esper What’s your favorite kind of environment in video games?
Villages built over bodies of water. Dead Cells has a cool one, there are some kooky ways of navigating it. Admittedly, all the maps just kinda register as lines and pathways when you’ve put as much time as I have into it.
Also The Hobbit game for GameCube. It’s a setting from a book of course, but it has a couple of my favorite puzzles (one of which is almost exactly the same as the Alundra puzzle that Brandon bemoans multiply) and a stealth section that I really enjoyed
(Skyrim has a pretty good one too)
esper Jerry Bready to Die asks: When is autosaving better than manually saving, and vice versa?
Big fan of the pause menu showing you “Game saved (x) minutes ago” like in Hades and Hyper Light Drifter. Also do like the perpetually save a la Dark Souls (also Dead Cells). I did accidentally have to cold bloodedly murder the first merchant in Dark Souls because I set my controllo down on that pesky right trigger, even though I exited the game within 5 or so seconds.
esper How do you balance player progression with game difficulty?
I think Fairune is the platonic ideal of this. It’s bare bones simple; you walk into enemies to hit them, and once you level up past them, you just flatten them like they aren’t there without taking damage. You can only knock out enemies your level or one level higher, thought they do more damage then. 2 or more levels higher is basically a suicide.
It makes traversing early areas a non issue. It also gates new areas really simply and allows for some numerical checks of x number of enemies (similar to the new Monster Boy, which has chests requiring an upgrade to magic ammunition to unlock)
