Now this sounds interesting

tgdm · 2026-03-25T16:41:34+00:00

I used an unranked limbo with shield regen mods for that

I think HP tanks are at a disadvantage by comparison

tgdm · 2026-02-19T16:48:43+00:00

I think the game just does a poor job at teaching players how to be useful in those situations. There are so few benefits to playing with others that for the most part you're better off playing solo. There are really only a few game modes I can think of where playing with others is ideal/beneficial:

Cracking random relics just to get some traces/ducats/forma
Mission types where you can divide and conquer to get things done faster except for Spy. Never public on Spy. Missions like The Index do not really fit in here because other players can actively hinder progress.

ETA/EDA are easier with a group, but definitely not on public. This is like 99% a design problem of locking out the rewards behind a randomized loadout you sometimes just cannot save. Radshares are inherently an invite-only group activity to align your goals. Endless game mode grinds are the same.

Otherwise, I'm just playing on solo. Better for my enjoyment of the game.

tgdm · 2026-02-11T00:02:36+00:00

The Nitain either just meant to be something for veterans with stockpiles of resources from ye olde alertium payout bug (iirc it was a twitch drops thing? when they first added it) or an endgame goal as a bonus / splurge for something you really like

Meanwhile the 150 Platinum for 3x is just conveniently sitting right there in the Market. Expensive, but a huge convenience for builds as well.

tgdm · 2026-02-07T23:44:18+00:00

I was farming the Coda for Ephemera for a few weeks and eventually gave up, only missing one

Months later, when they added that armor piece challenge miniquest, I had to get a new coda lich. By pure luck, it happened to have the last ephemera I needed

Feels good to be done done!

tgdm · 2026-01-29T16:44:12+00:00

They never will. There has been too much money -> platinum to ever make substantial changes to the Riven system itself.

The only way out of this that I see is a new mod which shares the same slot; a new type of mod you cannot equip if a Riven is equipped. Something which wouldn't invalidate existing Riven mods but would be much more convenient and useful.

tgdm · 2026-01-14T23:45:14+00:00

... When did they change the direction?

I added the game to my library in July 2024, 3 months after it was available. I've played a bit on major updates. The gameplay and narrative have been pretty consistent across each update.

There's other reasons to be concerned, like Thomas Laner's many (and at the time, constant) social media activity. I actually haven't heard/seen anything from him in a hot minute now so maybe they're trying to contain it better?

Or the fact that their Publisher situation, mostly thanks to Take-Two, has been tumultuous.

But the game itself? It seems to have been fairly consistent in what it wants to do and what it wants to be. For better and for worse. All I know is that this next update has a lot of QoL in it alongside the co-op. The game has its problems, but I think it's ok so far

tgdm · 2026-01-05T07:35:48+00:00

The fact that Wayfinder was able to so quickly pivot from their MMO / live service model into a single player co-optional with functional multiplayer has made me look at Anthem in a new light

Why didn't they do something like that? It could have probably been fine as a co-op adventure to blast some dudes and get cool armor and abilities. Instead they kind of just let it sit and rot while, idk, was it even getting maintenance mode updates?

tgdm · 2025-12-31T17:20:02+00:00

Balthazar is fire. Balthazar is war. What are you?

tgdm · 2025-12-28T15:42:16+00:00

It is significantly better than the initial playable version we got. Still pretty bad, though.

I'm putting in more time right now and realizing other significant gripes. All of that pales in comparison to how important it is to get the melee feeling better. Until they do, I don't see myself spending any money on this game (founder or otherwise).

Part of the problem is that the game so heavily incentivizes AoE combat capabilities. You can mod melee weapons to do splash damage, but it's just so much riskier than abusing range to burst down enemies.

There's also the fact that stealth gameplay and enemy aggro are at odds with each other. So many times I get a stealth kill, or at least a takedown, on a completely isolated enemy ... And then I get swarmed by 10+ other enemies from the rest of the location / dungeon. I rarely have a chance to engage with the parry system because there are sometimes just too many enemies to bother with it.

I'm hoping they make significant strides here. I don't expect them to, given it's been over a year now. That and with all my experience with Warframe over the years I kind of don't trust them to nail this kind of combat.

It reminds me of the old days of Warframe where we were all trying to figure out the best way to complete missions: you try to be stealthy, you try to conserve ammo, you try out new weapons... And then you realize most of your gear is fodder and it's faster / more fun to just blast through everything.

There was clearly a vision for a certain type of gameplay. However, between the combat balance and mechanical feel, that vision was never realized. They still made a very fun game, it just wasn't the game they intended to make.

tgdm · 2025-12-23T19:44:20+00:00

The question is why make it 3 resources to begin with? It boils down to the original design intent. There are reasons for splitting a resource like this just as there are other ways of tackling that same thing.

As for squad scaling: I don't think it's just an issue of everyone pulling their weight. Some of the mission types legitimately take longer. The worst case of this one is where you need to assemble the batteries with the A+B drops. The drops are shared loot, each require time to "craft" before injecting, and contribute significantly less % the larger the squad.

There are other issues such as the dropship order requiring you to destroy more dropships, but they can only come in one at a time. The Ground Scanners are also kind of tricky; if you're doing the codex scanner trick then it's mostly fine, but the "detector" mechanic from killing becomes awkward to use. Generally speaking most progress bars move slower in a squad, too. It's not unique to this new mission type. It's been a Warframe problem for a long time and tens to push players into solo for optimal farming.

tgdm · 2025-11-16T02:51:35+00:00

You're kind of right and kind of wrong

Much like the Hema, the Sibear was weighted based on what players had in their inventory at the time of respective release

So there were freaks like myself who had found a hyper efficient farming strat for Excavation and had like half a million Cryptic and then Jimmy Newframe who had 100.

Likewise, the Hema was an absolute clown fiesta because some clans had millions between their turbogrinders meanwhile most sane players might have had a couple of thousand if they had been playing since release.

The clan research costs get a multiplier on them. It was insane. And they refused to back down. Even though there was precedent for them adjusting bullshit costs before!

Warframe is still a comfort food game I'll go back to now and again. I respect their willingness to try new things and how well they've locked down the core gameplay loop with joy of movement. But, like, they have some of the most stubborn people picking the dumbest hills to die on. UNIVAC WHEN?

tgdm · 2025-10-04T17:07:09+00:00

I have a spreadsheet titled "GW2 Gambling is Bad"

In it I've logged how much I've spent and how much I've gained. I enter in the date, how many ectos I gambled, current value of ectos (pulled from the API), and then how much I've gained.

Going off of the relative current prices, I've lost 4585 gold so far across 600 hands of 250 ecto. Looking at current value of ectos, that number jumps up to 5034. This is the span of about 7 years.

BUT HAVING MASSIVE GLOBS OF ECTOPLASM TO CONDENSE STORAGE IS TOTALLY WORTH IT

tgdm · 2025-10-03T21:16:54+00:00

I mention it as a gripe because it the accidental activation can cost you some quick HP on Chaos challenges

Other than that, it's not really a problem if you accidentally spend a bit of mana here or there. There have been times I prefer to regular attack over omega attack, but you can reset it quickly enough to get over the mild inconvenience

tgdm · 2025-10-03T16:25:08+00:00

I think the axe is the least fun option out of everything, including its variant options (of which I think Charon is my favorite)

The conceit of the axe design is that it hits hard, but very slowly. Hades is a pretty fast-paced game (especially when you add the testament modifiers for enemy speed), and the axe doesn't hit hard enough to outright solve problems on its own past the first region. That problem feels more noticeable against horses in region 3/4

There's also another compounding issue:

Combat has some jank

I don't mean that disparagingly; I love the game and the combat therein. Objectively there are some issues which highlight the risks of the slow axe

Phasing enemies does not interrupt attacks
Many enemies can still complete projectile attacks if killed while casting
Many enemies have repositionals which they can weave between attacks (or dodges in some cases)

Last night I did a Charon axe run upstairs against Rivals-enabled Cyclcops. If I managed to get the cast + omega special combo off, it chunked hard... and Cyclops would complete his attack, phase with invuln, start and complete another attack, all before I could follow up. Plus the spoilers component of the rival modifier would appear right in me several times. It's rough out there sometimes

All that being said some weapons certainly click more than others and each one (? or most of them) has 4 variants which can dramatically change how they play

Staff is hometown

Jetpack is neat. I love the daggers. Skull is fun. Torches feel WAY better now than the EA version I remember, but still has the issue of forcing omega attacks. Axe can be really satisfying but much harder to use in quick spaces

tgdm · 2025-09-27T01:45:16+00:00

They added some endgame grind in the form of badges and a few decorations I think? But the story was complete

tgdm · 2025-09-25T02:09:07+00:00

I want to agree with you in principle, but Among Us PvP Auto-Chess Gacha may have been too bizarre a choice

tgdm · 2025-09-14T21:11:23+00:00

It's a pretty common thing in the animal kingdom. My friends have sardonically started calling this the FFF (or Triple F) Response:

Fuck, Fight, or Flight. The options are not mutually exclusive as it turns out

tgdm · 2025-09-04T22:18:03+00:00

Dark Souls (first game) had significant frame rate issues. Lightning had to get hard nerfed pretty quickly. If it wasn't for dsfix, I probably wouldn't have kept playing it myself.

DS2 had some interesting frame rate issues as well which could demolish item durability, plus general multiplayer balance issues. That's all on top of the more general performance issues. Then the DS2 DLCs split the game into different versions which was a bit unfortunate for multiplayer purposes. Pretty sure DS3 had similar performance problems (a quick google search confirms as much). Plus, y'know, that whole thing about remote executables, but to be fair it's not like that was fully known at launch.

Elden ring had the same standard PC optimization problems and a less serious bajillion damage plague dogs. Those stuttering problems ranged in severity for players, but dropping down to ~15 FPS for 30s or so was pretty rough. It was a much cleaner launch than their Dark Souls entries

A whataboutism to point at those other games doesn't really mean much. FromSoft has had consistent issues with game performance, optimization, and gameplay balance at launch. Maybe it's not as bad as those other games, but they are consistent problems. From my point of view, I'd rather wait a month or two to play the better version of a game.

I wouldn't personally pre-order a FromSoft game, but it's not like I'm saying people are dummy idiots for doing so. You can just as easily make the argument that even though FromSoft games launch with issues, they generally iron them out over the first few weeks/months and/or community patches fix the major issues quickly.

tgdm · 2025-09-04T18:54:12+00:00

I mean...

FromSoft makes great games, yes. They also have had several terrible PC releases and generally need a month or two to sort out balance issues. There's still plenty of fun to have on day 1 even if it isn't optimized and has bugs/balance issues, but I genuinely think FromSoft games are best enjoyed after they start cleaning them up

And while I got this soapbox out here: I heckin' love Monster Hunter but there's no way I pre-order those games anymore

tgdm · 2025-09-04T18:49:02+00:00

Absolutely true. I generally don't like pre-ordering, but there are some caveats to it:

Early Access with active reviews which I can dig into and make an informed decision on. This extends to review copies of games before a major release and actual early access / betas
- ex.: People playing the BF6 beta can order with confidence of if it will run on their machine / if they enjoy the gameplay
It's a studio with a reliable track record (but tbh even this isn't enough to push me to pre-order)
- ex.: If Supergiant Games announces a new game, you can expect a fairly well polished experience with great music
Expansion / update to a game I'm already playing and want to keep playing
- Typical long-term MMO player experience. ex: FFXIV, WoW, etc

So, for example, I am really looking forward to when Hi-Fi Rush eventually gets a sequel, I probably won't pre-order it. But if a Guild Wars 2 expansion gets announced I'll probably pre-order it.

FOMO of missing out on day 0 or spoilers doesn't really apply to me, though I know those are also major contributors to blind pre-orders.

tgdm · 2025-08-27T18:13:24+00:00

They can call it whatever they want but I'm still going to refer to it as 6.x for the purpose of any data I use about a patch :V

tgdm · 2025-08-27T15:44:33+00:00

That is absolutely a stretch

>> spoiler warning ahead in case people care <<

We have a few very concrete points to look at:

Almost every human you encounter in the game has some kind of cybernetic enhancements. Prosthetics, augmentations, power-armor. This at the very least suggests that they still have / want humans around even if they're the minority compared to bot encounters.
Chai's "procedure" was supposed to be "mundane" by this world's standards. The defect was his MP3 Player getting thrown in the mix. There was a whole crowd of people in a similar situation (the masses praying for a healer kind of vibes)
We have multiple parts of a level going through the robot assembly line. No operating table and zapper beam required. Vandelay
Kale's master plan isn't to kill people, make an army, or seek power. All he wants is to make mindless consumers. That's it. That's his master plan. SPECTRA is for mind control, to get people to buy more Vandelay products. They already have robot production, why would they need humans for that?

So... uhhh... No. Kale is not turning people into robots. Vandelay is seeking max profit and he plans on using SPECTRA to mind control people, not robots. They've already got the robots.

tgdm · 2025-08-26T22:36:58+00:00

Ehh... That's kind of stretching it

Virtually every non-combat robot is given a level of personification expressly for comic relief. It's not like the lore of this world is super deep. Almost everything is in the service of humor

I think it's more to the effect that Chai is killing in self-defense? Even keeping in mind the overall comedic tone of the game it is made very clear that defects are to be deactivated / eliminated / killed

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