Inconsistency is Beautiful: In Defense of Fighting Game Jank
September 7th, 2023This is a repost of an article from my cohost, posted on august 23rd, 2023. People seemed to like it a lot though, so I'm reposting it on my blog.
Gonna babble for a bit and hope this is coherent:
I was weirdly saddened today reading Strive's patch notes. A removal of the character weight system. A younger version of me would be SO RELIEVED by this. "Oh god I don't have to memorize a million different combos"! Yet now, an older me, is oddly sad?
Now, I'm not gonna hate on or argue about Strive, or any other game. Plenty of games I like have equal character weights and consistent hurt boxes. I'd rather game designers do what they want to do, rather than pander to me.
(Granted, I do wish more people were pandering to me, but that's a me problem.)
... Instead I want to be more positive about the stuff. So much of this conversation gets caught up in arguments about gatekeeping and "git gud" "Baby Game" BS but not a lot of people really go into why they might like some of these arcane systems.
A nice and polite twitter follower, immediately after I tweeted my disappointment, asked...
Why would you want combos to fail randomly per character performed on
... which like lol, when you put it like that, it sounds super silly. But it's that framing -- a framing I've seen many times. I remember being on a forum... very appropriately, it was David Sirlin's forum (thank god you can't name search on cohost)(edit: uh oh). Being the Sirlin forums, you expect a... certain type of person and player. Very big anti-execution crowd and I was like the only real execution defender (at least who was a semi respected member of the community and not a random SRK troll). I remember one exchange talking about GG combos and the comment "Well what's fun about just doing the same rote thing over and over again?"
"Well you're not? Like I'm adjusting my combos as we go, depending on how high they are and stuff"
"I don't believe you."
Now, this is mid 2000s. I don't think anyone now would deny that's a thing that players do... but I think it still highlights a way a lot of people still feel. Combos as this discrete thing, these bits of work you get through to get to the Real Game (that forum LOVED talking about the "Real Game"). You learn your combos, so you get to play brain chess.
But instead the whole thing is very fluid, especially in a system rich game like the older Guilty Gears. You never stop learning, and that combo you learn isn't a discrete unit. It's a lot of different smaller parts and that perfect hit you need to do your idealized BnB is actually kinda hard to land. You need to learn how to put these things together in different ways. Combos are less raw memorization, and more a matter of a little memorization, but a lot of developed intuition.
This is no surprise to anyone whose played a lot of really nutty fighting games. But the important thing is more the mentality of "Combos are a thing that you need to have, and you fucked up if you weren't optimal" vs looking then as an extra and not taking them for granted.
"... Wait, can I convert to this route off this hit?"
Often in games with open ended combo, you'll get a hit and you won't actually know what you can get off it. I recognized the situation 3 hits in.. what's the gravity scaling like? What's their character weight? This route doesn't work on her hitboxes usually, but I think it might because of the weird height I hit at??
From there you gotta bet on yourself. Take the easy knockdown? Try to extend to a damaging route? What are the stakes of the match? How much life do you have? Is it worth maybe eating shit just to find out? Those sorts of situational, high speed valuation processes, for some people like me, are extremely fun and with games like +R or Rev2, I'm still, after thousands of hours, guessing and developing my intuition. Every matchup has new things to teach me not only in neutral, but on what to do when I even hit someone.
I don't like character weight because I like dropping my BnBs, or because I want to make the game harder for new players, but because they always keep me on my toes and give me great moments where I am rewarded for my intuition. I like it because I can do cooler combos.
... What if input buffers made games harder?
I was playing one day with Lofo, a really incredible +R Dizzy player and a former (lol, recovered?) Sirlin forum poster who ended up a huge execution lover. One day we're talking about Rev2 vs +R and hit me with something that has been in my head for like 2 years. Something to the extent of...
"Yeah, I don't like Rev2's input buffer. I feel like it makes the game harder, because everything is more consistent... I... don't think I like input buffers?"
Which to me at the moment felt like an insane position. Like there was a lot of simplifications made to fighting games I didn't like, but that one seemed like a clear win. That just makes games better, right?
But Lofo kept talking, about things that are borderline impossible in +R that would be consistent in Xrd and how one of the things that keeps +R reasonable is that everyone drops stuff all the time. Not just in combos, but in pressure. There is always wiggle room... and then talking about mashing to tech.
Mashing to tech feels like a vestigial part of Xrd. It doesn't bother me much (I come from X2), but if you're trying to tech and there's a gap, you're gonna get it. +R, much less so. It's almost an analog skill check between you and your opponent. Your ability to mash, vs their timing during the hardest parts of their combo. Defender can piano, so there is a bit of an advantage
Then that got me thinking about ST. "It's fucked up that you need to do a 1f reversal to beat tick throws in that game."
... But you don't. You need to have better timing than your opponent to beat tick throws. Can they time to 1f input? If you're playing someone great, probably, but when you watch mid level play, most DPed tick throw attempts aren't usually reversals. That analog sense of timing is part of the game's skill expression.
This goes into why people didn't care about exact frame data back in the day or players playing "by feel". A move being +1 really didn't matter unless both of you have sick timing. We HAD the frame data. We had Yoga Book Hyper for ST. It did help. But it's influence was different because the play conditions are were different.
In modern games, a +1 situation is often pretty rigidly defined. We have buffers. Our responses will come out on he fastest frame. If my opponent is slow and my suboptimal option keeps winning, people will call that fake... because it is. The expectation is that verse most players, even low ranked players, people will get their moves out as soon as possible. Meanwhile in older games, you can't take that as a certainty even with the best players. They'll hit a lot of frame perfect inputs, but not all of them. Finding where your opponent is being sloppy helps a ton. No one is clean all the time even in modern games, but it's so SO much harder in old games.
I even think a lot about setplay characters. In older games 'perfect knockdown into oki that grants an auto timed safe jump' is actually super hard (or really lucky happenstance). Heck, this is also where GG's variable wake up timing stuff also comes in. You could do it, but it would be so hard that it can never be the expectation. Now safe jumps are so easy once labbbed that if you whiff a normal before doing your oki people will just assume it's a safe jump even if it isn't. You get stronger setplay because frame perfect repeatability, while not at all trivial, is extremely practical.
Buffers help turn is into robots and, depending on your taste, that can be a good or bad thing.
ALRIGHT THE TAKE AWAY
One thing that I've also thought a lot about is... new players seem to have an easier time getting into +R than Rev2? Part of this might also be the lobby system and speed to matches, but part of it is, in Rev2, even a mid level player can be pretty scarily consistent, but +R... Welcome to the scramble zone, lol. And like granted you can run into cryptids with 10,000+ hours of play time who will Burst Safe Sidewinder Loop you into the negaverse, but even THEY fuck up or get wilded out by weird interactions. And I say this maybe liking Rev2 more than +R.
In a weird way, making games easier, also makes them harder, because you make them more consistent for everyone... and when everything is more consistent, the game is more rigid and unyielding. You're not making an old experience accessible to new people, you're making something new, with it's own pros and cons.
Again, this isn't a judgment zone. I'm okay with Strive. I'm actively loving SF6. But a rigid games forces players to play it how it was intended. This can help new players learn a lot faster. Hell, such design has lead to games that have even taught me lots of stuff! I don't hate these games.
... But I miss that looseness. I miss how you can have a combo so hard that only like 2 people can do it reliably and just this really hazy, unclear idea of what's even possible. Infinite weird, crufty interactions between interactions. Feeling like I wasn't just playing my opponent, but exploring a rich, emergent design space.
Fighting games as a genre increasingly feel like they're (metaphorically) moving from "analog" to "digital".. and like most of those changes, there are usually more advantages and disadvantages, but, even with the new advantages... there are always gonna be people who miss how the old analog models used to feel.
Street Fighter 6's World Tour Mode is a Lost PS2 Game
June 13th, 2023I Wanna talk about World Tour Mode, but I gotta talk about the Actual Game First
I wasn't planning on getting on SF6 right away. My experience with Day 1 fighting game is usually pretty poor. The mad rush is a lot of peoples favorite time in the life of a fighting game but for me, I prefer when things are a little more hashed out. First released ruined Blazblue, Xrd, and Strive for me and I didn't want to repeat that mistake with Street Fighter 6.
... Still, a friend (Thanks, Dasterin) got it for me so I was obligated to play a little! While real meat of this is going to be about World Tour mode, I do want to talk about my early impressions on the game and my experiences online. I feel like it's impossible to truly review a multiplayer game on release -- only after months of hindsight can we really say if a game is worth while... but that said, more so than the games I mentioned above... I like what I see?
This is a game for sickos, by sickos. The drive system is unhinged game design. Tons of free meter every round? Practically the ability to Valle CC with some characters? The most cracked out Focus Attack clone and boomer check in existence? ... and all of this bringing you one step closer to burnout or being smashed in the corner? Just absolutely nuts. I worry that the system mechanics might be too strong but this is the type of thing that gets adjusted as a game goes on.
It's also nice to have avatar lobbies that don't suck. I told everyone it was possible! And sure you got normal menu based player rooms and ranked elsewhere, but it's a nice diversity and leads to a lot of fun expression. This is also the first game I've played with a real, living ranked System. I enjoyed +Rs a bit when it was active, but besides that, well.. Rev2's ranked is dead and Strive's Tower is barely a ranked mode. Playing random people has been good for my composure when playing. Endless practice for me to Not Make Up a Guy while playing strangers. It's nice to play a game with a community so large that I am practically anonymous and where I feel no need to prove myself. I can just fiddle around, play a few games with Dhalsim, and go off to do something else.
That said, before any of this, I spent COUNTLESS hours in world tour mode.
Calling something a Playstation 2 Game as a Compliment
Late PS1 and Early PS2 was a weird time. Weird, experimental, goofy, unhinged game design, sacrificing polish and fidelity to do something weird. These aren't games you get a lot these days. Most games focus obsessively on graphics and gameplay polish and while indie cames can serve fill some of the gap, the weird but also content rich type of games from that era are rare. The closest thing that comes to mind is the SEGA made Yakuza which is also tightly bound to its PS2 roots.
So when SF6 needs a singleplayer mode that is fun and rich, but not as polished as it's online content, drawing from Yakuza seems like an obvious choice to make. Simple but uncommon voices like unvoiced dialog, or those 'stage diorama' locations you meet trainers in serve as a way to make a lot of content fast and cheap and while this content isn't always that great, quantity is a quality all it's own. Even just the way you can horridly amalgamate fighting styles seemed to come from a different time.
Even the ways WT mode is annoying feels PS2 era. Grindy, janky platforming, using weird special moves to pop balloons with power-ups... MINI GAMES??? Even the goofy way metro city is split in the beginning as if it was some engine limitation or something (it isn't, ultimately) just has such delicious, old school vibes. World Tour mode feels like SF6 came with an HD remake of an unreleased early era Playstation 2 game with all the fun and wild surprises that would entail.
Mechanically it's weird. You level up AND get a Not Skill Tree tournament bracket to spend points on. I hate Skill Trees, but this isn't -- instead new and old options get shuffled back in each new "tournament". This caused me to reset my stats at one point to respec, only to realize my change changed the later brackets massively. The clothing upgrade and skill system is weird and arcade. "+10 to Unique Attacks"??? I'm pretty sure that's for command normals, but some people say it's fireballs so we're all just confused. But all this confusing stat absurdity again, has that whole janky weird PS2 vibe. Attacking far outside your level range leads to doing so little damage it's painful. You can DO IT but it's miserable, which also sucks when you're hitting one of the weird XP/Opponent gaps in the game. The game has buffs but they... don't seem to do enough to make up the difference? But all that said, it's fun and the enemies are so dumb they basically train you
Characterizing the Uncharacterized
One of the big surprises in World Tour mode is how much character it gives everyone. Not that Street Fighter characters have been uncharacterized for 30 years, but that characterization is either painted with broad strokes, or limited to semi canonical sources like the Udon Comics. Simple endings, winquotes, match dialog, that sort of thing.
World Tour mode gives you a lot? Characters are chatty, they talk about their hobbies, their past, things they like, their relationships. You get an idea about how someone like Ryu actually lives. Funnily, this is a similar vibe to Strive, which definitely also set out to humanize it's characters both aesthetically and in story. We wanna know how these weirdos live and what their relationships are in the smaller details. It's fun to here Ryu talking about Chun-li dressing him so he can get through airports earlier or how he does construction work for money. It's amazing to see what an awkward weirdo Cammy is, still cool a cool operator, but... just a little off. Or endearing to see what a piece of shit Juri is, moping on her phone, filled with ennui as all her enemies are dead and she doesn't know how to socialize or be a person anymore. The text messages are half baked but charming, something that feels like it should have been more developed, but it so good. Cammy's cat-version of herself for her avatar is funny every time I see it. The leveling system for relationships is goofy, the gift system is simple and crude, but again, this is a side mode, it doesn't have to be AAA, it can just be an excuse to gate cute, fun content that helps endear the characters to you. This game even managed to endear PMC warcrimes Gamerbro Luke to me, showing him as just a perfect, well meaning himbo. Maybe one day we can sit around eating doritos and mountain dew as we talk about the horrors of the military industiral complex.
The plot was a slow start, going from "I don't care" to this perfect intersection between "Horrifying yet silly" to (and let me be vague to avoid spoilers) being... genuinely being an almost nihilistic downer? And not in a bad way! The whole thing, given the overall tone of the game, resolves very interestingly and bravely (in a creative sense). There are dumb plotholes and things that don't make sense, but with a mode like this, the game has to assume you're along for the ride. No one is here for perfection.
Was that... the... best Fighting Game Single Player Mode ever?
... Probably??? It wasn't perfect and some Netherrealm fans could probably point to some old (also PS2) MK game as an example. Maybe that one Soul Calibur mode in... 3... 4? I don't remember. But I've STILL have played more World Tour mode than the actual multiplayer game and I've been playing a BUNCH of SF6 online. But as long as I can get new outfits and dress up for the Battlehub, I'll still be dropping into World Tour Mode from time to time.
New Blog
May 29th, 2023So I've updated my blog again. This by itself is nothing new, something I seem to do every few years or so. What's different this time is I'm actually cleaning things up and restructuring things. I have had 20 years of webspace continuity and almost 15 years of wordpress. This is cool, but also a horrible mess. My server is a trainwreck of files, layers of old php files layered as if in geological records. As such my stuff is almost always out of date and backing anything else is a huge pain. So it's time to pack everything into boxes and knock down the house.
Wordpress is gone, as are a lot of my old posts. Most of this isn't a great loss. Most of my old posts are painfully out of date, or about long dead internet drama. If you really need to embarrass me, the wayback machine is right there. I can't actually hide anything, nor do I intend to, but, considering the fact that every post on this new blog was copied by hand, I don't need to keep everything I ever made up on my refrigerator forever.
I've made an effort to maintain, with the right URLs, every important thing I have ever wrote. Stuff like the Reaction article. If something is missing, feel free to email me and I'll try to re-post any reasonable requests or redirect any old URLS.
This also applies to any random files I have removed too. I have them all backed up, so if I accidentally removed something that is still useful to people, I want to know. I have an old file still up of mugen tutorials cause someone asked me what happened to them 5 years ago. These were originally uploaded in like... 2006, so don't worry, just ask.
As of right now a lot of Brave Earth stuff is missing. This is in no means any indication of any abandonment of the game. Part of me cleaning stuff up involved things related to working on the game. The problem is most of it is way out of date. Expect a lot of things like character Bios and stuff to be reposted once there is actually a release date. I'll probably be crossposting on here and steam when that time actually comes. For now I'm going to keep it as a single page.
Edit: Added a new RSS feed. I'm not an RSS user but people always end up asking me for a feed so please let me know if there are any problems with it.
Dragon’s Dogma wants you to Choose
February 1st, 2023Dragon’s Dogma the type of narrow, niche fanbase that made me know I’d love it whenever I got around to playing it and even though I knew this would happen, I wasn’t ready for quite how much I’d love it.
Dragon’s Dogma is a weird game. It feels like someone played a game of telephone, describing the conventions and goals of the big western RPG genre to the designer of Devil May Cry, who then declared “I got it” and made a game. The reality isn’t quite as funny. Hideaki Itsuno had a lot of the core ideas for this game all the way back in the year 2000 and he clearly was a fan of the western games he was inspired by. But instead we get back funhouse mirror reflection of the genre, seen through the eyes of someone with a very different value system.
In many ways this is similar to Demon’s Souls, a reflection of western fantasies and RPGs with an entirely different value system. But in the decade since, Miyazaki’s vision has permeated the culture of the game, and besides coming from the same place, often aping the same references (down to Berserk), these two games could not be so similarly different. Dragon’s Dogma still feels almost like outsider art, a beautiful jewel that nothing else is quite like.
I could go on about the combat, how the game has some of the best feeling and satisfying variants of the Stinger attack I’ve ever felt, talk about how the classes are WEIRD, or other things but one of the most defining features of Dragon’s Dogma, that permeates its whole design is that the game wants to make the player Choose.
Now, it’s easy to look at other games, the morality systems of a Bioware game or whatever, good and evil routes and go “These games make you choose!”, and they technically do, but the point of the game is not to choose. The point of the game is to play a role, and the choices are what makes that possible. The choices are a means to the end. In Dragon’s Dogma, the choice is the goal — or perhaps, you could say, expression is the goal, but Choice fits the theme of the game all to well.
The thing that makes Dragon’s Dogmas choices so wonderful is they are complicated, obfuscated, and with unclear inputs and outputs. The game wants you to sweat your decisions, but it makes it very clear. Choosing is better than not choosing at all.
From character select this happens. So many of the choices you make in the character editor affects things. Long legs? You walk faster. Big? You can carry more. Light? You use less stamina while moving. Gender not only influences gear, but how some enemies react to you (but, blissfully, not who you can romance, which is…. everyone??). All these have an affect, but never an affect that is so strong you’ll regret it, or one that will keep you out of important content. Your pawn and its design matters to. You share them with the internet and how they look AND their stats matter. Program your pawn with a fancy TACTICS GRID? No no no, you sit down and talk to them. Your pawn gives you abstract questions, and you chose the answer. The game throws systems, items, loot and everything at you, forcing you to figure out what to experiment with, what to keep, what to do. What do all these stats and icons mean??? Wait I got only a few places I can mark with crystals to be fast-travelable? I gotta choose that too???
It all matters but it doesn’t matter. This isn’t Dark Souls you aren’t going to be punitively punished. You’re not going to be tricked into making choices you didn’t even realize you were making. In fact the game goes out of its way to make SURE you know what you’re deciding.
The “moral” choices in these games feel more real and nuanced than other games. There are rarely right answers. Characters understand. Do you give the hot merchant girl who seems a little shady a bunch of money? Sure, but it doesn’t hugely matters. She appreciates it, but the choice doesn’t come back to haunt you. Do you evict the family for the rich merchant? They’re understanding that you’re just the one breaking the news and SURE you can buy the house but the game doesn’t present it as the obviously good answer. It’s just something that can come up. What’s your reward? Appreciation. When the merchant goes to trial, is he guilty? I mean… he probably is for SOMETHING, but it’s unclear. You can find evidence for and against, you can forge evidence for and against. Hell, you can just FORGE items, even important plot items. Which merchant do you give the gold idol to? Do you help Mercedes during her duel? Is either choice right? Who is your beloved? Do you get a ton of special dialog with your loved one? No, they just go into your house. But you have the freedom to chose. Even how you give gifts and respond to pawns you hired fits this type of player expression.
The important part is that the choices matter enough for you to see results but not so much as to make you worry about gaming the system, or hunting for a best ending, or whatever. But making a decision is hard, and you have to make them.
Thematically, this plays through the whole games. Pawns are devoid of will, and is your will, your ability to chose that gives you command over them. The dragon exists to find someone to make an Arisen, someone with the willpower to choose. The present them with difficult choices and challenge them. They need someone with the strength to inflict their will upon the world. Grigori fights you with every ounce of his strength, but that wonderfully, beautifully written dragon wants you to kill him. He wants someone who can take what is theirs.
All this to find someone who can replace the “Seneschal” of the world, to slay the previous god and replace them, to refresh the willpower of the universe. Every step, you are given permission to stop. Grigori understands sacrificing your beloved for peace. Not embarking to find the Seneschal is a valid place to stop playing the game. The game even tells you, as you fight god, that the peaceful life is an underrated one.
… And once your god, you chose when to die. This is a game, fundamentally, about having the willpower to Choose.
Odds and Ends
Alright, this will be less focused but just to get some stuff out.
This makes sense, coming from the designer of Devil May Cry. The DMC games are filled with choice. It’s not about being OPTIMAL. you CAN be optimal, but the games are about style, about being cool, about expressing yourself. This leads into combat that feels like a toned down DMC. Stingers, double jumps, crazy infinite arrow blasts. The game doesn’t try and constrain you with offensive resources, it wants you to express yourself. I expressed my self by being a Mystic Knight, third strike parrying everything, and by oppressing all those who would oppose me, with my friend the orb. Now I’m doing NG+ as a solo assassin which is just FULL of options.
Visually, the game is dated but beautiful. You see the rough edges, but the lighting is unusually naturalistic. It just… feels like being in the woods, a lot of the time and it makes things just feel so real and immersive, even with some of the age. The game didn’t need to have a day night cycle. The game looks beautiful during mid day and it could be kept like that but… traveling at night is another choice, and one the game encourages despite it’s drawbacks.
The story of the game is wonderful. While being low in dialog and character building it still manages to stitch together an amazing cosmology. The cycle of godhood is so creative and the Pawns are just wonderfully weird. Grigori might be my favorite dragon ever? The voice actor does a hell of a job. I love shit like the Duke’s whole mini arc
I also love how wildly bisexual this game is. Like the Duke’s Wife assumed my girl was ready to hook up with her at a moments notice (and she was right). It’s definitely more of a female leaning slant but the game still gives you the freedom to… romance whoever.
The armor in this game is funny. Want DS style armor? Covered. Wanna be Red Sonia? Covered. Less options for boy sluts, which is unfortunate, but the swinging pendulum of armor has me loving silly hot fantasy armor again.
I cheated a bunch by the end of the game. Rift crystals were too rare because online isn’t THAT active anymore. Also I’d dupe items I had cause forging stuff, while affordable, was just annoyingly time consuming. I in theory like that inconvenience tradeoff, but after the 20th forgery I was like ‘alright alright enough of his’.
I played on the PC version so no Berserk armor, but I love how this game takes a totally different set of Berserk influences than DS. Very Golden Age-y, while also being its own thing. Especially stuff like “Hey we made Mercedes cause we clearly love Caska but she’s not Caska, and the weird Witch Pawn isn’t Schierke… even if she lives in a tree house guarded by a golem”. All the influences are obvious enough to be appreciated, but unique enough to not be rip-offs.
Anyways, Madeleine is my wife. Dirtbag girls forever, see you in Dragon’s Dogma 2.
2022 Cleanup
February 1st, 2023I know I said I was going to post on every game I played, but that turned out to be too much work. Some games are worth talking about but don’t operate well as whole post. So lemme hit the four games I didn’t write about
Breath of the Wild
Hey I’m caught up. The problem with writing about this game is everything has been said and it’s very obviously good. I liked it a lot, like most people. Big shocker, BOTW is good. So I just wanna hit two points.
First, Princess Zelda is so bullyable. Like oh my god she’s so pouty. It’s amazing how you could just tease her and she’d cry, even though she’d also be into it…. and how she can withstand combat with Ganon for a century. Truly a duality of womanhood. A true queen.
Second, I was thinking about that whole, awful article about how “Zelda had to be more like Dark Souls” thing and how some people might go “See that was right!!” even though… it isn’t. It does similar things like trust the player, allow the game to be cheesed, and just giving an unusual amount of freedom and that feeling of being trusted by the Dev is something a lot of people felt with DS… But it’s not like DS and never needed to be.
As usual, people who say something should be more like Dark Souls don’t actually know what’s good and special about Dark Souls.
Hardspace Shipbreaker
This game rules so hard. It honestly deserved a whole post. The mechanically fun action of chopping up ships to the brutal depictions of capitalism and the even handed treatment of unions. Like “Yeah, Unions have problems. You have to contend with some of them. But you also know how worse the alternative is. Nothing is perfect.”
Fun story, well told, neat bonuses and just good core mechanics. This game needed a ship editor or something so the community could keep it alive forever. I hope the devs come back at some point to give it an expansion. It’s definitely a concept that’d benefit from just a little bit more meat.
I guess that’s part of why I never wrote a bigger piece. It’s so solidly great, but in a way almost too simple to go into deeply. A simple, tasty treat.
Satisfactory
Not done yet but I wanted to talk about how Satisfactory is fundamentally opposites. Factorio is a game where eventually, macro building gets EASY. Difficulty comes from the unreliability of your input (materials) and from Alien attack. Building is easy and systems must be scalable because input and output will change constantly due to all these factors. Ignore a base for too long and something will surely go wrong. You travel to expand, but also to maintain. Factorio is about growing an unstable system fast enough that it maintains stability.
Satisfactory is different. They added blue prints recently, but even then, this seems to hold true. Outputs are CONSISTENT. You have to build with growth in mind, but future growth is predictable. Nothing breaks the machines. And nothing should break, Satisfactory is a pretty game. It wants you to explore. It wants you to be able to leave for days and come back to a working base. Bases are extremely hand built and building is hard. Modifications are painful and tedious. Fixing a problem feels like taking apart an engine. It rules. Satisfactory is about expanding a stable system and good planning. It gives you time to lounge around, look around, for fuck around with tiny problems. Every factory and machine feels deeply personal. It more has the vibe of like… modded minecraft skyblock.. In fact, I should try Satisfactory Skyblock
It’s amazing how two games so superficially similar are actually so different.
Strive
I like it now. Goldlewis is my dad. I swing the coffin and peoples health disappear. Most previous complaints are still mostly valid but I play Goldlewis now so they’re other peoples problems. Playing a character with no legacy version to compare to was a pro move. 7.5/10.