I’ve been with my partner for 13 years and I’d say you still change a lot between 34 and 43, as you put it. The difference is that as we get older, we are usually more accepting of all the little things we used to find annoying.

I find that my core values are stronger, but everything else is less annoying overall. It makes accepting that your partner is changing a lot easier to deal with, so long as their aren’t in contradiction with your core values.

It is a lot simpler nowadays. Download Caddy, put a 2 line config and you are good to go.

Crap, I didn’t read the article, I just wanted to do my joke and be done with it.

At least he didn’t SLAM Democrats. What a relief

D4 is objectively a worst game than LE, I agree. But in my situation, when I play looter, I play D4 because I can get right in. I haven’t played this season, but in 2 mins I could be logged in and on my way to do what I like in D4.

D3 already had adventure mode, so the MMO argument is not valid. D4 iterated on that.

In D4, once you’ve unlocked everything in a realm (hardcore or softcore), the unlocks that matter (skill points, obols and paragon) are forever unlocked in or out of season. You don’t need to do renown unless you want the gp reward and the xp boost. It does not block your character to be at its strongest, unlike LE where I need all the totem slots and passive points in the campaign for each char.

I have 150ish hours in both, thoughI haven’t played LE in a while because I don’t have the will to go through the campaign again and the performance isn’t that great. Though it’s mostly because of the campaign. The performance is just another friction to add to that.

To get the skip in LE, I need to get to act 5, skip to act 9 and complete the quests for totems and passives. I need the keys for the dungeon skips as well.

You can start monoliths after your specialization, but you’ll be level 20ish for level 58 content. So you either twink (not possible on the first character of the season), need to know your build extremely well and still do the campaign rewards after that.

In D4, I create my char, jump in the game, do the introductory mission for the season event and play the game as I want.

LE game loop, just like PoE and D4, is what keep people coming in, and the LE campaign get in the way of that for a lot of people. I play looters for the loot, as the genre implies, not the milquetoast story that I am forced to play.

D4 has got the mechanic right for that and other looters could iterate and benefit from the mechanic.

The campaign is long for what it is. The time travel adds absolutely nothing to the gameplay.

Let’s take D4. For all its flaw, you can start a character without having to re-find all the Lilith statues and nothing is locked behind the campaign.

You venture out in hell tides or do a few dungeons to unlock some legendary aspect right off the bat.

This is what I want with Last Epoch. The campaign is essential because it unlocks totem slots and passive points. Taking an hour and a half of content (probably more if you don’t have as much experience as you) I don’t want to do just so I can start playing my character as I want is not fun.

I only have an hour a night max, every few other nights, so these 2-3 hours to “start” a character is 2-3 nights for me.

When a new season start in D4, I name my character, assign my 10 skill points and go do whatever I want. It it takes a min and I’m started and I don’t need prior equipment to do so.

I know that skip, but it’s not a real solution. Why is it a problem to let people enjoy the gameplay loop without forcing them to go through the pacing of the story?

They were probably brought there through human trade of some sorts. I doubt they covered that range without causing massive issues and destruction on its path in such a short time.

FlashGet brings me back haha.

I have memories of using a free dialup internet with ads and trying to download a Worms Armageddon demo of like 11-12MB and using FlashGet because my sister was kicking me off dialup.

I tried to use my phone without a cover, but it’s so thin that I don’t like the feeling. So I went back to my cover only for the added thickness.

PR speak need to die and anyone caught using it should be shamed into oblivion.

Last Epoch needs to let us skip the campaign once it has been done once.

I do not play these games for the dogshit story, I want to kill stuff and get new loot and the story gets in the way of that.

Same thing with PoE (haven’t tried PoE2). I don’t want to have to rush 5-6 hours on a new char just to get through the dog shit story.

Diablo 3 fixed that a decade ago. Shouldn’t be that fucking hard.

Flat fee for realtors instead of a percentage also wouldn’t hurt.

Then it can be said about any mechanic, isn’t it? In Soulslike, parry is part of the core mechanics.

When Balatro exploded, a ton of copy cats tried to get in on the action. It happens all the time. Why is parrying any different?

OP’s point is that parry in itself doesn’t need much more around it to feel rewarding.

The guy I replied to said that this is a crutch. I asked if that applied to bullet hell dodging because dodging in bullet hell is a core gameplay element and you’ll be hard pressed to find people calling that mechanic a crutch. But you’ll find shitty bullet hell with a terrible implementation of the mechanic.

The mechanic itself isn’t a crutch and has been used successfully numerous times and I fail how to see how the mechanic in itself is crutch, and not the bad implementation by some devs.

Show me a great game mechanic and I can find you terrible implementation of that game mechanic.

Would you say the same thing about dodging in bullet hells?

What OP said is right. Parrying is an easy mechanic to give dopamine, just like dodging lots of things in bullet hells.

At one point, the choice for defensive mechanism aren’t infinite. We usually see armor, dodge and parry/block.

Parrying is clearly popular by looking at smash successes from FromSoftware where this is a key mechanic in the games.

People usually complain about parrying when it isn’t clear when to parry, or parrying is inconsistent. It feels cheap. The mechanic itself isn’t the issue, but how it is implemented.

I totally agree with you then.

It is already just another work. Electronics and software development has never that accessible before.

Grandma can pick up an Arduino, a few components and create a fully automated garden if she so choose, without having prior experience.

Engineers are people like everyone else and some people have no qualms fucking over other people for money.