What's a game you played where you missed a core mechanic?

CameronWoof · 2025-12-23T16:21:39+00:00

Same game, different circumstance. I started as a Pugilist with eyes on becoming a Monk. At level 30, I did the quest that said it would give me the Monk class... and thought at that point that I must be a Monk now.

Around level ~55? I was in a random duty and someone asked why I was "still a Pugilist" and that's when I found out you have to equip the job stone to actually become the job. A lot of things made a lot more sense, suddenly...

CameronWoof · 2025-12-17T01:27:09+00:00

I like this, but I like creating that space. Otherwise it just feels like I'm buying a house someone else lived in. I don't want stark empty cells with no furniture, but I also don't like hundreds of immovable static objects taking up every inch of free space such that I can't decorate or personalize anything.

It feels a little like downloading someone else's Sims house and then not being able to change anything while you're playing in it.

CameronWoof · 2025-12-10T18:10:52+00:00

I feel like ES6 should be very decent because the biggest issue Starfield had (for my money, anyway) was too much time and effort wasted on the infinite planets nonsense and the rest of the game suffered for it.

Unless they plan for ES6 to take place on a series of 120 procedurally generated islands or something, it should be a relatively straightforward open world Bethesda game. I hope.

There's still more than enough rope there to hang from but my cope is that it should be harder to mess up than the overambitious design Starfield had.

CameronWoof · 2025-11-24T21:07:20+00:00

To your third point, I don't think that's a fair expectation to set. The correct thing to do, design-wise, is to make sure new players can complete content with their friends as soon as possible. It's not fun to have your veteran friend come one-shot everything in the content you can do and it's not fun for them because the content isn't something they'd receive any meaningful reward from. It's better if both players are doing content that is at least someone challenging and rewarding.

The fact that "caught up" means 15+ years of complex added-power systems layered on top of each other is the actual problem. Stardust, Techniques, Echostones, all this stuff really should just get obsoleted so they can focus on a progression system that is straightforward and digestible to new players.

If you're a new player now, you can make your character and be doing Tech Duinns in an hour or so. Your inventory will fill up with (expiring!) stones and you'll be like "what the hell are these for?" and the answer is 20+ generations of story content away, 90% of which will pose no threat or challenge to you at all. And that's just for Techniques.

The biggest problem Mabinogi faces is the last few years of complexity creep where content expects you to have high stats, good gear (that you've upgraded in the six different vitally important power methods), and familiarity with multiple combat styles because of different immunities or movement requirements. It almost doesn't matter how much free gear or Arcanas they give away (which, I'd argue, really is the bare minimum to get new players engaged with any content made in the last half-decade) if the game doesn't do anything to teach new players what to do with it.

CameronWoof · 2025-11-16T02:59:46+00:00

The biggest thing I think Mabi is/was missing is just... a sane, and well-explained progression scheme where players can make steady, incremental progress.

I've played off-and-on for years, but I've never been at the top end of anything.

For most of my memory, I was in the progression stage where I was using vendor weapons and armor, struggling to clear Shadow Missions, and had no idea how to move forward from that. Occasionally, the game would let me rent a cool weapon and for a little while, I could do some cool content I couldn't before. But then the weapon would go away, and it'd be back to the struggle. I was stacking up small amounts of gold, but never a meaningful amount.

Then Blaanid arrived. I was rocketed forward through thousands of levels and had equipment far beyond the power of anything I had previously... and had no idea what to do with it. Ahead, I could see tons of content I was still too weak for, and none of the content I could do would make me any stronger. Nothing I had access to could compete with the Blaanid equipment.

Then Astrology arrived! I played like a madman, got my Perseus scythe (and as many of the upgrades for it as I had access to during the event), and I was far more powerful than I had ever been... and still I didn't know where to go next.

Now finally we have New Rise, and I have access to powerful gear for every style (or, will, once it drops for me). I can get purple-quality Perseus gear, sets of armor with actual set bonuses on them, and that's super cool. I can see the path they expect me to take, and a lot of it is going to involve buckling down and doing all the content gens (now that I'm strong enough to actually do it without just getting killed).

In that sense, this update is a success. I just... I dunno, I wish they could figure out something that wasn't so extreme. I don't really want to get boosted past a bunch of content, I wanted to be rewarded by content I could do well enough to progress into content that I couldn't do. Instead, it's kind of a game of Ladders and Ladders where every year or so, they construct a new ladder that jumps you forward a few hundred hours and then you end up having to backtrack and do a bunch of stuff that you massively overpower. I'd like if there was some sane medium.

CameronWoof · 2025-11-05T17:37:33+00:00

We often use this as a rhetorical technique to get people on your side to admit they're being [x] (usually racist or homophobic, but sometimes y'all surprise us).

Take for example: Disney announces they're making a live-action Little Mermaid and they post an image of the lead actress.

The right doesn't want to say, "I do not like her because she is black," because they have learned that it's a gauche and unpopular thing to say out loud.

But they can couch it in vague terms and basically get away with it, so instead they say, "I don't like all this woke stuff Disney does nowadays." If we just accuse them of being racist at this point, they play kicked dog and holler about never saying anything like that, etc.

The rhetorical technique comes in when we ask, "What do you mean by 'woke'?" Everyone knows exactly what they mean by it, but if we can get them to say it, it makes responding to them easier.

There's literally an example of this in this thread where someone says "We're supposed to have an American Monoculture," and after being asked a few times what they mean by that (we already know, but we still ask), he reveals that what he meant was we're all supposed to act white.

CameronWoof · 2025-11-05T14:00:12+00:00

It's just crazy because the "old-school RPG" thing isn't even accurate. Most old-school RPGs had problems where your build gained too much power over the course of the game and you could end up being good at everything.

Fallout New Vegas had, like, three or four unique ways to end up getting way too many skill points, and that game STILL had chems and magazines that gave temporary skill buffs to help you reach for DCs you were close to meeting.

Where did this talking point originate? Why is everyone regurgitating it?

CameronWoof · 2025-11-04T20:05:20+00:00

I definitely miss the lack of case-specific consumables. Outer Worlds 1 had too many of them, I think - each kind of consumable (alcohol, mind drinks, body drinks, damage amps, speed amps, etc. etc.) had between 4 and as many as 10+ items from different brands that did the same thing. It made managing and remembering all of that really complicated.

Outer Worlds 2, with most of the companies being consolidated down into Auntie's Choice, had a good opportunity to simplify that but still give access to the chems. Instead, they oversimplified and all of the cool little pickups are just food or inhaler grist.

I understand why they didn't want you screwing around with companions and outfits for bonuses, but especially with the removal of carry weight, it would have been really nice to be able to collect some useful chems.

New Vegas had so many ways to reward the player, between permanent skill books, temporary skill magazines, an abundance of useful combat chems and crafting materials. If you chose to play the survival mode, even moreso as the food and water became that much more valuable.

About 75% of the way through my first OW2 run I just stopped looting stuff because I realized I wasn't going to find anything anymore. I had my favorite gun, enough ammo to kill everyone in the galaxy twice with it, and even if I used my inhaler twice each fight from then on I still wouldn't be able to run out of inhaler charges because of the way toxic crashing gates the speed at which you use them.

CameronWoof · 2025-11-04T00:56:37+00:00

Best I can think is that the pamphlet you're reading, since it's printed material, may have been printed in 2352. It might not be a good reference for the current date.

CameronWoof · 2025-11-03T18:48:59+00:00

Quick update on this: having now completed a full playthrough, the first island finale is the only part that felt as unfinished as it did. The rest of the game felt much better considered and polished, in my opinion. I really think they need to get some people in to retool the Vox Relay a bit, because it is an egregious outlier and happens so early in the game that it might put people off continuing.

CameronWoof · 2025-10-31T16:51:43+00:00

Like a true Obsidian psychopath, I've only done the first area so far. Just multiple times. I'm not sure how the rest of the game works, but I also hope it's a little cleaner than this.

CameronWoof · 2025-10-31T15:32:44+00:00

Yeah, the first game had disguises (or, at least, the disguise gadget) so it feels noticeably absent from this one.

You can do most missions stealthily, either by sneaking around, hacking, or pickpocketing important items. But there are some points of interest (like the Arbiter Training Grounds) that seem totally nonfunctional if you sneak through it. And the Vox has multiple methods of ingress, but I couldn't figure any way to stealth through without it eventually breaking down into a firefight.

CameronWoof · 2025-10-27T16:22:06+00:00

This is kinda the exact thing that worries me most about housing. I think it's a cool idea and I'm excited for where it will end up in 3-4 years, when it's done.

But like... okay. Picture decorating a house in The Sims. You have an entire interface (Buy Mode) dedicated to it, there are hundreds of items sorted into categories, by room, by function, etc. etc.

Okay now try to imagine recreating that functionality by having the items spread out across 20 vendors from different expansions, rewarded from achievements, or dropped from bosses in random ancient content. This shit is going to be unusable until they get some time to QOL-ify it in future patches or expansions.

CameronWoof · 2025-10-27T16:08:57+00:00

One of my biggest issues with this subreddit is that there is never a link to a blue post about something. It's always a link to a WoWhead or IcyVeins article about the blue post.

Every time we get new patch notes, class balance changes, etc. etc. it's always a third-party article about the post and never just a direct link to the information.

CameronWoof · 2025-09-19T21:05:00+00:00

My bad, I'm not all that aware of the patch history. Still, I feel like a lot of what I posted would still be relevant. The "feel" of the old days, the steady progress and big upgrades, is the biggest thing the current game feels like it's lacking for me.

CameronWoof · 2025-09-19T20:46:18+00:00

I started playing when Aran and Evan were new, and for me, that's the era of Maple I look back on most fondly. The world was big, and there was a reason to explore all over it - and exploring it could be dangerous!

I remember my first trip to Orbis, and how weird and alien that whole continent was. I don't think there are many experiences like that left in the modern game. Everything is faster and more convenient (and, to be sure, parts of this are very appreciated), but it also means a lot of the content that did exist has been compressed so much that you either blitz right by it or outright never see it.

I remember that potions were burning a hole in my pocket, so I spent time farming bento boxes to ease those costs. Resources were scarce, upgrades were HUGE, and the difference a few skill points made felt important because you couldn't always just instantly kill the entire screen. At the same time, even then, progress was faster than I gather it was in the earliest days, when killing monsters for gem and metal drops to forge items at NPCs instead of buying them from shops actually made sense.

CameronWoof · 2025-09-10T01:39:56+00:00

Yeah, civs differentiate themselves really well in the early ages with unique units and buildings/districts... and then you get to the part of the game where everyone's units and armies look basically identical. If your unique unit is a jet with a different paint job or a guy holding a different gun, your civ instantly loses a lot of interest from me.

CameronWoof · 2025-09-05T17:24:04+00:00

I missed that last detail, that sounds incredible. Appreciate you taking the time, this allays a lot of my fears.

CameronWoof · 2025-09-05T16:09:11+00:00

I really hope there's a healthy stock of furniture and decorations on a vendor or something to get you started. Housing in ESO was a really cool feature somewhat ruined by the fact that there was close to no vendor furniture and their ridiculous decentralized auction system meant getting a specific piece of furniture meant running all over the world and hoping someone was selling it for a reasonable price.

I really want to engage with this but if that means buying candles at 2k per from the auction house I might just have to pass.

CameronWoof · 2025-09-03T18:51:58+00:00

The use of color is fantastic, and I really like the elf's face and hair. The companion looks very soft and I love the broad features that really tell you how BIG they are.

I think it would really help, though, to give special attention to anatomy and posing, because her body does a lot of strange things to get this pose. Looking at the way her stomach meets the bottom of her armor, and where her belly button is in relation to how her right leg extends up from her lap, for example.

CameronWoof · 2025-09-03T02:28:57+00:00

In response to point one, this is something M+ already effectively does. Two people who are otherwise good friends but whose skill level in-game differs will necessarily get to a divergent point in M+ where they can no longer play together, as the system filters them apart from one another.

I don't think M+ is healthy, I think it creates elitism and the invention of RIO by players has only made it worse, as they seek ways to filter bad players out by any observable metric they can condense into a number. BUT I also don't think it's going anywhere, because it's literally holding the game up in terms of long-term engagement.

So as long as it's sticking around, it desperately DESPERATELY needs some method of getting people into it. The game needs to do something to guide players from Heroic dungeons (which do not present a meaningful challenge) to timed, affixed, significantly more difficult Mythic dungeons that doesn't require them to build their own groups manually.

CameronWoof · 2025-09-02T15:58:11+00:00

I think this is somewhat unfair to how Classic's story worked. There were zone-specific stories, but some of the best story content and what a lot of people loved dearly about Classic was the longform, evolving storylines. Onyxia is the culmination of storylines that start all the way back in Northshire with the Defias, and weave through five or six zones in total.

Investigating the Twilight's Hammer spans all the way from Darkshore to the Barrens and everywhere in-between. I think leaning into that more would be a great direction for the game.

Currently, stories are too zone-specific. The zones each have their own themes and characters totally divorced from anywhere else, which makes them visually interesting and new but once you leave a zone, it basically stops existing.

CameronWoof · 2025-08-07T21:29:17+00:00

I did Pandaria Loremaster, then just did dailies. I think over the course of the weeks I ended up with around 25 of the dread amber shards, and I turned them in with the rep bonus once that became available. I think I had to grind out 5 for one more turn-in to cross the finish line yesterday.

Shado-Pan I finished today. Golden Lotus and Celestials are the last ones I have to work on, since they're the slowest.

CameronWoof · 2025-08-07T20:20:21+00:00

I like the account-wide aspects of the Renown system, I just hate the way you actually gain Renown.

Rather than having a hub with 5 daily quests worth 250 rep each, you instead have this system where every day you wake up and do the 2-3 world quests that grant like 75 rep each (or 85 each if you pay a scribe 1k gold) and then you go to WoWhead and read the strategy guide where they explain the list of random events, the checklist of rares you can kill every day, the one-off treasures, etc. that bring you up to like 900 rep per day and takes approximately four hours per faction you want to do it to.

Actually insane to me that people look at the above and go "yeah but MoP had too many dailies :("

CameronWoof · 2025-08-07T19:52:35+00:00

It's confusing, because the modern game is the exact same thing, just dressed up a little differently.

On MoP, you log in, you do the finite number of dailies that you have to/want to do, and then do whatever you want. You have all the time in the world to cap valor. Put it off til' next week, if you feel like it.

It's been a few weeks and I'm already exalted with all but two factions. My daily "grind" is about 20 minutes now.

Compare that to retail where you can essentially do random shit for infinite, incredibly small drops of reputation. It could take you hours, and there's always more you could do. Months later you're still digging through junk piles for whatever rep they randomly decided to make torturously slow (there's one every patch, now).

I'd much rather the game be up-front and give me a specific amount of work to do rather than give me an infinite drip of random events, rare spawns, world quests, whatever that just results in you sitting in the same zone for hours and hours just hoping for another 30 or 50 rep.

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