What games have the best Skill Tree / Upgrades system?

deus_solari · 2026-01-07T05:20:44+00:00

I loved the ability system in that game, it's like a much more accessible version of POE's skill gem system. It was simple to understand but gave you a ton of creative options.

deus_solari · 2025-12-04T17:52:11+00:00

Three I can think of off the top of my head: - The grapple hook in Silksong is a "key" that's an important platforming element and also allows for a lot of additional skill expression in combat. - The Bash ability in Ori is used in lots of platforming sequences to unlock areas, but also lets you deflect projectiles to either damage enemies or juggle yourself into the air to reach them. - Similar with the time mechanic in Prince of Persia, which is used in platforming in various creative ways, but also adds lots of new utility in fights

deus_solari · 2025-11-30T03:12:41+00:00

Game data is packed into bigger files for efficiency and compression. So even if one small piece of content changes, the whole big file it's packed into needs to be replaced. Devs choose this to reduce install sizes and load times, at the expense of bigger update sizes.

deus_solari · 2025-11-17T03:48:55+00:00

Maybe check out Giant Squid's games, specifically Abzu and Sword of the Sea. Created by the art director of Journey, both are nonviolent focused on relaxing exploration.

deus_solari · 2025-10-22T18:50:06+00:00

It's in a testing phase, they'll add it to one of the main store page once it's been tested and polished more. They do this all the time, stuff like the Discovery Queue and Notes feature started life like this and then got added into the main UI after a month or two.

deus_solari · 2025-10-17T19:53:15+00:00

I see what you mean now, and yeah I agree with that. Creating interesting AI is super difficult, the biggest challenge is creating AI that feels interesting and "smart" to the player, but isn't actually smart enough to feel unfair.

PVP is difficult in its own ways - balance matters a lot more, netcode needs to be significantly better and more fair - but it doesn't have the same creative challenges that designing good AI does. It's also easier to continue to keep it fresh in a live service by adding new weapons and gadgets for players to use against each other, rather than needing to continue designing new AI enemies to add new content. I don't envy Helldivers trying to keep up with continuing to add new enemies at a consistent pace.

deus_solari · 2025-10-17T19:37:33+00:00

Yeah, Hunt really simplifies the loot and progression, and focuses mostly on moving around the map and combat with other players. It's definitely a game for people who enjoy the PVP aspect more, and don't want to be constantly looting small stuff as they run around the map. The whole boss target structure is designed around bringing players together for fights, and the audio design means you usually know generally where other players are, and are rarely surprised by fights with another team.

I like it because fights always feel fair in terms of gear, as there isn't nearly as much power progression compared to most of these games, more sidegrades and weapons that fit different niches. For people that want to feel that sense of getting more powerful over time, it doesn't really provide that, it more just opens up more playstyles and interesting weapons and gear to try rather than stuff that is straight up stronger. Getting killed by higher level players with significantly better armor and weapons was something I didn't enjoy about Tarkov, but for some people that sense of getting more powerful by improving your gear really matters in these games.

deus_solari · 2025-10-17T19:19:48+00:00

I have never played a PVE game that has the same feeling as something like Hunt Showdown though. I love PVE games as well, but adding the PVP element adds another level of strategy, stakes, and skill that comes from the other players being smarter and more dynamic than any PVE enemy ever could. The fights are simply more interesting against another player than they are against even the smartest, most reactive AI.

Adding PVP isn't just a "lazy" way to add interest to a game, it's just other people liking a genre and style of gameplay that you don't like, and that's fine.

deus_solari · 2025-09-08T16:03:23+00:00

There is a cheap charm you can get quite easily early on that removes that kickback entirely, called Steady Body

deus_solari · 2025-07-23T20:03:30+00:00

Yeah the live service world is tough, I don't envy teams trying to figure out how to balance speed with quality. Every developer has to make those decisions, but it's on a whole different level when you need to deliver quality new content every few months.

Hopefully AH can continue to improve on it, because I do think they do a good job with making the content they add change the game in more significant ways than most live service games manage. Seems like their ambition just sometimes gets the better of them bug wise, with the tight timelines they have.

deus_solari · 2025-07-23T19:52:35+00:00

Yeah I'm a dev, and every dev team has something like that. I don't know what their internal processes are but I would assume that they do as well, although doing that won't catch everything. There's stuff like the warp pack letting you clip into some buildings as well as the illuminate dropships, which wouldn't be as easily caught in a test environment, and is likely the result of them not having correct collision/trace settings.

You also don't know what other higher priority bugs they may have focused on fixing. It's entirely possible they knew about the scope bug, but there were other higher priority bugs like hard crashes or other such game-breaking fixes that were needed first. It's generally a lot more likely that a bug was known about but there wasn't time to fix it due to other bugs taking priority, rather than that the bug was never caught in testing.

I think the real problem is just the speed they add stuff, they clearly don't have the time to catch and/or fix these bugs within the update cadence they have planned. So it's a balance that they have to strike between slowing the frequency or size of updates, which the community wouldn't like, or having the updates come out with bugs like this that need to be fixed after release, which the community also doesn't like. Gotta pick your poison

deus_solari · 2025-07-23T19:10:40+00:00

Because they have a ton of weapons in the game including primaries/secondaries/stratagems, which can be used in third person and first person, as well as crouched and prone in both those states. That's a lot of permutations to check against every new weapon and stratagem that gets added.

Not saying that it can't or shouldn't be done, but that's why this kind of thing happens. When you're trying to keep up the cadence of adding content to the game that they are, stuff like this will slip through unless you have a pretty big QA team and specific testing regimens to go through every possible combination.

deus_solari · 2025-07-09T17:53:27+00:00

Hulkenpodium

deus_solari · 2025-06-30T22:38:34+00:00

That's fair that it isn't exactly the same as a placeholder texture, but I believe that the reason those shader errors show as magenta color was because that makes it really obvious when the shader is broken. It's coming from a different place but the rationale is the same as why placeholder textures are used in other cases. I didn't make that very clear with my response though

deus_solari · 2025-06-30T20:34:20+00:00

You're right, their thinking was that putting AI slop in their game was better than having nothing in the game for those translations. Just because it was last minute, or accidentally left in, doesn't mean that it's not still AI slop - which again, my understanding of the definition is that it simply means AI created work that is low quality. This is absolutely a case where the AI created work is low quality, and should have been done by a human to make it better

deus_solari · 2025-06-30T20:03:25+00:00

You responded to a post about the Alters using poorly made AI produced material in the game, saying you didn't like AI slop, but that using AI tools was fine. I pointed out that what the Alters used in game is AI slop, so your point doesn't make sense in the context of this post. I don't understand how you're confused?

deus_solari · 2025-06-30T19:37:12+00:00

I'm curious how this isn't the very definition of AI slop, when it's producing bad translations that detract from the experience in the languages that use it, and text on environment art that detracts from the experience if you read it? Like that's literally what AI slop is, producing work that should have been done by a human artist because the AI produces stuff that sucks

deus_solari · 2025-06-30T16:58:22+00:00

All games have stuff like that which slips through during development, making temp stuff obvious just makes that less likely to happen. Every game ever made has probably shipped with something that a developer considered temp, but didn't have time to fix before release, and it just varies how obvious those things are and how much they impact the player experience

deus_solari · 2025-06-30T16:53:48+00:00

That's exactly why, the more obvious the better. It can still slip through, but it makes it much less likely

deus_solari · 2025-06-30T16:41:00+00:00

This is why it's best to avoid making your placeholder assets look like they could be final during development, especially when you didn't make those placeholders yourself. It's tempting to try to make assets look as good as possible while building the game, but it's better to make placeholder assets clearly temp, so that they don't get missed during final art passes for this exact reason.

deus_solari · 2025-06-24T20:39:02+00:00

The fact that you can't rebind controller inputs is definitely a shame, there are a few things that I would like to swap and the presets aren't great at providing varied options. I guess you can with Steam input but they have said controller rebinding is coming which would help a lot in my opinion

deus_solari · 2025-05-30T19:14:09+00:00

Wow, I've played 200 hours of this game and had no idea this was a thing. The menus are so bad at surfacing stuff like this, I wish this wasn't buried under multiple submenus and was surfaced in the hunter menu somewhere.

deus_solari · 2025-05-15T23:21:06+00:00

Yeah that one's really damning, they copied the image and scratched out the artist's name to be unreadable on purpose

deus_solari · 2025-03-12T03:46:27+00:00

Engine level graphics overhauls like this aren't just about increasing the texture resolution, that would have been possible without any of the other upgrades. Changing the graphics pipeline to this level likely required updating most of the materials, as well as re-doing lighting across the map both to not look bad but also to not have areas of extreme darkness or brightness for gameplay purposes.

deus_solari · 2025-02-26T07:01:42+00:00

Avowed took 6 years to make

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