T w e n t y S i d e d
I’m congested, and I didn’t want to host a Diecast where it sounded like I was recording from the bottom of a swamp. So rather than leave you with a big ol’ blank space on Monday, I thought I’d do a few rapid-fire topics that have been gnawing on me.
Basically, this is the stuff that would have been in the Diecast if I’d been fit to record.
Strange Email
I got an email from PlayStation. It went as follows:
Happy birthday! You can now upgrade your account.
You are now old enough to upgrade your account and enjoy all the features available on PlayStation Network.
By upgrading your account, you’ll no longer be subject to parental controls and you’ll have your own wallet to make purchases.
Your online ID, friends, and trophies will remain on your account.
I have no idea why they sent me this. I obviously didn’t tell PlayStation I was a minor. I usually give the corporations the wrong birthday because that sort of thing is none of their damn business, but I always make myself older, not younger.
The email doesn’t actually list the account name. Could this message actually be for one of my kids? I don’t think so. Nobody in the family has a birthday in early September. My oldest two have been adults for years, and my youngest hits 18 in a few weeks.
It’s weird, and the fact that it doesn’t address me by name makes it all the more confusing. If there’s an orphaned PlayStation account out there someplace, I’d like to know about it so I can close it properly.
Or maybe this was sent in error. Whatever. If anyone else has experience with junior PS accounts I’d love to know if you’ve had messages similar to this one.
I Finished Borderlands 3
I got my character up to the level cap, and… I’m done. For now, anyway. Normally I’d begin a new playthrough with another character, but this game is plagued by many, many minor problems and I’m going to wait until some of them get fixedI ran into the bug where I got negative guardian tokens. Supposedly this is a correction for a bug that awarded too many, but it still sucks. Also, no matter how many I earn, the number never goes up. I’m stuck at -21. Since that’s the only thing to earn once you hit the level cap, it sort of makes it pointless to keep playing.. Also, I’m not really having a good time with the game. There’s that, too.
There are dozens of interface bugs and annoyances. This is particularly true on the PC, where it feels like the mouse-based interface was never given proper testing. I realize that acute consolitis is a staple of this series, but that doesn’t make it okay.
The story is a soup of retcons, fanservice, and random gimmick ass-pulls. It drags on for far too long. It’s not terrible, but it’s not nearly charming enough to justify having long unskippable cutscenes.
There are a couple of mapsSkywell-27 and Jakobs Manor are notable examples. that are brutally long, completely linear, and don’t have a midway fast-travel point or vending machine to give you a chance to recover / refill. I thought the dam was a huge slog in Borderlands 2, but Borderlands 3 has many areas that are much larger, and still don’t allow the player to take a break and resupply. It’s brutal.
I stand by what I said last Monday: The loot in this game just isn’t interesting. The game showers you in exotic and legendary-tier weapons that don’t seem to be significantly stronger than the common loot. I rarely felt like I had an honestly good weapon. I have a video on this planned for next week, so we can wait until then to dig deeper on this topic.
In the meantime, here’s an aside that got cut from the video for time:
Because these games are fundamentally built on randomness, you have to study them for a long time to really get a feel for what’s going on. I’m not an expert on this topic and I don’t know the game deeply enough to diagnose the root problem with loot in Borderlands 3. However, if pressed I’d guess that weapon attributes are a major contributor to the ongoing sense that weapon rarity doesn’t mean anything anymore.
When the game generates a weapon, it chooses from a list of random attributes. Some of these are obvious like “more critical hit damage” or “adds fire damage”. The higher a weapon tier, the more attributes it gets. My guess is that the game has a huge list of worthless and even harmful attributes that it treats like a bonus.
One example: Maliwan brand weapons have a “charge up” time. You have to hold the trigger for a second or two before bullets start coming out. Given the frantic speed of combat in this game, that’s a massive handicap. Additionally, Maliwan guns are often further hampered by slow projectile speed that flings the energy bolts at the speed of a gentle underhand toss. It’s really hard to hit distant or fast-moving foes with something like that. And no, the guns don’t seem to have other bonuses to offset this. The game doesn’t take either of these two things into account when calculating the value of an item.
But then you’ll get a legendary version of one of these monstrosities, and it’ll have a bonus like “35% less charge-up time”. The game acts like this is a huge positive, but all it really means is that this crippling defect is 35% less severe. It’s still a trash-tier weapon and not fit for use at any level, but the game gives it a high value score anyway because of that “bonus”. It’s like a football teamEither kind. where one of your players is legally blind. But! He’s got glasses that help him recover 35% of his eyesight. So he’s rated as one of the best players on the team because nobody else has this massive eyesight bonus.
In the end, you wind up with low-tier guns handily outperforming top-tier guns, because the top-tier versions have a bunch of worthless bonuses that inflate the value of the item in the eyes of the game. I’ve actually come to feel a sense of disappointment when I see an orange item pop out, because after all these hours I’ve come to associate that audio/visual cue with disappointment.
That’s crazy.
Pizza Game!
Link (YouTube) |
A few weeks ago I talked about Pizza Game. I ended up buying it and being disappointed. The trailer really sells the game on the strength of these incredible vocal performances. The voice actors for these people are genuinely funny. But then I played the game and discovered that most(?) of the text isn’t voice-acted. I played the first 40 minutes or so, and 97% of the dialog was text-only. If I knew more about the visual novel genre then I probably would have understood this up front. But I don’t, so I didn’t.
(Also, there’s a disclaimer right at the end of the trailer making it clear that the game isn’t fully voice acted.)
I can understand why a $10 budget game can’t have hours and hours of voice acting. I thought the price was pretty low for what I thought I was getting. But still, I really love the humor in that trailer and I’d love to get more of it. I’d gladly pay more for an all-voice version of the game.
Ah well. It’s still a charming little title.
Footnotes:
[1] I ran into the bug where I got negative guardian tokens. Supposedly this is a correction for a bug that awarded too many, but it still sucks. Also, no matter how many I earn, the number never goes up. I’m stuck at -21. Since that’s the only thing to earn once you hit the level cap, it sort of makes it pointless to keep playing.
[2] Skywell-27 and Jakobs Manor are notable examples.
[3] Either kind.
Shamus Plays WOW
Ever wondered what's in all those quest boxes you've never bothered to read? Get ready: They're more insane than you might expect.
MMO Population Problems
Computers keep getting more powerful. So why do the population caps for massively multiplayer games stay about the same?
Batman v. Superman Wasn't All Bad
It's not a good movie, but it was made with good intentions and if you look closely you can find a few interesting ideas.
Zenimax vs. Facebook
This series explores the troubled history of VR and the strange lawsuit between Zenimax publishing and Facebook.
Dear Hollywood: Do a Mash Reboot
Since we're rebooting everything, MASH will probably come up eventually. Here are some casting suggestions.
Any chance that Playstation email is plain old phishing?
I suspected it was, but it doesn’t seem to be. The URL is account.sonyentertainmentnetwork.com, and that LOOKS like a really good spoof site URL. But apparently that’s the real thing.
Good gods, that huge unbroken domain.
Are we 100% sure Sony is run by humans?
…
I guess not.
Yes, of course its run by humans.
…
The alienbots tries to take over, but were driven quite mad attempting to keep up.
Be very very wary. I recently received an email (and continue to) from “Netflix”. Air quotes because it isn’t. It is really really convincing though. The *only* reason I know it isn’t really Netflix is 1)I’ve never had a Netflix account (pretty damning) and 2)The email this scam is sending to is an abandoned address I only ever used on WoW forums ~10yrs ago. There’s no reason for Netflix to ever have it. 3)The timing. I recently checked my old WoW guild website to see if it started up. It hadn’t. There was a domain squatter there.
Thing is this phish looks completely legitimate. I can’t find any faults with it at all, even knowing it is a scam. The urls look completely plausible. The only reason it didn’t catch me is that I know it is impossible. My best guess is the domain squatter used some sort of script to scrape the autofill of my email address for that domain. A few days later I got a phish from Netflix.
Point is, don’t trust that PS4 email. The scammers have gotten really sophisticated.
I did a Dig on the domain and looks iffy. It’s a CNAME (i.e. pointer/redirect) to account.sonyentertainmentnetwork.com2.edgekey.net which itself is a CNAME to e15095.b.akamaiedge.net. Good thing you didn’t click on it.
Edit: Or not? I opened the site and it seems legit. That last domain name is an Akamai Edge Server.
It redirects to id.sonyentertainmentnetwork.com in the end, and that domain is registered with Sony Interactive Entertainment Inc.
“In the end” is probably the key phrase. What about before the end?
A phishing url can bounce you around with automatic redirects to have you visit whatever pages first. Then you end up on the real and legit page it was pretending to be. It looks totally normal to you. But it can run hidden scripts in the blank pages before then. There’s a lot they can potentially do and if they aim low they will likely get away with it. For example loading invisible ads or whatever. It might be they made $500 from a million people checking their PS4 accounts in referral redirects.
Akamai is just a CDN that plenty of companies use.
What’s edgekey dot net?
That’s a part of Akamai’s CDN setup.
If you are curious enough to care and have a chance to “view source” on the message (how you go about doing this depends on who you’re using for email), I’d love to see at minimum the headers. That will tell us a lot.
…I’ve been dealing with a lot of email security crap at work recently so a lot of this is fresh on my mind.
Yeah, phishing would have been my first guess as well.
But incompetence by Sony seems plausible too…
Plausible that it’s been N years from account creation, where N is 13 or 18 or some other legally significant number?
+35% Charge Speed is even less than a 35% reduction in charge-up time:
If a charging speed of 1.00/s means x seconds before firing, then a charging speed of 1.35/s means x/1.35 = 0.74…*x seconds of charge time.
So it only shaves off about a quarter of the chargeup time, meaning it’s more of a 25% bonus.
Which means that a 100% charge speed item would be valued as the most epic weapon of all times when it just means you have to charge up for a second instead of two before shooting with a gun 100% indistinguishable from a non-charge-up one.
I don’t get along with visual novels. It’s not so much the content as the format. (Although, yes, it is sometimes also the content.) A lot of games have what are essentially visual novel-style dialogues between gameplay segments. I don’t mind a little of that sort of thing, but I get really irritated when it goes on for too long. I get why it happens; it’s a cheap way to implement narrative in a game engine that otherwise doesn’t have any tools for implementing narrative. I mean, it’s got to be easier than cutscenes. Nevertheless, I regard all “repeatedly click a button to see a series of character portraits and text boxes over a static background” events with a certain amount of dread. The thought of an entire game with nothing but that is terrifying.
I understand what you mean. On the other hand, there’s sometimes an ineffable quality to going all-in on a format that invisibly changes perception/experience.
I don’t enjoy VN segments in a non-VN game in the same way I don’t enjoy stealth segments in an action game. But I can sit down and enjoy a stealth game as my brain is no longer parsing it as an unwelcome intrusion. Similarly the times I have played (and enjoyed) a VN I didn’t notice the things that would otherwise bother me in the VN-ification of something else (the interminable nonsense that serves for a story in Blazblue, for instance.)
None of which is a comment on general quality. In all cases, Sturgeon’s Law tends to hold firm.
“…”
*click*
“…”
*click*
“…”
*click*
“…huh?”
The closest I have ever come to playing or enjoying a visual novel is Long Live the Queen, which despite using a visual novel engine is probably not strictly speaking a visual novel. The thing that makes Long Live the Queen tolerable–and, heck, even fun–for me is that it is full of constant decision-making in ways that proper visual novels (or so I have been lead to believe) aren’t. I get to not only make dialogue choices but also choose actions and skills that affect the dialogue choices available to me. The narrative branches early and often and there is a very real sense that the game is responding to my choices in interesting ways both immediately and in the longer term.
Now there may be some proper visual novels like that. I’m not an expert. I wouldn’t know. But the impression I get from the visual novel reviews I’ve read is that most visual novels want to tell you a very specific and mostly pre-determined story. The reader may get to make a few decisions and the narrative may branch somewhat, but mostly it’s click, new text box, click, new text box, click, small portrait change, new text box, and so forth. There’s just no way I could endure that for hours on end.
Doki Doki Literature Club was pretty good, as well, I thought. Nice ideas, though the actual implementation leaves something to be desired.
But again, that was mostly the way you could actually affect the story. Just clicking through….not for me.
I’d say DDLC is more linear than a typical VN. While most VNs have only a couple of “routes” and maybe a few smaller choices for flavor, DDLC only *pretends* to have routes. After the first act, it drops the facade and the only route you’re getting is the Just Monika route.
DDLC doesn’t have routes per se. It has 3 different endings to Part 1 and then a different ending if you manipulate your saves to get all the Part 1 endings before heading for the main game ending.
In theory, I should like visual novels since I voraciously read everything I can possibly read. In practice, I tend to dislike them, because if I wanted to sit down and read a novel I’d read a novel, since for most visual novels the story is simplified versus what you’d get in a novel, while the gameplay is simplified versus what you’d get in a game.
“XBlaze: Code Embryo” is an interesting one, where the story is shaped into something like five different endings or so based on what you choose to read in your TOI (read that out loud as one word). It doesn’t work for me because I tend to obsessively read everything which gives you one particular ending. Also I’ve heard that “Stein’s Gate” is good due to its mechanism and how you can choose to end the game at pretty much any time and get a unique ending once you get into the main plot, but I haven’t actually played that one yet.
The typical problem with any VN is that it’s hard to find the good ones. There’s a lot of bad ones out there and the ones that are there tend to be porn related, which makes it harder to find the good ones. But they are there. Steins;Gate is a really fantastic read (and porn free, if you’re not into that).
The genre in general reminds me of how JRPGs tend to work. Less gameplay, but more focus on the visuals and providing a well-paced story. Where it really comes together is you can get a very good first person story with visuals to help it along. The gameplay or choice elements help a lot to make it more of a first person experience than anything you could get out of a book.
But it really is important that you get a good one to start. Steins;Gate is a great start. Fate/Stay Night is also pretty good for the average person, minus the porn bits if you’re not into that.
I’ve already watched the Steins;Gate anime at the recommendation of someone on my blog — I was talking about timeloop media like Happy Death Day 2 U and Elsinore at that point — and then someone else said that the game was better, so I’m giving the remastered version a try (Elite, I think it’s called?). Still, I tend to hate just reading the text in those things, so it really does depend on the gameplay or choice mechanisms. I had tried one of the Corpse Party games, for example, but didn’t care for the gameplay.
Thing is, I really like dating sims, even more VN oriented ones. But in those cases you do seem to get more choices or, at least, seem to be living more of a life. For example, I played Sunrider Academy which is that type and while there aren’t that many choices in it you do essentially get to live a life instead of simply reading a story.
If you’re into reality warping shenanigans* “The Nonary Games” might be up your alley, though admittedly I’ve only played the first one way back in the day (the Steam release of the entire collection is waiting in my wishlist) at least that one is entirely non-romance kind of VN.
On a broader topic. Yes, VNs are a problem genre to get into because most of them are some kind of romance, and of those most are… various kinds of bad. I’d compare it to RPGMaker JRPGs, first you have to like JRPGs, then you have to like this particular style, and then you have to filter through the bad ones (or have very low standards). I will admit that VNs are a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine because while there are some good and entertaining ones sometimes I just want to gorge myself on sappy gay romance and I’ll tolerate mediocre-to-low quality writing and a certain saturation of anime tropes as long as I’m given that. Though I will say getting some higher quality titles over the years I have gotten more picky for where I get my fuzzy feelings from. Plus there are non-romance ones that can actually have an interesting story.
*I think anything more would be a spoiler, and this might already be pushing it.
I’ve played them already, including the last one, Zero Time Dilemma. The first two were good, but the last one spoiled itself for me because while the previous two games wouldn’t let you get too far without having gone through the previous sections in the last one if you had the passwords — like from a walkthrough — you could easily identify and choose the main story sections and then run straight through the game without doing any of the rooms. Since I would look up the passwords in a walkthrough anyway even IF I had played them, I went through the game quickly and, since I knew how it ended, had little interest in doing the other sections (although some of them did have interesting stories to them).
VNs are also odd because they’re a broad category: they can vary widely in how much gameplay they have and what that gameplay is. So it’s even hard to say that you like VNs without specifying what sort of VNs you like. After all, I consider the Nonary Games to be an escape room game, not a VN per se. If that sort of VN elements make it a VN, then the Persona Arena games probably count as well.
Interesting in that I see 999, or at least what I remember of it, as a VN game because I consider it mostly a narrative driven character focused game and I interpret escape room games as very strictly puzzle focused, and that aspect either wasn’t as pronounced or didn’t stick with me over the years.
So basically genres are vaguely defined BS we use as a crutch.
Zero Time Dilemma is a serious contender for the Worlds Dumbest Plot Twist title. I think the only game in the series that actually comes halfway to being good is 999. Luckily it’s also a self contained story.
“Did they include this list of rules for writing mysteries just to let us know they broke all of them?”
I didn’t really mind the plot twist — and there were multiple plot twists in that game — but it didn’t impress me much either (in part because I didn’t go through the other parts to have it be developed). For all of those games, though, what drove my interest were the characters and the philosophical implications of what they were doing, and pretty much all of the games had at least some of those things that were interesting, so they worked for me. Your mileage may vary, though.
I watched a little of the Fate/Stay Night anime once. I knew very little about the series going in. After a few episodes I started to suspect that it was a dating sim adaptation. Then–bam!–sex out of nowhere. It wasn’t especially graphic, but it was stupid, arbitrary and very clearly shoehorned-in sex for sex’s sake. It confirmed for me that, yeah, the series was a dating sim adaptation. I hate fanservice. I abandoned the series after that.
I will never play Fate/Stay Night. The anime was only okay-ish before the random sex act and I can’t see how the story could possibly be any better in the slower, click-ier visual novel format. At least the anime could show fight scenes properly. I’d much rather watch a fight scene than have a couple of still portraits narrate one at me.
Depends on the person I guess. I really like reading VNs, even when they’re effectively novels with pictures and all the other trappings of a VN. Muv Luv is one of my favorite pieces of fiction, and it’s got little to nothing in the way of choices. Still a fantastic story. Then there are ones that are more gamey like the Sunrider series. Still liked Shining Song Starnova though since it was a really good VN, but with no choices.
Fate/Stay Night was awkward because the sex was effectively shoehorned in. It was made back when that was pretty much the only way to get published. The only route I think that actually delved into sex and relationship stuff was the last one, so that didn’t help either. They’ve since dropped the sex now that they don’t need it to pay the bills. The netflix anime I don’t remember having it and that was a pretty good adaptation.
The beauty of the still stuff is they do a good job of using their limited animations to make it seem livelier than it is, and they’ve got some really good prose to go with it. Feels very visceral. What makes it really good is they can explore what the characters are thinking. There’s this good youtube video I saw where he compares how people that watched the Netflix adapation generally disliked the main character. But when they read the VN, they suddenly really liked him because of all the discussion about his thoughts. Really good discussion of how the media type determines in part what you can do with the same story.
For what it’s worth, I should iterate that people should watch the Netflix version of fate/stay night. The others aren’t the greatest.
Is that all of them or only some Maliwan? That was one of my preferred brand in BL2, and it seems they ruined it. Did they at least bring back old favourites like the Hellfire?
I honestly don’t remember. They’re all blurring together in my head now. Another one of the changes is that the weapon parts are more mixed up. An assault rifle is sometimes shaped like a sniper rifle. A sniper rifle might look kinda like a shotgun. Shotguns are sometimes shaped like a rocket launcher. And so on. I have to look at the icon to see what kind of gun it is, because looking at the thumbnail or holding it in your hand can be misleading.
I imagine this was done to make things more varied and interesting, but instead everything gets sort of lost in the noise.
I’m 65% sure I’ve found Maliwan SMGs that act like BL2 Maliwan SMGs (bullets, not laser bolts, no charge time) but even then the damage output seems low compared to competing variants. I can’t say you’ll NEVER find a good Maliwan, but after leveling Zane up to ~20, I started filtering Maliwan guns out the way you’d filter out white guns in BL2.
I’d say it was done to inflate the number of possible guns for the trailer, but maybe I’m being too cynical. Kinda removes the purpose of having a thumbnail, though, if you can’t trust it.
Fully automatic Mailwan shotguns are rad. Unfortunately I’ve only ever encountered one, early in the game. Since then it’s just the insta-vendor stuff you mentioned: slow-charging semiautomatic weapons or SMGs with shockingly low damage output.
In my experience the orange items tend to be gimmicky, and if I find something spectacular it’s generally a blue. Like COV assault rifles or pistols with double damage output, ridiculous Torgue rocket launchers or my current favorite, a shotgun that’s actually a corrosive grenade launcher for some reason. Imagine having 140 grenades, that’s what it’s like.
Shockingly low damage? Well at least Maliwan still has one element working I guess.
Going by the comments here, I am really disappointed by Maliwan guns in BL3. They were my favourite in BL2 because of the elemental damage and overall look&feel of the guns, which was the closest you could get to actual energy weapons (which TPS solved by adding laser guns, then ruined it by the frustrating ammo system that doesn’t let you run a lasers-only loadout effectively, then on to BL3 that scraps lasers again because… reasons). I generally like charge-up mechanics in guns, if done well, so I was looking forward to that in BL3. For example, one of my favourite guns of any video game ever is the Opticor Vandal in Warframe, which is basically the game’s BFG; it has only a 0.6 sec charge time, the beam is hitscan, has a significant diameter and can hit several enemies in a row or punch right through pieces of cover (on most guns you’d have to spend a precious mod slot to get that). I was hoping to see something similar in BL3 with the Maliwan charge-up mechanic, but from your description it really does make them sound quite useless.
The charge up is on ALL Maliwan weapons. It actually says this on one of the tips on the loading screens. It’s a shame because pretty much the only value I ever got from Maliwan was the high-fire SMGs because there’s only a chance of elemental effect.
I rarely look at the manufacturer of the gun before trying them out, just because I like to form my own opinion. I just realized, I’m level 20 and have ONLY used Jakobs or Tediore.
On the flip side, Tediore shotguns are SO MUCH FUN (in my opinion). You can use them like classic Tediore (explode on contact) or change them to sticky, so you stick people or the ground and they explode like fireworks when you reload. It’s super satisfying to me for some reason.
Is the reload explosion still heavily based on ammo remaining in the mag (which is lost on reload)? Tediore was great fun in BL2 until hp bloat killed the usefulness of the reload. It’d be nice to hear they managed to do a manufacturer well this time round with what I’ve been hearing.
Its most of what I’ve seen. An early side quest gave me a sniper rifle that didn’t have the charge time, but as a low level weapon, it wasn’t useful for long. Its a shame because being able to switch between two elements is useful enough to offset the gun’s lower damage, but not with the added charge time.
Fortunately Maliwan is the only straight up bad manufacturer I’ve seen so far. Can’t say much for end game gear, but I’ve got good guns with just about everything else.
I think it’s all of them. All Tediore weapons have the ‘throw on reload’, all Jakobs seem to have a critical hit bonus (same one, from what I can tell), and I think all Hyperions (or maybe Dahls?) have a tracker-based secondary mode.
At least, so far as I have noticed.
Are you still going to continue writing about Control?
Yep. Next post is tomorrow. :)
PS4 version also seems to have its share of bugs . I’ve seen enemies fall through floors (walking down like they thought there were stairs there). A side quest where at one point you had to kill a room full of enemies, and one of them end up on the other side of a wall you can’t get through. And at one point in my game, enemies just stopped spawning altogether, which prevented me from finishing another side quest until I’d restarted.
And, but this might just be network latency, was playing with a couple people where one person at one point was able to ‘fly’; they would jump, and just keep going up until they did a crouch drop. Another got constant rubber-banding. And the inventory/map/etc tabs are always slow to respond for me in MP.
If the networking is as bad as that see if you can replicate some of the bugs from BL2. Anyone not the host could clone weapons and equip multiple copies at the same time stacking the bonuses (Thanks GDQ glitch explanations). I wouldn’t put it past them to copy-paste the system and have the exact same bugs appear.
Architectural nagging!
Southern Gothic is the colloquial term for the Gothic architectural styles common in the south of France. The mansion in the picture appears to be Queen Anne style architecture, maybe with some Richardsonian Romanesque influences.
I’ve been reverse identity theft-ed more times than I can count and video game companies are some of the worst when it comes to the “someone put my email address in your form, you didn’t verify it, and now I can’t stop getting their notifications” problem. I think the only companies that gave me more grief than Sony are Steam, 2K, and AT&T.
I apparently own an Origin account that someone made using one of my emails. I know this is an address that must have leaked from one of the myriad sources I’m using it for since I’m getting a bunch of spam to it but I’m also not willing to shed it. Anyway, so one day I got an email stating that someone attempted to reset the password on my Origin account, the thing is it seemed suspiciously genuine so I went to the Origin website (not through the links provided in said email, usually when I get an email that I did not specifically requested even from a service I’ve subscribed to I’ll go to their page through a bookmarked link, or google it if I don’t have one) and the account does actually exist, I was even able to get access to it through the password reset form but obviously I’m not using it since who knows what whoever made it has done with it (it’s empty in case anyone is curious). I should probably try to request deletion but I usually don’t remember it exists and when I do I’m typically not at a computer where I can deal with it… so it’s been sitting there for at least a couple years now.
It may not even help. I’ve gone so far as to delete accounts from sites only to have them reappear under the same email address again.
Everything I’ve heard about BL3 makes me glad I’m waiting for it to be released on Steam, after many patches and rebalances.
Same here. Buy it maybe some time in the future from the bargain bin when the mountains of DLC has ended and the game is (hopefully) fixed.
In BL2, weren’t guns automatically, but imvisibly, bumped up in level based on rarity. That is, your orange level 20 drop was actually using level 23 tables instead, as well as having a chance for unique properties.
If this was dropped, it would make Shamus’s issue clearer.
Huh. That’s hilarious, because that’s basically the way I’ve sorted the value of weapons. I wonder if it’s meant to be intuited like this.
Didn’t Diablo 3 have a similar problem with their rare items initially too? It got bad enough they had to revamp everything because the very random items didn’t work. Turned out players did want their gear to be good, and were generally frustrated that “legendary” items tended to be worse than well-rolled rare items. Not surprised that the players in BL3 are similarly disliking the system, but I am very surprised to see their team make the same mistake in their loot tables.
Yes, on release D3 legendary items were really gimped.
Rare items could have up to 6 stats, and late-game weapons could spawn something like 13-14 different attributes. So the best weapons were the ones that spawned with high values of the 6 most valuable attributes, of course. Same went for armors as well but since you had many many pieces of armor it didn’t matter so much if they weren’t all top-tier, whereas you only had 1 weapon so it had to count.
Legendary items generally had 1 or 2 fixed affixes on them. Then IIRC some of them were capped to only spawn with a total of 3-5 stats (including the fixed ones), making it practically impossible for any of these capped ones to be top-tier since a rare item with the same base type could potentially get 6 affixes and you just had to get an ideal roll on them to beat the legendary.
Add in the fact that legendary items were stupidly ridiculously rare (I found a total of 2 for my first Wizard that I got up to the start of Act 2 inferno with, playing about 100+ hours) and they were just disappointing garbage.
About 5% of legendaries ended up being capable of end-game tier due to the fixed bonuses they had. Many of them had fixed affixes that you couldn’t otherwise get on that particular item type, some of them just had a fixed affix that you would always want and it could stack with the random base ones to give an outsized value. There was one particular crossbow whose fixed affix was a gem socket, and this combined with the random possibility of gem sockets to let you get 2 gems in it – all other weapons only capped at a single gem. Gems in weapons were overpowered deliberately, since weapons normally only had 1 socket and this was a way to force players to grind for rare/high level gems. So instantly that crossbow became amongst the best weapons in the game IF you could afford 2 high level gems for it.
They totally revamped the whole legendary system for Reaper of Souls, so now all legendary items have some unique property that you can’t otherwise get, as well as other useful fixed affixes and they tend to have 0-2 random affixes on top.
Well, after watching the Pizza Game trailer I feel I should draw your attention to Crying is Not Enough, a terrible survival horror game that managed to get fluent English speakers to read a script that was clearly not written by fluent English speakers.
Shamus, if you have time in between all the other games you’re playing, I’d love to hear your opinion of GreedFall. I haven’t played it yet, but a lot of people are comparing it to ‘classic’ Bioware games like Dragon Age (albeit with a smaller budget and copious amounts of jank). I’m just hoping it ends up on GOG eventually so I can try it out.
I must admit that I’d like to see Spiders succeed. It feels like they come up with some really novel ideas for games, but then the jank quotient winds up undermining everything.
Weapons having a charge time is a mistake I didn’t think they would make again. The original edrian weapons from BL1 had infinite ammo (in the game loaded with ammo regen) but started charging when you pulled them out because ammo capacity perks only came into effect when the weapon was drawn. I honestly thought someone had intentionally decided this was a bad thing when they moved to eridium weapons in BL2 but here we are. If it’s only Maliwan weapons it’s even worse, most of them already suffered from a terminal case of “not being a hit-scan”. (Is it still a hit-scan if it’s a straight line but has a velocity or is it a really fast projectile with no physics?)
Maybe they were thinking along the lines of “If a green gets 3 bonuses and an orange gets 6, then eventually you’ll find one with 6 good mods” without considering how fast you’ll drop it when leveling up because of scaling base stats. It wouldn’t surprise me to see a looter shooter designed these days entirely around grinding the endgame with any sort of leveling being a secondary concern if it even manages to get that high up the list.
Worthless affixes in drop pools can devastate a game feel, especially when the entire game is based around looting. It hit Diablo 3 hard and spread to Path of Exile so harshly (among other issues) that the most ideal way to play is to filter out nearly every single drop.
Only weirdness with a Sony account came from an Epic Games email that said that my PSN and Epic account were linked successfully. I don’t have/never had an Epic account so I contacted them and told them to disconnect them. It was quick and easy to do but I don’t like that I got an email that confirmed the successful connection but not one to make sure the connection was okay…
Could the age email be a Y2K problem? For example, if you put in a birth-date in circa September 1901, and it treated that as a two-digit date (i.e., ’01 = 2001). It’s 2019 now, so in that scenario the computer might conclude you just turned 18.