For game designers, encouraging aggression is often a good thing. Too many players of StarCraft or even regular combat games end up "turtling", dropping initiative wherever possible to make their games slow and boring while playing as safe as possible.

But in other games, often of multiplayer variety, hyper-aggression can sometimes ruin pacing in the other direction. Imagine spawning into a game with dozens of mechanics to learn, but finding that the prevailing strategy of enemy players is to arrive directly into your base and overwhelm you with a large set of abilities, using either their just-large-enough HP pool, or some mitigation ability, while you were still curiously investigating mechanics and working on defenses.

Some players find this approach fun, and this may even be the appropriate situation for games of a competitive variety, where the ability to react to unexpectedly aggressive plays is an exciting element for both players and spectators.

Plus, this is a very necessary setup for speedrunners, who often optimize to find the best way of trivializing singleplayer encounters.

But other games have something of a more casual focus, which can give a sour feeling when trying to bring people into the experience without having to reflexively react to players that are abandoning caution. Even when a game isn't casual, aggression metas can trivialize the "ebb and flow, attack and defense" mechanics that the game traditionally tries to teach. This can also lead to speedruns becoming less interesting because one mechanic allows a player to skip much of what makes a game enjoyable (which can sometimes be solved by "No XGlitch%" run categories)

So, the prompt branches into a few questions:

• What are fun occasions you've seen where players got absolutely destroyed for relying on various "rush metas" in certain kinds of games, because witty players knew just how to react?
• What are some interesting game mechanics you've seen that don't ruin the fun of the game, but force players to consider other mechanics they'd otherwise just forget about in order to have a "zero HP, max-damage" build?
• What are some games you know of that are currently ruined by "Aggression metas", and what ideas do you have for either players or designers to correct for them?

For those who want a summary; it's been going okay, but could've gone better. I decided to space out my tinkering and keep going with life, since these days my life is not so bound to my desktop. (It's also possible some details weren't recorded quite right. Many search tabs were closed)

I've been aware of the impending death of W10 in October 2025, with fears that hackers will start taking over the OS at that time. My main reason for avoiding Linux was game support, but Valve has been handling that well.

I decided to set up a Linux Mint 21 drive, which at first was difficult because my first USB stick had corrupted sectors (took some time to determine that was the issue). Then, when I booted in...it didn't support my wi-fi (it claimed it did, then couldn't connect, even when pairing with my phone). My first plan was to set up a nice, isolated 500GB partition on my nvme SSD (a drive I'd mostly used to store games) for Linux, and have it refer to the NTFS partition for games. (I would later learn this doesn't work well, and Linux is optimized for ext4).

Then, I learned this NVME had an "MBR" partition table, and I still had to convert it to GPT. While there's several tools for this, they complained due to the placement of my partitions, not leaving enough space for the table. I tried moving the entire gaming partition 1MB to the right...and got the same error.

After deleting the (backed up) partition to finish GPT conversion, I learned two things. One, that it was actually complaining because when giving the converter the target Device, I had given it the "Device:" labeled in the Disk management, which was "/dev/nvmen0p1". Guess what the P stands for at the end? So, gentle tip: The "Device" is not the "device", it's the partition - and diskpart does not present the resulting error well. Second thing I learned was that Windows had somehow put some of its boot setup on the NVME back when I had installed it on my computer; so now Windows wouldn't boot. (I'll see if I can fix this later. Windows' fault, not Linux's)

The good news is, I had downloaded a copy of Mint 22 (1 up), and THIS got full wi-fi and audio support. A little strange I had to go so recent for basic old-hardware support, but it could've been something else odd going on. I installed Steam, got a cryptic error about 32-bit NVidia drivers I ignored, and with my library moved back (and fixing ownership through chown, something Steam thankfully provided a relatively clear error message on) it's been able to run a few test games!

Having my browser and some basics up, I can kick back on YouTube and tackle whichever pressing things I think of first. I don't have replacements for 2 or 3 Windows products I like, but overall the setup has gone well, and a few of my annoyances actually go to my USB drive store, and Windows. Overall, much better than a decade past when I last tried Linux.

To keep Windows as an option, I'm planning to run a Windows installer repair boot to my original drive; but am admittedly worried whatever caused it to install boot info to the NVME against my instructions last time will, once again, screw up Linux. I may also try seeing if GRUB can locate Windows and boot it successfully. I feel somewhat blind on the topic of setting up / fixing the OS bootup.

I can tell this process is much simpler if someone has only one drive, backs things up to an external device, and then installs cleanly. Only on that vein, I wouldn't mind recommending it to others. Still, that's only in part because Microsoft has steadily made things worse and worse on the Windows front. (And, of course, I'll still be using it for work)

EDIT on day 3:

It's still been rocky. I became a bit pinpoint-focused on Hitman 3/"WoA" as my testbed to verify gaming was working; as it was more demanding and had proton dependencies ready. I selected a mission, got into the loading screen, and...got a black screen on the level, before a crash to desktop. Interestingly, the system was pretty unresponsive during the crash. Checked ProtonDB, nothing familiar about the issues. Failing so early felt like a dead end for Linux Mint as a gaming system, especially as it was one of my favorite games.

I had mentioned in prior comments I had skipped Bazzite worrying it would be the equivalent of RGB lighting and mostly unnecessary for gaming. But, if it's their claim to fame, I may as well try it. I had partitioned the OS away from the /home folder where I had copied my backup Steam games, so I went ahead with the reinstall. The Fedora-based partition selector was not so clear about its errors/required fields, or good at suggesting defaults for /home, /boot, and /boot/efit mounting; I ended up looking up recommendations (200MB boot? etc) on another laptop. To be fair, it's probably a less common use case, but still worth highlighting this part could've been clearer.

Bazzite worked! It was quick to put up a working Steam install, and Hitman levels loaded great. It took some time getting used to the new OS layout, but I'm not strongly opposed to it - it's a bit tablet-like, which makes sense since the OS targets ROGAlly users as well. That, in itself, is something I can live with. Of note, I wasn't terribly offended by Windows 8's largely hated tile layout and lived with it for years. I did not even need to compile the Xbox One dongle controller driver from source, as I had from Mint - worked out of the box!

Some things that stood out to me as annoying: The distro obviously makes efforts to cut down on options/buttons to simplify the experience and avoid overwhelming people. The biggest place I saw this is the file explorer, which insists on keeping you out of "/" and hopes 90% of your interactions will be with Documents / Pictures / Music. Given how many drives I had to interact with, this felt pretty crippling. Even after auto-mounting old drives I'd like to fetch things from, it still didn't show them in Open File dialogs within apps.

Bazzite tries to rise above the package managers of other distros by running any other necessary OS in containers. I'm no container pro, I've used docker for my job at times, but I tried going ahead with documentation. Treating it as an Ubuntu or a Fedora install, I had an extremely hard time getting VeraCrypt (a familiar app from Windows) working; using official .deb downloads on the website, or the package managers that had it listed. When I did finally get it installed off COPR, the "distrobox-export" command documented to add the app to my "Applications" did no such thing, nor did it explain what kind of filesystem entry it was trying to create.

As of yet, I still don't actually know where Bazzite's list of Applications is physically located, even after running some "find -iname" / locate commands. This might be nice to get to because the right-click menu on each one is sparse (again, simplified for users), and doesn't let me customize a few .desktop files not launching how I want them to. (A long time ago, something that really bothered me was Windows calling Steam's taskbar entry "Steam Runtime Helper" with no known way for me to fix it. But for Linux to also seemingly lock me out of solutions feels frustrating)

Some other things became worse. I set certain preferred keyboard shortcuts for window management, and Bazzite overwrote them to defaults - MULTIPLE times. That really set me off. When in the Activity View, many of the GUI apps did not have close buttons. I'm practiced with using tapping WIN+1 multiple times to go to the "third open Firefox window" - this is something apparently not supported on Linux, and I can't understand why. The OS takes a long time to recover from sleep mode, and needs ~10 seconds to re-discover my mouse. A few times, I came back to find the visuals garbled from some sort of display driver failure.

And, while Bazzite was very very good with games, as we all know falling just short of what we're used to niggles at our senses. Helldivers 2 worked - but a white-bar border at the edge only went away after tweaking launch options from ProtonDB. I launched Dead by Daylight, and while everything was visually fine, there was notable input lag, most visible on the game's reflex-based "Skill checks". I play a lot of games, and had gotten VERY used to "Install > Play > Done", so thinking about being so unsure on every game purchase worried me.

I have a number of small indie games that don't receive Steam's attention - often coming in from the web browser as .zip files with an EXE somewhere at their root. It's common for me to only spend less than 30 minutes downloading, trying it out, and maybe commenting on the creator's page. This is not a good workflow for Linux, given that launchers like Lutris make you fill out a long form with the position and title of the app before you can launch it - and give no immediate feedback or log output towards its launch failures.

I did research some of the many things annoying me, but of course Bazzite is still a niche offering and I was unsure at times whether to expand my searches to, eg "fedora disable screen anchors" or "gnome disable screen anchors". Often, I guessed I was the first person getting an issue.

When browsing the web, handling basic communications, even some games, I'm kind of comfortable with Bazzite. It's very very possible that a number of these issues would go away with some time and practice. But, I'm at an age where time is at a premium and it's VERY valuable to get a number of things "just working" without much concern. For those reasons, I'm definitely strongly considering going back to Windows.

I really hesitate to blame the strong array of choice for linux distros here - it's highly possible some comment will shout "Try XXXdistro!" and that would be the one where I'd magically run into zero problems, and all UI annoyances are things I could configure. But, getting that right so quickly seems unlikely. I may have shot myself in the foot with Bazzite, but I knew I wanted gaming as a focus, while as a consequence I got a lot of things locked down - to the point I couldn't even find configuration to tweak the things most breaking my workflow.

This might be a slightly unusual attempt at a prompt, but might draw some appealing unusual options.

The way it goes: Suggest games, ideally the kind that you believe would have relatively broad appeal. Don't feel bad about downvotes, but do downvote any game that's suggested if you have heard of it before (Perhaps, give some special treatment if it was literally your game of the year). This rule is meant to encourage people to post the indie darlings that took some unusual attention and discovery to be aware of and appreciate.

If possible, link to the Steam pages for the games in question, so that anyone interested can quickly take a look at screenshots and reviews. And, as a general tip, anything with over 1000 steam reviews probably doesn't belong here. While I'd recommend that you only suggest one game per post, at the very most limit it to three.

If I am incorrect about downvotes being inconsequential account-wide, say so and it might be possible to work out a different system.

Sales follow the tradition of supply and demand. Products come out at their highest price because of expectations and hype. Then, as interest wanes, the publisher continues to make some sales by reducing price to tempt the less interested parties.

But this isn't the formula for all games. While we might agree that games from 2000 or even 2010 are "showing their age", at this point 5 to 8-year-old games are less and less likely to be seen as 'too old' by comparison to hot releases. Some publishers have picked up on that theme, and doubled down on the commitment to the idea that their games have high longevity and appeal; making the most of their capitalistic venture for better or worse.

I recently was reminded of an indie game I had put on my wishlist several years back, but never ended up buying because it simply had never gone on sale - but looking at it now, not only did it maintain extremely positive user reviews, I also saw that its lowest all-time price was barely a few dollars off of its original price.

In the AAA space, the easiest place to see this happening is with Nintendo. Anyone hoping to buy an old Legend of Zelda game for cheap will often be disappointed - the company is so insistent on its quality, they pretty much never give price reductions. And, with some occasional exceptions, their claims tend to be proven right.

In the indie space, the most prominent example of this practice is Factorio, a popular factory-building game that has continued receiving updates, and has even had its base price increased from its original (complete with a warning announcement, encouraging people to purchase at its lower price while it's still available).

Developers deserve to make a buck, and personally I can't say I've ever seen this practice negatively. Continuing to charge $25 for a good game, years after it came out, speaks to confidence in a product (even if most of us are annoyed at AAA games now costing $70). I sort of came to this realization from doing some accounting to find that I'd likely spent over $100 a year on game "bundles" that usually contain trashy games I'm liable to spend less than a few hours in.

For those without any discussion comments, what games on Steam or elsewhere have you enjoyed that you've never seen get the free advertising of a "40% off sale"?

We get a lot of sequels in the gaming world, and a common criticism is when a series isn't really innovating enough. We're given an open world game that takes 40 hours, with DLC stretching it out 20 more, and see a sequel releasing that cut out it's late 30 hours because players were already getting bored.

Meanwhile, there's some other types of games where any addition in the form of "It's just more levels in the series" is perfectly satisfying. Often, this is a hard measure to replicate since these types of series often demand the creators are very inventive and detailed with their content - this likely wouldn't be a matter of rearranging tiles in a level editor to present a very slightly different situation.

What I've often seen is that such games will add incredibly small, insignificant "New Gameplay Features" just so they have something to put on the back of the box, but that tend to be easily forgotten in standard play (yet, the game as a whole still ends up being fun).

The specific series that come to mind for me with "Level-driven games" are:

Hitman - the way the levels are made naturally necessitates some creativity both from the level makers to come up with unique foibles and weaknesses to each target, and from the players to discover both the intended and unintended methods of elimination.
Ace Attorney - While they series has come up with various magical/unusual methods for pointing out contradictions in court, the appeal is still in the mysteries themselves, and it's never needed much beyond the basic gameplay, and the incredibly detailed and well-animated characters to hook people in.
Half-Life - For its time, anyway. While its Episodes certainly made efforts to present new features, quite often the star of Half-Life games isn't really in any core features or gameplay mechanics, but in the inventive designs of its levels, tied in with a penchant for environmental storytelling; making you feel the world was more than an arrangement of blocks and paths. For a long time, the wait for Valve-made episodes was alleviated with modder-made levels hoping to approach the inventive qualities of the original games.
Yakuza - While the series has undergone a major overhaul moving to JRPG combat mode, for 6+ games it satisfied a simple formula: Dramatic stories driven by cutscenes, as well as a huge variety of mini quests, of boundless variety and very low logic. For many of their games, they weren't doing a whole lot to re-contextualize their core gameplay, being fisticuffs combat, and it still worked out well (plus, they're continuing to go that route for games like Kiryu's last game)

To open up discussion, and put the question as simply as I can: Which games do you follow, that you wish could be eternally supported by their devs, by simply continuing to release new "level packs" or their functional equivalent, with no need to revamp gameplay formulas?

Short segment on the subject, but he was aware of the issue long before many other channels. (If timestamp code does not work, go to 11:00)

This should apply to internet purchases as well as retail, up to a $2,500 limit on a single item.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/73425

Boston has always been a confusing city for transit. Recently, in an effort to improve the Somerville region of the city, the construction group extending the green line completed work on a walking and biking path that follows the green line's tracks, connecting the Magoun Square area, through to the new stations at Gilman Square, East Somerville, and Lechmere.

The most significant part of the new extension is that it takes pedestrians and cyclists past two major obstacles of the area; the MacGrath Highway, a four-lane road with high-speed traffic, scant crossings, and a history of cyclist deaths, and the "Inner Belt" area, a network of blocked-off rail tracks for the railways coming from North Station.

The community path's new end destination at Lechmere takes pathgoers through Cambridge Crossing, a rising center that runs many outdoor events, through to connections that take people across the Charles River Dam into downtown, or through North Point Park and the pedestrian North Bank Bridge to reach Charlestown and the Navy Shipyard.

When it snows in Boston, I know it tends not to last very long, so I go out to take a lot of pictures on a morning walk. These are from January. Click the link for about 30 more pictures, through Somerville and Cambridge Crossing!

https://1drv.ms/a/s!AiBHtlx4uQqpkJxIc10TZ747csbOPw?e=AiWyjg