u/lee_macro

I really liked the setting and feel of the originals, I think the reboot that happened on PS3/XB360 went in a more action beat em up direction that may have been ok if it had more polish, but it felt rubbish.

In the modern day we have the notion of a "Souls-like" action game and that feels like it would fit this sort of game far better, with more of a focus on difficulty when fighting mobs and more of an intimate 1 on 1 like in the originals (maybe not 3rd), which again suits the souls-like style of combat and engagement.

I am not sure if the platforming aspects of the game were ever its strong suit so removing them seems like a good thing, but keeping the traps as they also lend themselves to the souls-like genre, and fewer but stronger enemies with the large gruesome bosses could really work.

I hope so, I have seen anecdotal information for people implying Blizzard have said they cant do layered linking but I am sure they have support for it so I am really hoping that they find a middle ground on this.

Its really odd though as this is the elephant in the room when it comes to their claims and aspirations for Forever, and all the official communication has been really high level "we will improve it" but no solid directions given. This being said though I have seen people mention that there is some consistency as people see others they have grouped with or seen before in passing, but I am a bit sceptical as technically trying to track who has seen who and trying to marry them all up is extremely complicated.

Posted same comment as a response to someone before:

There are plenty of solutions, its just each one comes with a pro/con for business/player.

In vanilla we didnt have this problem as you were on a realm, and the whole realm was simulated together, so you didnt see something that you couldnt interact with, if you saw it, you could interact with it.

The problem with this approach though is that the business had to pay for servers to be on regardless of utilization (not entirely true for full realm) but simply speaking it meant you could have lots of low pop servers or skewed alliance/horde ratios, which were not ideal. HOWEVER even though there were problems, they often consolidated low pop servers and offered character migrations from high pop servers.

You could take an approach where you layer at the realm level so once you login, you are on a given virtual realm, and things are pretty much same as vanilla, but you still have the problem of potentially being alone in certain areas if there is no one else in that area in that layered realm.

I think this is where the 2 conflicting problems arise and you cannot have one without sacrificing the other.

- Do you want consistent world?

or

- Do you want consistent amounts of players around you?

Those 2 things pull in different directions, as you cannot really have both, the more consistency you want, the less guarantee there will consistently be players around you. They could likely do a hybrid sort of approach where they force linked layer simulations around all cities and known high throughput areas, and then let dynamic layering take over in less high throughput areas.

Ultimately there are likely several solutions or improvements they can make to the problem, but it will impact other aspects of gameplay. In Vanilla we didnt care that sometimes you were the only person in Desolace, but I can see some players would care and always want others around them, and I think the goal should be to try to find a decent middle ground. Currently it feels like they are 100% in on consistent player amounts and 0% in world consistency.

Even if they changed it on PvP vs PvE so PvE was more focused on consistent player amounts, and PvP was more 80% focused on world consistency and 20% on player amount consistency etc.

It doesnt really matter what language you learn, C# is a well rounded language that will teach you many paradigms and allow many modern architectural design patterns. Like in the real world for web/app/api development you will need to know about Dependency Injection, Interfaces, Mocking and other things which are more design patterns allowed by the code.

So you wont magically be in a better position moving to a different language, and anything you learn will likely transfer over with just syntactical differences, most of the better programmers pre AI knew multiple languages.

Yeah I did quite like RE7, especially the first 2 parts, I could have done without the hide and seek bits as much but overall it felt like it was close to the mark. To be honest I preferred the demo more than the game, there was something special about it, a bit like PT, but the overall game has a different vibe and direction compared to the demo (i.e less occult/paranormal with the ghosts, the mannequin etc)

I dont feel like the 2 compare in terms of being "scary", as they are both charting different avenues in horror.

The original RE trilogy was more about slow dread than direct horror, it was less "oh my god there is a guy with a chainsaw" and more "I have 5 bullets and im pretty sure there is a licker between me and the save point".

It was that dread of hoping you could get to the destination without getting killed, or what was around the next corner and if you would survive it.

Its all subjective as some people hate the original trilogy but love the modern ones, but I really dislike hide and seek mechanics, it may as well just be a cut scene for me at that point, I have less agency and I am unable to defeat the pursuer (some games let you down them), I let RE3 off for this to some extent as it was not common place back then, and you could down the Nemesis if you wanted to for that section and it also wasnt constant, but it could have easily become annoying if it happened more often or you couldnt hurt it.

Anyway I think games from RE4 onwards were less survival horror and more action horror, sure it had same sort of ammo/health mechanics, but areas were designed with more open space, the whole feeling of being afraid of whats behind the door was replaced with an excitement for the next challenge behind the door.

I think RE Remake was the pinnacle of this design principal and in some ways improved on the original with the crimson heads, but I dont think you can really compare the level of "scare" between the two games as I dont think original trilogy were ever scary in a conventional sense.

There are plenty of solutions, its just each one comes with a pro/con for business/player.

In vanilla we didnt have this problem as you were on a realm, and the whole realm was simulated together, so you didnt see something that you couldnt interact with, if you saw it, you could interact with it.

The problem with this approach though is that the business had to pay for servers to be on regardless of utilization (not entirely true for full realm) but simply speaking it meant you could have lots of low pop servers or skewed alliance/horde ratios, which were not ideal. HOWEVER even though there were problems, they often consolidated low pop servers and offered character migrations from high pop servers.

You could take an approach where you layer at the realm level so once you login, you are on a given virtual realm, and things are pretty much same as vanilla, but you still have the problem of potentially being alone in certain areas if there is no one else in that area in that layered realm.

I think this is where the 2 conflicting problems arise and you cannot have one without sacrificing the other.

- Do you want consistent world?

or

- Do you want consistent amounts of players around you?

Those 2 things pull in different directions, as you cannot really have both, the more consistency you want, the less guarantee there will consistently be players around you. They could likely do a hybrid sort of approach where they force linked layer simulations around all cities and known high throughput areas, and then let dynamic layering take over in less high throughput areas.

Ultimately there are likely several solutions or improvements they can make to the problem, but it will impact other aspects of gameplay. In Vanilla we didnt care that sometimes you were the only person in Desolace, but I can see some players would care and always want others around them, and I think the goal should be to try to find a decent middle ground. Currently it feels like they are 100% in on consistent player amounts and 0% in world consistency.

Even if they changed it on PvP vs PvE so PvE was more focused on consistent player amounts, and PvP was more 80% focused on world consistency and 20% on player amount consistency etc.

I think the layering concerns are a real problem that they should be externally talking more about, and feels like a somewhat more objective problem, the balancing, graphics, whatever other stuff being discussed is more subjective.

I appreciate if you dont care much about environment consistency or PvP then the layering stuff may not matter much to you, but I have seen countless vids/gifs of people moving between areas and everything just fades away. Like imagine how cool it would be walking out of Stormwind to see a mass of alliance and horde fighting, and you run out to join in, only for it to fade away, with no way for you to do anything but go back into the city and just watch it happen knowing you cannot interact with the cool stuff right in front of you.

That I feel is going to be a huge problem.

I am the same but the thing that I really didnt like about FFT was the inability to undo on a turn, in FFTA quite often you would move somewhere and see if you could do the move you wanted, and if not undo it and try something else. Not being able to do that in FFT paired with the not so great camera and sometimes unclear terrain/line of sights etc it can be really frustrating and can mean many wasted or overexposed turns :(

I have not found anything to date that has the same *feel* of world and guild as FFTA/2

It is getting near impossible to know if AI has been used in something when you are using 3rd party stuff, for example the Unity asset store has loads of audio, sprites, animations, models which have been touched by AI in some way shape or form, be it directly made by AI without human intervention, or without knowing some other plugin in your 3d modelling/photo editing tool was written with some AI etc.

Being frank, life is hard enough as an indie developer, so to expect you to do a supply chain risk management audit on stuff is a bit unrealistic given the current state of play, especially when im pretty sure AAA studios are using AI all over the shop and not disclosing it, or some even saying they refuse to use AI then get caught using AI.

Its like Pandoras box now really, its open, people may not like it, but I cant see it going away and I also cant see it being reasonable for someone to do a deep dive into every single thing they are using to check its not been touched by AI at any point in its journey. Like look at modern software development, you ask for a single package from your package manager of choice and that has dependencies upon dependencies. You have a whole tree of code being pulled in that you never wrote and have no idea if a dev at any point in time decided to ask an AI to see if there was any code smells.

I think we will be in a horrible position for years where some people will absolutely hate anything touched by AI, regardless of context, regardless of intent etc.

Like if I use an AI to give me some inspiration for a character, it gives me a load of rubbish but the inspiration for a decent backstory arises from the noise, and I do everything else without AI, do I need to say it was made with AI? was it actually made with AI? I got the inspiration from a conversation, but thats no different from talking to someone in the office and them giving me a load of ideas that may not work but give me perspective to come up with the good one.

There is no right answer here as you may have used no AI, be unaware of any AI anywhere, and then someone does a data mine and finds you have a license file that was made with an AI or something, and suddenly that flag of "Made with AI" now applies, even though there is such a massive chasm of difference between that scenario and someone who one shotted a game with everything being made with AI.

Its good for people to be angry with AI, it basically stole the collective human creativity and knowledge and is being ransomed back to us while taking away our jobs, but the reality is it is being used everywhere and no one knows whats AI and whats no any more, and its not going to get any better. If we were not living in a capitalist hellscape where your only value is your skills/knowledge, AI may have been seen as a glorious thing, and to some it is, but until this tug of war comes to an end you will be caught in the middle as will anyone who creates anything anymore.

Not related to the duo, but is anyone/company working on a decent eco system for allowing you to spatially anchor your existing apps? Like I get we can project a computers desktop into a window in front of you, but why constrain yourself to a monitor? your whole wall/room could be a desktop.

It baffles me how we have this huge push for XR and at best Apple show us putting clocks and calendars on walls, and like thats it for spatial anchoring. Where are the examples of using a wall behind your desk as a huge desktop to host loads of apps, or having things pinned to your desk, like in the video above replace the virtual iphone duo with a music player you can interact with via touch/gestures etc.

Historically from a technical perspective you had to do LOADS of tricks to even do simple things like shadows, depending on how far you go back, before shaders using FFPs you would have to do loads of depth/buffer stuff to try and do even basic shadowing, thats not even touching on more advanced stuff like reflections and environment mapping etc, global illumination wasnt even really a thing.

We have gone through transitions with shaders, PBR now ray tracing (although I guess im talking more about path tracing), all of these improvements on the graphics pipeline meant the developers (I dont mean coders specifically but technical artists etc) could create more realistic/streamlined outcomes with less work.

Now we have Raytracing you can get reflections, dynamic lighting, global illumination for free really. So it takes a lot less creative artistry to get effects that you had to really think about before, it also means you dont *need* as much art direction to get nice looking things as you can just make the game using the industry standard approach, which is why you have a lot of people saying games have a UE5 look etc.

As an example, we had loads of PS2 era games that had really good reflections, and these days you never see reflections because it took too much effort to do without raytracing, look at most modern games and go to a mirror and see if you can see a reflection, chances are most of them wont, but if they have an RT setting they will have reflections everywhere as its virtually 0 effort to have it.

I am interested but unless there is more of a focus on productivity stuff I cant see the current demographic going to it, given most active users on their platform are kids I doubt they will get much benefit out of this.

For me I have been wanting someone (be it Meta, Valve, Apple) to focus more on the usability of AR, which I think AVP has made massive inroads in, but nothing is really *pushing* spatial anchoring for apps.

The main focus for AR productivity at the moment has been just pushing your monitor output into a floating window, but I feel they need to go further than that and instead focus at doing this at the app level. The "desktop" and way we dock windows in 2d space makes sense on a monitor, but with AR its an arbitrary bounding box.

Ideally I want there to be more of a focus on just using the real world as the new desktop and just using the PC/Headset/Whatever as a pure compute node where we can just take the applications we care about and pin/anchor them around us, for example I would love to have a music player pinned to my desk that I could interact with through physically tapping the buttons to make it skip/pause/play etc, then pin other apps like email, discord etc to the walls, the difference being your walls are basically huge desktops, but again no platform seems to really be going for this.

There are loads of issues like resolution of headsets, resolution of pinned things, input translation, having apps that look/work well in this paradigm, but until there is a decent approach in place to standardise it I cant see any major progress there.

No but also Yes, so there seems to be 2 different types of events in RA.

1. Its quite complex, with loads of games and specific achievements, and you need X of Y to do Z

2. Its really simple, complete single game with specific criteria.

I have tried to do the first types, but I just find them a bit too complex and long winded, I don't think they are bad or anything, if anything its amazing that the community puts so much effort into these events, and for the people who play every day its great.

I am more casual and the 2nd type is right up my street, I really enjoyed the 4JF event on FFIV, and I also took part in the Ragnarok Online event as it was fairly clear what you needed to do, there was no real long term investment or short term cram needed.

There have only been a few events which fall into the latter category, so for the majority of events I tend to skip, I did try the halloween one last year and that was ok but I just didn't have enough time to do all the games required to get to the end.

I would LOVE there to be more focused events, even if there wasnt a dedicated badge and just we had a dedicated discord/forum thread for completing a game that month, so we can get all those subject experts together in one place to help us muggles out and keep the conversation and appreciation focused on the specific game.

As thats what I really liked about the events I took part in, it has a focused really helpful group of people and everyone is really enthusiastic about that single thing. In the more complex events, you will likely have several different games/achievements all being discussed at once over a longer term.

(I know there has been talk about quests possibly being the new way to have focused game/s events, but I imagine that wouldn't have the time boxed community channels that events do)

Games look more "realistic" than ever, but "better" is subjective, like I prefer the look/feel/graphics in the Arkham games way more than the modern Batman games, and you can run that on a potato. A lot of AAA games that have loads of performance issues when coming to PC but are fine on consoles, so I think the "games run better than ever" argument is again subjective depending on your platform.

There is too little focus on art direction and too much focus on technically accurate rendering, like ray tracing is great, but do I care that its there? nope, I dont even turn it on in most games. It makes the development process easier but I feel we should not really be chasing realism as the main goal, its definitely something to think about, but a good game is good regardless of the graphics, like you could take God of War and make it look like a PSX game and it would play great, but I personally feel everything since the Xbox 360/PS3 era has just been diminishing returns.

This can definitely help, but likely only if you know your own layer at any given time, but it still wont address any of the PvP or grouping transiency issues like:

- You hear there is a raid in stormwind, but you go there and cannot see it, you have no idea what layer its in, and cant join it, your only hope is getting a raid invite, but even then can you have multiple raid groups share the same layer? how do they ensure they go into the same layer together etc?

- You are on your alt and get ganked by a max level and want to bring your main on to dole out retribution, that enemy could run across a boundary and potentially go to another layer, how do you know which one? how can you enact revenge? the griefer has again gotten away with ganking so learns its fine to gank as its logistically too problematic for people to deal with them.

Even with this ability to pick a layer, everything once you pick it is still transient, its that which is the problem, being able to swap layers is handy, and opens up avenues to abusing quest mobs, ganking etc if not gated in some way.

Yeah, this stuff also effects day to day open world PvP scenarios and behaviour, for example gankers are more likely to gank because everyone is more transient, you are just a faceless person who may never see these other people again so what come back is there for being an absolute menace.

On the flip side of this, also imagine you are playing an alt who is being ganked, and you want to come on our main to fight them off. Are you going to be put on the same layer as them? will you ever see them again after this to exact revenge?

In vanilla a lot of organic combat was due to this push and pull of griefers or large scale attacks, and the fallout and memory of the events, it felt like there was an ongoing war and you were on the periphery and all events were connected and there was a community feeding into it all. That community would now be fragmented, and so will their stories.

I appreciate most of these implications only effect PvP/RP related players, but that was what most of the "fun memories" people have of WoW are, the hardships and how they overcame them and made friends doing it. How am I going to overcome the hardship of transient multiverse griefers who I will likely not be able to get revenge on, and how am I going to make friendships through the hardships when every server boundary change may erase that ally from my layer.

I'm sure loads of people will say "just friend people more" or "always try to be in a group", but I wouldnt want to friend every person who I have a small chat with just so I could have the possibility of seeing them again, also imagine how big everyones friends lists would be, how would Blizzard try to ensure an ever sprawling web of friends could all co-exist together in layers, its near impossible.

In a way I feel like Roadwarden could fit, I went in expecting very little and found it one of the most enjoyable games I played that year, it doesnt outright tick everything but on a venn diagram there is enough of an overlap with your wants.

There are huge downs, like someone in chat tells you there is a raid in stormwind, and you go over there and there isnt anything. You see someone getting ganked or overwhelmed by mobs, you help them and they thank you, you see them again in the next area and ask them how they are getting on, you make friends, form a guild etc.

These organic interactions are on the clock now, the likelihood of seeing other players again are reduced because the world around you is transient, the moment you know that, it changes how you play and think about interactions as everyone is basically a faceless person you will likely never see again so whats the point of putting the effort in with people if you will likely never see them again.

When WoW introduced cross realm group finder, it started the downward spiral into everyone being awful to each other as you would often never see the other people again and if it wasnt your realm you didnt need to really care about much consequence for your actions. If you were on the same realm with the same people so you would passively get a bad rep.

I agree with some of the upsides, like never being alone in the world, always having a balance of factions etc, but it does come at the cost of community and organic interactions/events. This leads to there being no consistency or history to the game, i.e if you wanted to make a name for yourselves as the guild who lead a charge on stormwind and won, even if people saw it happen, out of the hundreds of people who were there, they would get fanned out into other realms and they would likely never cross paths with that guild again and there would be no infamy for the guild.

The "community" is no longer persistent at the day to day gaming level, and for me this is a major downside.

To be fair it's not up to me to create or offer a solution, I am just pointing out the issues as I see them.

To flip this around somewhat, what problem is layers solving? For Blizzard it's great as they can maximizer their compute without under utilised servers, and in the world of LFG systems where most people are treadmilling instances it's fine. As the focus isn't on communication or community as in PUGs no one talks, and in Guilds it's likely discord for grouos/raids. 

I could see an angle of "it ensures you are never on a low pop server" but having had that happen in vanilla (or tbc can't remember) they just folded servers together or offered free migrations. I migrated from a super high pop pvp server to a lower pop server. 

Anyway my point is layering is more of a business problem they are solving to save on cost. It's not solving game design issues really, and for retail it's fine, it doesn't really effect anyone due to the focus of content being instances or solo activities. In forever it's the opposite, and they are trying to incentivise more open world interactions and less instancing, but layering directly impedes it. 

I know plenty of people are saying it's fine and they are working to try to ensure there is some cohesion across the layer boundaries etc, but it will never be perfect as the nature of it just keeps jumping people about like a multiverse, and every fade in/out you see reminds you that it's not a cohesive word and break immersion. 

I will still play and enjoy it with my friends, but it sours it a bit somewhat knowing how vanilla didn't have these problems, and now we do. 

Back in vanilla because it was realms and you were always with the same people you often ended up seeing some of the same people while you were leveling, and the more you crossed paths the more you would group up etc. We ended up making a guild as we kept bumping into the same people and enjoyed partying with them.

A HUGE part of the "community" feel in vanilla WoW was that things could dynamically happen and you could hear it on chat and go get involved, or bump into someone you helped the other day and ask how they are getting on etc.

You would get to know what guilds to avoid, the gankers, the guilds who would physically try to stop other people getting into MC etc (on PvP servers anyway).

All of that organic and recurring interactions and server knowledge you built up while playing cannot happen anymore, the world and environment is transient. The chances of you organically bumping into the same person more than once is near impossible, the guilds will not be consistent, if someone says in chat "STORMWIND RAID" chances are you wont be able to take part, as you will be on a different layer.

All of this fragments interactions and experiences, in some ways the game will be even less fun as you will likely hear lots of cool things happening that you wont be able to join in on, so it seems to conflict with their core pillars and vision for everyone being friendly and organically doing stuff together.

I always see the counter points of "its supposed to be difficult, they are achievements etc" and I get that but I think it misrepresents the talking point a bit.

A lot of these requests don't really come from a position of "make the achievements easier" its more a logistical problem, if you have 100 achievements on a game now, and 10 of them are wildly more difficult than the others, most of these propositions revolve around just moving the 10 to another subset, so its still same difficulty available, no lost achievements etc and also it makes it clearer to players if they want to opt in to the harder ones or not.

HOWEVER there are some problems with this:

- Not all emulators support subsets fully

- Most games/emulators need separate patched roms for subsets

- This would introduce a new badge for the subsets that would house these harder achievements

- The notion of Mastery would be somewhat redundant (this itself was also a talking point in the forum)

Hopefully in time more emulators will update to support all subset functionality AND also support subsets on the default supported game file, rather than needing to patch. It would require a lot more work from the artists to produce these badges, you could argue the work could be reduced with a convention like "its same badge as core but has a different border or something" but that again would need discussing and ratifying.

The notion of Mastery is a weird one at the moment, as when most people look at a game (and I did this too until it was discussed) and see Mastery and Subsets as different conventions, but really they are both the same thing, a Subset is a mastery of a specific part of the game, the default Mastery is the mastery of the core parts of the game, so really the default is a subset in a way, it just has a "beaten" flag associated. So the term Mastery is one that often gets discussed.

Anyway personally I would quite like for some of the more difficult achievements with a theme to maybe go into their own subset, but taking a game like Illusion of Gaia, there are a handful of achievements which are basically "Go through whole area without getting hit" and the areas are pretty big and time consuming to do, and you need to do it in a single session too. So am I saying the achievements are bad? ... No not really but I would sure love it if they were in a subset outside of the core game as I have avoided playing it because while I am sure I could do the required thing, it would require a perfect storm of kids to not pester me, chores to not need doing for a while etc and I play RA to relax (not everyone does and thats fine, we have like 2 conflicting groups both wanting the opposite things in the community).

There are other games like Koudelka where there are some wild achievements in that, which are not hard, but are super faffy and stop me playing the game, as I could likely do most of them, even the time consuming ones, but I just cannot justify having to block out an hour or more in a single sitting to do something, there are loads of examples of these and it makes some "hidden gems" less likely to be picked up by the more casual community.

Loved that game, I had a cheat book from a magazine back in the day that said there was a secret cave under the aztec transition cave, I spent hours looking for it, I think they just made it up

It looks like something that should be on the speccy

I don't see treating it as a checklist as a bad thing, I really enjoy playing JRPGs I once played as a kid, and finding secrets I never knew existed back in the day. I think its genre dependent and some achievements are not showcasing game content and instead challenging you to do something within the constraints of the game, be it kill a boss under leveled, beat a boss with some random equipment etc.

The ones which showcase stuff in the game you wouldnt obviously find are amazing and I love achievements for that, the other ones I am not fussed about, but thats fine and I know loads of people love them, so its difficult trying to balance those 2 sorts of playerbases, who want to use the achievement sets like a tour guide vs those who want to see it as a challenge list.

I do feel some challenges on some games maybe cross over into the "maybe this should be in a subset" or borders on unwelcome concepts but 90% of the time sets feel great and do a mix of both.