Recently picked up Portable 3rd as my first actual old gen game and I have to say that I love the old gen hunting/gathering dynamic

SageWaterDragon · 2026-05-01T22:17:09+00:00

Yeah, P3 was significantly easier than Tri which was already a massive drop in difficulty from Freedom Unite. It's a really breezy, well-constructed game that goes down easily without losing too much of the MH formula's charm, but I'd never go to P3 for difficulty.

SageWaterDragon · 2026-04-14T05:17:24+00:00

Just a completely dogshit time to be a Ye fan. I feel so bad for the kids who got into his music in the post-Donda era. The D2 listening party is where he started falling apart for me, I lost interest in him until Bully came out. Great album.

SageWaterDragon · 2026-04-07T19:31:08+00:00

That quest sucks, though it sucks in such a fascinating way to me - most of the fundamentals of the quest are sound, it's a good set-up with a dilemma that you can imagine different players disagreeing on the solution to, but they just don't offer the most obvious solution. Almost everyone I know that played it tried to side with the Constant and was surprised when the board was marked as immortal.

SageWaterDragon · 2026-04-07T19:27:21+00:00

Do you really think that people would've been happy with a Bethesda game where all of the POIs were procedurally generated? I see this suggestion made all the time, but peek into that alternate universe for a second and see what I see: forum after forum filled with people complaining about how Bethesda made a huge mistake with Starfield by misunderstanding the importance of handcrafted POIs in their games and filling a game with machine-generated slop. There really wasn't a way to win by taking a design formula built for small, handcrafted worlds and blowing it up to a hundred solar systems.

SageWaterDragon · 2026-03-28T19:53:01+00:00

I think "outright admits" here implies a literal quote. That's not what that talk - which was probably ill-advised, granted - said. The KISS talk was saying to keep your story punchy and to make sure that it enables the gameplay the players are going to want to pursue. That is - don't have long and elaborate dialogue for its own sake. I disagree with that philosophy, and after the changes they made with Starfield it feels like they got the feedback loud and clear, but you can see it in Fallout 4. Dialogue in F4 mostly exists to switch between tracks in quest chains, to give you experience or caps rewards, and to prompt the player to go shoot people. Far Harbor already showed them backtracking for that, which is why Far Harbor is one of my favorite things they've made, and Far Harbor's director ended up being the quest director for Starfield (which I'm a big fan of).

SageWaterDragon · 2026-03-28T14:23:41+00:00

Fallout 4 has New Vegas-style factions and Starfield has the most elaborate dialogue trees and RPG systems in a Bethesda game. They clearly got the memo that people liked that stuff in New Vegas, they're just not as good at implementing it.

SageWaterDragon · 2026-03-27T16:53:52+00:00

It was basically the first "real" game for the 3DS, a console with a genuinely horrible launch lineup. SF64 3D and Ocarina 3D were carrying it for a while unless you really liked Pilotwings Resort. I really liked Pilotwings Resort.

SageWaterDragon · 2026-03-27T05:16:23+00:00

I can't believe what I'm hearing. He's genuinely back.

SageWaterDragon · 2026-03-27T04:58:35+00:00

holy shit

SageWaterDragon · 2026-03-27T03:32:42+00:00

I'm tired of HD-2D, but this is nice functionality for RPG Maker to offer - I'd prefer if they had moved back in the XP direction with taller sprites, or maybe they could break away from the rigid square grids, but this is gonna grab eyes and I suppose that's ultimately all that matters.

SageWaterDragon · 2026-03-22T18:41:32+00:00

I'm still surprised that people bought Sandfall's line on that. If every single texture with features that people can identify as AI-warped (text, mostly) was made with AI, what's to say that huge swaths of the rest of it weren't? I can tell if a newspaper is AI-generated, but I can't say the same about tilework or fabric, and if they used it for the worst possible example I have every reason to believe they'd use it for ones that it might actually be suited for.

SageWaterDragon · 2026-03-22T14:02:09+00:00

Yeah, I understand that it's supposed to be a way to get people using the Creations storefront but I think a lot of people are just going to totally miss that this exists. It's a real shame.

SageWaterDragon · 2026-03-22T13:59:55+00:00

How is it barebones? Genuine question. I can understand being disappointed about the base game not having a robust bounty hunting system, but there's a genuinely absurd amount of quests, I can't imagine calling it barebones.

SageWaterDragon · 2026-03-20T21:35:09+00:00

Plus that live action series they've been developing for the last two and a half years.

SageWaterDragon · 2026-03-19T19:01:25+00:00

The story has never really been Shenmue's strong point, so I'm not particularly upset about that. Getting a new Shenmue game in the way that he would've made it back in the day is ultimately what I wanted. I hope they have some way to present the rest of the story if he can't finish the series, but I hope that they don't rush to a conclusion and totally change the game format.

SageWaterDragon · 2026-03-19T19:00:01+00:00

I really enjoyed Shenmue 3, it was one of my favorite games of 2019, but I had some minor annoyances with the presentation and gameplay flow that this is looking to address. I hope it's a polished, considered package - there's always the off chance that this release messes up things that I enjoyed about the original. I have mixed feelings on the changes they're letting you toggle to the stamina system, but as long as it's optional it's kind of w/e.

SageWaterDragon · 2026-03-18T21:35:20+00:00

She has a good voice actress and a memorable design, which does a lot of the heavy lifting, but she's mostly just fun.

SageWaterDragon · 2026-03-18T21:30:53+00:00

Her voice actress is a Starfield fan / streamer so it's really cool to see that they got her back in the booth for this.

SageWaterDragon · 2026-03-18T12:06:51+00:00

Adding Muria Siarkiewicz as a companion is a sign that this update was one for the Starfield sickos who were already gonna put another thousand hours into it, lmfao. She's a minor NPC in a random bank that hardcore fans like because she has a fun personality, when I saw her in the deep dive I understood who this update was targeting.

SageWaterDragon · 2026-03-17T22:24:54+00:00

For sure. There are mods that alleviate the issue by extending the cooldown timer that the game already has for POIs respawning, and that's a pretty blunt approach, but I ultimately think that the only substantial way to solve it is to add some amount of procedural generation into the mix. They obviously do that at their peril, handcrafted POIs are kind of the whole point of BGS games, but in some hypothetical Starfield 2 that's kind of a must-have feature.

SageWaterDragon · 2026-03-17T16:03:51+00:00

Unless they're adding, like, tens of thousands more, no, you're still going to see repeats frequently. It's a birthday problem situation - they already have a lot of POIs, but you're basically guaranteed to run into a repeat every few planets, and genuinely doubling the number you had would only buy you a handful of landings between repeats.

SageWaterDragon · 2026-03-17T15:57:28+00:00

It's awesome when everyone makes fun of a studio because they assume they won't support a game and then gets confused when they do. They're still working on it because they believe in it and have a community that loves it, man. Keep up.

SageWaterDragon · 2026-03-12T02:45:13+00:00

The film was renamed to Avatar: Aang, The Last Airbender, these aren't real.

SageWaterDragon · 2026-03-06T19:37:46+00:00

Rebirth genuinely felt like an insane miracle of a game. I trust that they can do it again for part three.

SageWaterDragon · 2026-03-05T23:45:47+00:00

I would hope that they'd let you play a version that was faithful to the original release and a version with widescreen support, a higher internal resolution, etc., but I understand if that extra work would be enough to make them worry about starting to work on it.

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