I have grown a bit bored of Assassins Creed: Odyssey, but am not going to pull the plug on it just yet. The major issue I have with the game is that you seem to just do the same shit over and over again and this gets even more monotonous if you try to do the optional side missions which really aren't all that optional considering that if you only do the main story quests, you will likely find yourself woefully underpowered for them. I'll save that potential rant for another day though because for now I want to talk about something that appears in many games that will quickly encourage me to bail on that game: Complex consumables needed in order to maintain health.
I hadn't thought about this in a while because I haven't played any Fallout games since New Vegas but that is what Deadcraft reminded me of after playing it for just a short while.
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Deadcraft is a zombie apocalypse game, which is not normally my cuppa because I feel the genre was over-saturated a long time ago. Hell, it makes development easy because now you have a never-ending supply of enemy "soldiers" whose motivations don't really need to be cohesive or even understood to be believed.
Deadcraft functions in a similar fashion to many other games in this genre, only it has simplified graphics so I don't have to sit staring at a loading screen for 3 minutes every time I want to go anywhere. Therefore initially it appealed to me.
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The top-down "Diablo" style of the game also appeals to me because I like simplicity in gaming every now and then and like most people, I have been drawn to Diablo every time they release one and I can't really explain why that is the case. I am of course not referring to the mobile game because I refuse to play mobile games.
Where Deadcraft totally lost me was in the rather convoluted system of keeping yourself alive that includes the need for food and "water like products" that are scarce in nature and especially when it came to hydration, had negative side-effects as well. This game is intentionally complicated in the way that you continually find a bunch of crap that can be used to build things that are not crap at some point. I can't say for sure because I gave up on the game once I started having severely diminished ability in combat due to the fact that I had taken the "wrong" sort of hydrating materials.
I enjoy games a lot better when we just have a health bar that can be filled by any number of rather silly methods when you think about it such as eating apples mid battle in order to keep yourself alive. It's an absurd and unrealistic idea, but whatever man! We've been doing it for so long at this point that I don't even mind anymore.
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There is a certain "sim" aspect of the game such as building defenses and farms and what not that I also never made it to and that is a shame because I quite enjoy it when games incorporate this sort of thing in them. I guess I'll never know because the need to find 2 forms of sustenance just to remain alive is just so damn annoying. I'll go ahead and say that there is actually 3 forms of sustenance because you also need to rest but your rest will only heal you to a certain degree depending on what you ate and drank as well.
To me this unnecessarily clunks up a game when all I really want to do is get into those caves and crush some zombie skulls. Think about it from a Diablo point of view: We were always just drinking red potions to heal ourselves and we didn't concern ourselves with "what is in those potions?" we just knew that they kept you alive and that was all the complication that I really want in that sort of thing.
This is a real shame because the simplicity of this particular game initially had me excited about it but then I realized it actually isn't simple at all and it can get quite complicated since the "best" kinds of nutrition in the game are not readily available to you.
I suppose there are probably some people out there that enjoy this sort of more complex system as far as HP/MP/endurance/whatever is concerned but for me I feel like gaming is complicated enough as it is and when you introduce extra features like this that it only detracts from the actual gameplay.
Maybe it is just because I am a filthy casual when it comes to gaming but I don't actually want these innovations in games. I prefer the completely unrealistic notion of just eating whatever and it keeps you alive. So I guess the search for a simple alternative game to play when I am not playing AC continues.