This reminds me of anime subtitles from the 1980s. Most of those I’ve seen are simplistic, boring, and sometimes misleading.

Bad translations still exist today, of course, but I don’t run into them as often. I’m guessing that the growth of anime popularity in the west, along with increased translation budgets, have something to do with that. Better translators are probably doing some of this work now.

Losing a game’s flavour in translation might be a challenge to overcome, but I don’t think it’s inevitable. Suggestion: Don’t make translations an afterthought when producing a game. Instead, recognize that the words used to tell your story and illustrate your world effectively are your story and world, and seek out translators who are especially talented at conveying nuance and feeling. Accept that they are probably better than you are at communicating in their language. Give them room to be creative. Pay them well. You will probably get better results.

Maybe it is now? I don’t believe that was present when I played years ago.

I think you somehow missed it, mate. Here’s a screen shot from the year of its release:

It apparently isn’t designed to your tastes, but to say it isn’t designed well would be to overlook decades of highly regarded roguelikes. Even Nethack, which is nearly 40 years old and still loved, requires lots of experimentation (and many deaths) to discover how things work.

Seriously, where did this BS come from?

The components to build a science machine in Don’t Starve don’t strike me as much stranger than those to build crafting stations in other games. In my experience, they’re often unrealistic.

And how the hell would I know this necessary recipe without looking it up?

Did you miss the fact that the recipe is shown in the build menu?

That’s still true in BotW. (I think it requires the set to be upgraded as well.) The bonus from the Flamebreaker set is fire damage immunity, which can be handy when fighting certain enemies. You don’t need that bonus just to be in a scorched climate, though.

I think you only need one piece of the flamebreaker set to be fireproof survive in Goron City. You would need a second piece (or one piece and an elixir) to get closer to the caldera, but by that time you can buy a second piece in the city. You never need the third piece.

I went to the stables just to check out what was there, and discovered that they have quest information, quest triggers, rumors about the world, vendors that don’t show up elsewhere, mini-game challenges with rewards, hints at the locations of Link’s lost memory photos, etc. It never occurred to me that someone might miss out on all that stuff if they weren’t given a reason to visit a stable. (Maybe the game gives a hint to go there? I don’t remember.)

Sorry you drew the short straw.

Wow. Seems like your approach must have been really off the beaten path.

From memory, I think I was offered a fireproof elixir by an NPC at the nearest stable, and by a traveling vendor further up that road, and was given the flamebreaker armor for helping an NPC about halfway to Goron City. (That last one caught my interest because the help needed was in catching fireproof lizards, which seemed relevant to my immediate needs.) Any one of those would have been enough.

Your experience must have been frustrating. Were you avoiding roads and NPCs, by any chance?

Elden Ring and Dark Souls 3 both bored me to sleep. I didn’t find anything in their worlds to care about, and the meta-game of endlessly memorizing monsters’ attack patterns just doesn’t hold my interest for more than a few minutes. I guess soulslike games are not my cup of tea.

And some of them are unskippable.

TK Dodge RE made melee combat much more interesting when I last played. I could finally enjoy playing someone other than a stealth archer. :)

Adamant and other overhauls from SimonMagus did likewise for various other game mechanics. Some people prefer Ordinator and other overhauls from EnaiSiaion.

Interesting NPCs adds a bunch of potential followers, and the one I chose was fun.

And at least some of their flagship games were ported to PC by a developer that didn’t bother with optimization, leading to ridiculously high system requirements, so only a fraction of PC gamers would reasonably be able play them. (I’m looking at you, The Last of Us.)

High prices, late releases, badly performing ports, forced online accounts… Each of these mistakes is a slap in a potential customer’s face. Together, they practically guarantee poor sales.

Maybe they think recent RAM and GPU prices will lead many PC gamers to start buying Playstations? I doubt it.

Guild Wars 2 has a dynamic level scaling system that does a pretty good job of solving disparities like the one you described. I think it also has simpler battle mechanics than other MMOs. And the base game is free.

Looks like there’s a free demo, at least for now. (Part of the Next Fest?)

Yet still its one of the most modded engine of all times.

And leaded gasoline was one of the most widely used fuels of all time. That doesn’t mean we should still be using it.

You are not wrong, but it seems really nitpicky.

Ah, yes… the dismissive opinion of someone who hasn’t had to do the work to clean up messes caused by the broken design. I’ll be sure to keep that in mind when looking back upon the time I’ve spent helping people in your position.

I guess you’ve never had to reconcile the disaster that ensues when multiple CE mods update different parts of a game’s .esp data.

If they touch properties that happen to be near each other, the mods that try to preserve properties that don’t concern them end up stomping all over one other, leaving the player in a horribly broken land of conflicts and sadness. The mods can’t help it, because the engine’s modding system and data structures are fundamentally too coarse to allow touching only what’s needed, and too stupid to make reliable conflict resolution possible. The endless quest to work around this flaw is why Skyrim has uncountable patch mods, which shouldn’t be necessary in the first place. It’s a bloody awful design.

I get that you love the possibilities afforded by modding. We all do. But please don’t glorify Creation Engine in this area. What’s under the covers is embarrassing, and particularly bad when more than a few mods are used at the same time. Players and modders deserve something better, and a competent engine developer absolutely could deliver it.

As someone who has spent too many hours dealing with its fallout, I wish Creation Engine would die.

Aye. Which reinforces what I wroot.

I prefer not to give those people any attention at all.

What do you mean by PnP in this context?

Here are some tabletop games that can be played solo:

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamemechanic/2819/solo-solitaire-game/linkeditems/boardgamemechanic?pageid=1&sort=rank

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation, General American) IPA(key): /ˈdiː.mən/
• Rhymes: -iːmən
• Hyphenation: dae‧mon

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/daemon

Rhymes

• daemon, demon
• freeman
• seaman
• Seaman (surname - see especially David Seaman)
• semen

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Rhymes:English/iːmən

It’s somewhat regional. Lots of Americans pronounce the ou as in ouch, but lots of other folks pronounce it as in root (recognizing that route is its root word).