On Sat, 31 May 2025 19:13:36 -0700, Justisaur <justisaur@gmail.com>
wrote:

[...]

One Star. I'd call this a strong recommend against this, and should've >listened to the low score. I could see someone who likes fast paced, no
time to stop or think and very very hard ER type combat enjoying this. >There's obviously people who do, but so far I'm not one of them.

The shrinking circle idea came from battle royale games like PUBG.

In multiplayer BR games it makes a lot of sense, because as players
kill each other off and the popluation of the session decreases...
there needs to be a way to force the remaining players to stay close
enough to each other to fight. Without the circle of death always
closing in, a single round would go on indefinitely, people would just
quit from boredom eventually when there's only a few people left on a
huge map and 20 mins go by without even seeing another player. It
also prevents someone from just camping a highly defensible position
and never moving again... which again would just result in each round
becoming inordinately long.

The circle of death thing has become increasingly popular in some
"extraction shooters", such as COD Warzone DMZ mode (Call of Duty
isn't a one trick pony as it used to be, there are different modes now
which change gameplay substantially). And extraction shooters are
somewhat of a spin off from the battle royale genre.

And I haven't played this game, but my hunch is that's why they added
the circle of death to this game -- as far as I can tell it's designed
to be played as a co-op multiplayer game, so the circle is an extra
element of tension and a way to control the timing/duration of a
gaming session...which doesn't matter at all for single player games,
since only one person's schedule matters with regard to time
management, and they can save and resume at any time...

But, the timing/duration of a single session matters in droves in a
multiplayer game, because even if one player is okay with a single
round taking one hour, other players may not be. If sessions are too
long and people are quitting before the round is finished, it can
screw up the dynamics of the gameplay as designed.

Mack from WAB rated it very highly, but with the caveat that it is not
balanced enough yet for single player gameplay:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkdgvCmTRtU

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Only if PW starts playing it. It was mostly helping him :)
I doubt that's going to happen as it's not a solo friendly game, and he >expressed not liking any kind of multiplayer.

But I did! lol! But, you are right. It is not an RPG and just more of
a too tough combat game. I was going to get a refund because I
thought it was only a MP on-line game but I found a switch in the
setings to turn of on-line.

I don't like it so you won't see me posting anything about it. From
what I read, the single player / off-line is designed to be extremely
hard and harder than multiplayer so I won't be playing it for very
long. Looks good though. And there seems to be no difficulty level
or character selection in the SP game so I will just boot it up
everyonce in a while like I am doing with the new silly, made for the
general public DOOM.

I will never let myself get addicted to another game like I did with
Elden Ring, even though I hated the one save game file and having to
back it up everything before I tried something that looked hard. But
I especially hated the "cheating" required to level up. Heading to
the same location just to keep beating something over and over again
to get the required points or whatever that was called.

But I do appreciate all the help from you and rms!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I am only playing the new Elder Scrolls Oblivian for about an hour
total each week, not taking it seriously. Just enjoying the ride. It
is buggy as heck for me. Never got messages that my video card ran
out of memory and especially hate it when it boots up and the graphics
are all screwed up like vectors and I am riding my horse in the air...
and have to find a save game to resort back to so it stops. Getting
tired of that trick to force the game to redo the shaders even though
I never see a message on the screen. Got so sick of waiting over 5
minutes for STALKER 2 to become available to start playing every
single time I booted it up (only to get killed a couple minutes into
the game - it is so dark and gloomy).

The best thing about those two though are the quicksave and quickloads
and multiple save game files.

I guess I couuld copy and paste what I just said and post it in this
months "What have you been playing..." thread :-)

Nah.

-pw

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