if they screw that up it's probably gonna be a no from me. The other major concern I have is whether they rewrite story beats for culture war reasons (Kanji and Naoto are likely victims there), which I doubt they will do but is always a possibility in this day and age.

I think there is some rewriting for modern western cw reasons going on. That's the rumor. It's gonna suck.

The soundtracks have always been great. But I happen to think that turning the engrish into correct english would actually worsen the whole thing and homogenize it while taking some of the focus away from pure melody/vibe (which they (used to) excel at) and onto words. They made some completely new tracks for the P3 remake. They weren't bad at all, but they clearly broke with the old style.

When P5 came out, some American players were complaining about a lack of "localization". I think that if Atlus keeps adapting the series to the Western market, they'll ruin it. My suspicion is that we've already seen the best of the creative genius behind the series and it's downhill from here even though P6 (coming in a year or so) will probably make a lot of money for them.

With the new "darker theme" they supposedly have gone for with P6, and given how almost the same ground has been covered 3 times now, this would have been a good time to create a university age game.

Man... I just found out last night that there is a P4R version of Heartbreak, Heartbreak that people have pulled off their promo stream. It's so awful compared to the original. No idea what the heck Atlus is doing rewriting music to have a completely different feel. I think I might pass on this one, or at most try it out on game pass. The music in P4 is top tier, and what this remake is doing to it is a crime.

RIP "heartbeak, hearbake, you make me goomba" or whatever the hell it was. Gibberish ftw. With rewritten, intelligible lyrics sung by a Westerner I'm forced to pay attention to how bad they are.

Huh. I should purchase something. God knows I don't play any of the games I buy, but I can pass it on to the grandkids. A slight pain is the fact that I've still got an account based in India, because it occasionally pays off in terms of geographical arbitrage. But at other times, it makes a quick spur of the moment purchase difficult.

Right now, I'd recommend anyone into tactics give Menace a whirl. It's still a while away from feature-complete, but the recent updates and a few mods make me quite close to booting it back up again. Got my money's worth with about 20 hours of playtime already, and it has the potential to provide hundreds.

+1 for Menace rec. Very fun. Very unfinished too though, back when I played it, but the potential is there.

I'll wait for 1.0 before I go back to it.

God knows I don't play any of the games I buy, but I can pass it on to the grandkids

Well....

"Unfortunately, Steam accounts and games are non-transferable," the support rep explained. "Steam Support can't provide someone else with access to the account or merge its access to another account.

"I regret to inform you that your Steam account cannot be transferred via a will."

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/you-cant-take-it-with-you-but-you-cant-leave-it-behind-either-valve-says-you-arent-allowed-to-bequeath-a-steam-account-in-a-will/

There's the official EULA and there's handing the password away with a wink and a nod. I'll make sure to delete all the hentai games I do (not) own.

It'll be interesting to see what Steam does when it's been around long enough that there's no conceivable way some of the account owner as can still be alive.

Unfortunately this is likely to happen at a time where Gaben is also gone, so I'm not hopeful about the answer.

It's at least plausible that in 30-50 years, games like these will be sufficiently "retro" that there isn't enough money in the market for anyone to even bother the lawyers to object. Already there are games I played as a kid that can't be purchases legitimately (the first two Civilization games, for example), but they can be played online for free and nobody has bothered complaining. I assume those aren't even worth packaging up (and sorting out licensing, which may be complicated) and selling for 99 cents on Steam, or it'd have been done already. Other games of that vintage are still sold, though (LucasArts ones, for example).

Related: does anyone care about the licensing implications of passing on an iTunes MP3 library? The kids are all using Spotify and streaming these days anyway.

The new habit of remastering and re-releasing old games might affect that too. Civ 2 was 1996 and dropped off, but Age of Empires 2 is 1999 and just got a remaster. Being able to trivially pirate what's functionally the same game might be a problem.

Especially when some of those remasters go badly: Warcraft 3, for example, I think there are a number of people who would rather have the fresh-off-a-disc-install version of that.

I also wonder if, as the rate of graphics improvements drops off, the old games might become more valuable relative to their successors. Morrowind and Oblivion in their original forms are visually rough, but Skyrim is a 15-year-old game that is still totally fine visually. ES6 will look better, but probably not that much better, and if there are design, story, or mod opennness issues, it's much more likely that people would go back to Skyrim than that they'd go back to Morrowind in the Skyrim era.

I'm considering getting the Skitarii DLC for Darktide, but I think I'll be able to restrain myself by focusing on completing some challenges with the vanilla characters instead.

My brother strongly recommended Elden Ring, but it's damn expensive. Doesn't look like it'll be any cheaper anytime soon, but here my strategy will be to instead focus on completing Dark Souls 1 instead. I have the Prepare To Die Edition, which I need to mod with DSFix to make it playable with KBM, and even then it'll be a rough ride, but the easier-to-play Remastered edition is, again, damn expensive.

And then I got Lords of the Fallen (2023), which only cost around 9€. I don't get to play much, so I suppose it'll last me long enough for me to not need to torture myself with Dark Souls after all.

Play DS with DSFix but don’t use M&K. It’s just not worth it.

The advice for a shield is because a lot of the early Souls experience is about learning curves. Going glass cannon, or even just armor tanking, will send you back to the bonfire more often, slowing the learning. A shield gives you more opportunities to observe.

Once you have some system familiarity, it doesn’t really matter what you use because you will recognize the design patterns more easily. “That enemy looks like he has a window to attack.” “That would be a good place for a spike trap.” “I should kill the dogs first.”

Edit; I see you’ve had some experience already. Disregard me.

Play DS with DSFix but don’t use M&K. It’s just not worth it.

Well then I'm back to the Logitech Extreme 3D Pro.

I refuse to buy a controller! Irrationally perhaps, but my desk is full!

I keep my controller balanced on top of my uninterruptible power supply (under my desk) rather than on my desk.

That's an option to be sure, but I don't like storing things where they can 1) be kicked, 2) fall down and 3) are out of sight and free to gather dust.

Dark Souls isn’t that bad. There’s a few rules:

  • Have a big shield, keep it in front of your face at all times.
  • If you can’t succeed, grind a bit and get a better sword/armour/shield. Dark Souls has an adjustable difficulty curve - you can get as strong as you want before taking on a challenge.
  • Explore everywhere.
  • Go slow at first, then once you know the map a bit you can run past everyone. They don’t chase you far.
  • Don’t leave the bonfire without levelling up if you have souls. If you need 1200 souls to level and you have 900, grind or use items rather than risk them all. Much more relaxing that way.

Now that you recommended shields, I'll do the contrarian thing and take the shield away from my character and two-hand the Zweihänder instead. Maybe use a parrying dagger in the off-hand.

FYI, if you use a two-hander, you still want a shield (your character puts it on his back while two-handing) because you can get stat bonuses from them even when not holding them.

There’s hardly any shields with such bonuses. But he should keep it in mind if he wants to recreate The Build.

I wasn't going to say The shield in case he didn't want spoilers.

I would recommend trying Dark Souls with controller. All the souls games are beatable with M&B, but sometimes you just gotta use the right tool for the job.

The main advice for the series is to not worry about dying. It's not a skill check as much as a knowledge check.

Yeah, my last attempt to play DS1 in the absence of a controller led to me trying to play it with a joystick. It went about as well as could be expected. Still, I won't buy a gamepad. KBM or bust. Don't want another device cluttering up the place.

And I'm fine with the gameplay. Well, mostly anyways. I made it about halfway through the game so far; I think I ended up stumbling into Artorius, and that was sufficiently little fun for me to put it down. I always preferred the exploration and smaller fights, anyways - the bossfights in soulslikes are more of an annoyance to me.

Lords of the Fallen (2023) has surprisingly easy bossfights, by comparison. I ended up beating most bosses on the first try, and feeling like I cheated. That's now supposed to be how soulslike bosses work! They're meant to be annoying-to-frustrating!

Yeah, my last attempt to play DS1 in the absence of a controller led to me trying to play it with a joystick.

Don't think this would have occurred to me. Don't think it should have occurred to you. ;)

My mantra is "Work with what you have, not with what you don't have.".

I'd honestly hold off on Skitarii until it goes on sale. It doesn't feel like it fills any truly unique niche.

Good recommendation. I ended up getting it for myself and a buddy, pretty much on a lark, and...yeah, you're right. It feels like one big pile of conditional buffs that don't really amount to anything in particular.

ER is good, but it's functionally DS4. If you haven't played DS2-3, you can get those first instead.

I got Empire of the Fading Suns. I played the demo in the 90s and couldn't find it until recently.

Keeps crashing for me.

If it's on launch, the Dev suggests:

1 - Go to the game folder, then in there go inside the "DAT" folder.

2 - Once inside open the EFS.ini file as a text.

3 - Change the line "video_on=1" to "video_on=0" and save.

There's probably some codec issue loading a 30 year old video file.

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