Still on my first Witcher 3 run on Switch.

Same game and roughly same amount of time. Just started the main quest in Novigrad.

Got both DLCs for like 3 bucks, which was nice.

Everything from 3 times a day to once every 3 days is normal. It depends on how much you eat, how much of it your body can absorb, your fiber intake and some genetic variance too.

Your intestines aren’t a conveyor belt, things don’t constantly move. There are multiple muscles acting as a valve between different sections. Based on the factors above your body decides when to push stuff to the next section including the exit.

Not entirely, however, I feel as though proper resource management got less common over time. While the ideas are still present in modern games, they tend to be easy enough that most resources can just be horded. Most people don’t even use consumables nowadays. Games are seemingly balanced around ignoring entire systems.

From my point of view, you’ve got it wrong, but so do many developers. A good JRPG is all about resource management. Your HP, MP, items, money and the balance between these and your EXP and equipment. Combat is simply a drain on your resources up until the final boss, which should require more strategy. This needs something akin to a dungeon without constant healing and money being a thight resource. Once you’re in a dungeon, you should either be prepped or doomed.

You mostly see this done in dungeon crawlers, think any Etrian Odyssey game for example. Persona 5 goes for the same thing, as do most Shin Megami Tensei games.

Most modern games, however, are overly lenient with either money or healing. Often times, combat is easy enough to not even drain your resources. That’s when endless grinding becomes an option. Once you’ve destroyed this balance, you need something else to keep attention and that’s where I think your observation comes in.

Still on Witcher 3, just finished the Bloody Baron arc which has been great! Looking forward to more.

Probably won’t play anything else anytine soon, the game is massive.

Level scaling is never fun and never will be, I think. There is no progression if your fights with early enemies are just as hard as they were 50h ago.

You could probably design around that by providing in-depth build options such that optimized builds outscale other entities of the same level. Later game enemies themselves would be optimized better and better. But that’s really hard and I’ve never seen it done. Why even provide a dynamic build for each enemy with each level if you could just have a normal non-scaling progression?

These systems often lead to me avoiding combat altogether. While not exactly a crpg, Oblivion was more fun to me without ever leveling up (which was optional, but made fights kinda pointless).

That mech-woman seems like a direct copy of Kerrigan from StarCraft, their faction even assimilates others.

I’m surprisingly indifferent about this, despite playing ER multiple times and loving the DLC. Maybe I’ll get it at a discount in the future.

Monolith is pretty much the only reason I’ve already decided on getting their next console - it would be strange for Nintendo to not want them. It may be more niche over here, but JRPGs are the (one of the?) biggest genre in Japan.

So, I’ve started the Witcher 3 last week and will continue playing. I just arrived on the second map - Velen or something like that.

It’s certainly not the generational masterpiece everyone made it out to be. In fact it is really janky. Luckily, it’s just the kind of jank I was raised on and enjoy - games like Gothic and Risen.

My two biggest gripes are combat and dialogues. Combat just doesn’t feel good, in fact I never played Witcher 3 until now because the combat in Witcher 2 was that bad. Luckily, the open world structure lends itself more to the Witcher power fantasy of optimizing combat out of the game by over-prepping (mind you, I’ve played both games on the hardest difficulty). As for dialogues, what’s there is actually good. It’s just that almost nobody talkes to you.

In conclusion, it’s fun. There are no deal breakers, yet judging by the first area, it does not surpass its inspiration. However, I’m expecting things to get much more interesting later on since everyone was going on about the quality of the side quests. I did everything and so far they were quite basic.

As for me, it used to be 50/50 back when I studied. However, ever since I’ve entered the workforce I mostly stopped watching videos.

I need to constantly learn new things, tackle new problems and optimize stuff. I usually go for the highest difficulties too. In theory, my job provides these tasks for me, however, I get a lot of satisfaction from trying and failing things over and over until I’ve figured them out myself. I can’t usually do this professionally, as most problems have already been solved and I’m just learning how others did it. The same as playing with a guide or watching a video on a game. It just doesn’t scratch the itch.

Yeah, I somewhat agree. Collecting full sets in the game is kinda fun, just because opening card packs is inherently fun. But I play the game precisely because this isn’t worth any money to me.

Having cards that are only obtainable with money ruins this. It’s kinda killing my interest in anything else they do since I can’t complete the promo set anyway.

The worst part is, they would make millions without it. People already pay for regular packs, just to collect their digital cards faster. Heck, the increased attention to the actual card game alone probably already offset the developing costs.

Switch:

• Witcher 3 (don’t judge)
• Eiyuden Chronicles

PS4:

• Code Vein
• Disco Elysium

PC:

• Torchlight 2
• YGO Master Duel

Phone:

• Pokemon TCG Pocket

Do you mean quick time events (QTEs)? The game has at least one cutscene I remember where you’re prompted to activate an ability to change the outcome, however, I think that’s it. The games usually doesn’t have them.

Although, it does commit an entirely different sin in terms of unskippable cutscenes: There are several ‘immersive’ cutscenes with you suddenly walking at a snail’s pace or climbing slowly around while the cutscene plays out.

I fixed my post - according to my source 59% make less than 6 figures, not more. It’s still different to your sources, but not by as large a margin. Thanks for cross-checking!

I went into detail here. In short, nothing was actually engaging. Combat, puzzles and traversal all felt shallow.

I sure hope so, I got quite burned on the last big budget game I’ve played years after the hype. God of War 2018 felt like a culmination of every wrong with gaming at that time (outside of mtx) and AAA games only got worse from there.

I don’t know shit about taxes in the US, but a solid guess would be that 45% is actually proportional to the amount of households making 6 figures post-taxes.

According to this website about 41% of US households make at least 6 figures pre-taxes. Not that rich apparently.

EDIT: Got the numbers mixed up, initially I wrote 59% - which is the percentage of people making less.