There are a couple linear places where it’s real rough because enemies eat up so many hits cumulatively that you just run out of FP, even with all your flasks blue. And one or two bosses that get close to that too.

Also the damage is spikier than other classes IMO.

I like the gunplay of Sniper Elite better, but I’m a big stealth fan and they’re both fantastic stealth engines. I’d love to put MGS5 in that same category because I think the engine is there, but the actual world just never got filled in. After Ground Zeroes the scales of the bases in the main game just felt like a disappointment most of the time.

It’s not that it’s an awful mechanic or anything, in the context of a specific game, but it’s basically just automatically part of most games now. You’re basically only punished for being hit if you die.

I don’t mind a (visible) expanding reticle to indicate loss of precision for whatever reason, but not having an indicator seems like it would feel bad.

Because they generate more than they make.

Styx does this, to an extent at least.

I like a little more combat than it offers, so I haven’t truly spent enough time on them to comment on the quality as pure stealth, but figured I’d mention it anyways.

Destiny (before it jumped on the treadmill of trash content) was mechanically my favorite shooter, and unless I’m completely misremembering, there was definitely a flinch for at least higher impact weapons hitting you.

It’s kind of a weird category, because a lot of them purport to be hyper realistic, and nail it in some respects, but the actual hits are super gamified. Body armor might save your life, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to take a couple hits to the back, run behind cover, and heal completely 30 seconds later. I’d like to see more games that didn’t do health regen as an unconsidered matter of course, too.

If it uses tags correctly you can just filter in and out what you want to see, then bunch by other common tags or whatever.

I have not reached the point of finding the right book hosting to properly self host my large collection of books, so I can’t really give a suggestion for a good browsing experience, but just generally speaking tags allow as much structure and organization as the front end wants to take advantage of. I’ve seen plenty of platforms that, once you pick your first tag, give a sorted list of other common tags you can dig down into, in addition to showing the list of content that meets the tag by whatever criteria you have. (An example I’m not sure exists, but very easily could, is to take the highest frequency set of tags with the least overlap (fiction/nonfiction/kids) and display them as titled shelves, then, once you click that, breaks down that group in the same manner until extra tags aren’t really useful.)

But in terms of the information they contain, the real world is fuzzy, so a method that allows for fuzzy buckets instead of strict ones is going to be more representative of the eventual content.

True, but people remember the headlines, so I wanted to make the actual quote slightly more visible.

Use something that supports tags properly.

It lets you handle fuzzy boundaries way easier. If something’s both fantasy and sci fi? Give it both tags. A book on the real science implications of some fantasy magic system, using actual quantum physics models? No problem. Give it fiction and non-fiction, and science and fantasy.

Then you can filter by tags to get all the books that fit what you want.

Rubin continued: “The engine is really great but it does require a lot of work and with that work comes a lot of bugs that other engines have already worked out.

“We’re not a shooter that’s been out for 20 years. If you like what we are trying to do stick around and you’ll see things improve and new features get added. But if the game isn’t for you that’s ok you can move on.”

The quote is a lot less aggressive sounding than the headline.

His examples were games that demonstrate what being stunlocked and killed before you can react look like, and why some people think they’re “too hard”.

I agree with your premise that AC style generally not what I want to play. Though Shadow of Mordor does that format well enough that the combat in a true alert is more or less just to buy time to get the f out, because they swarm like crazy and you’d have to kill a hundred plus enemies to “win” outright at points. Taking on captains is about hitting hard and fast, triggering events that limit the number around, or at minimum disabling the alarm systems so the crowd doesn’t get too big. But overall I prefer to be punished hard.

They both bring their own ideas, but the modern hitmans and sniper elite are both big 3D games built around stealth as a core part of the gameplay loop.

Sniper elite leans into the sniper part as the primary gun (you can get a lower power lower range higher bullet drop silenced version, or you can gun and move before they triangulate you, or you can use other loud sources of sound to avoid triggering alerts), but you can do most to all of it with a pistol and knife if you want.

Hitman does the costume thing, but every level is designed with the intent of a “no extra kill, no alerts, no bodies found, suit only” challenge being possible.

In both cases the enemy AI (what makes a stealth game IMO) has a nice level of reaction to sounds/things they see, without just categorically abandoning their post to chase shadows, and once clearly sighted enemies can really swarm and escape gets super messy.

There are ways to handle and prepare most meats so that they’re reasonably safe. And even the “safe temperature” people generally see are the instantaneous temperature (if they hit that, the most common sources of food borne illness they carry are dead), but you can achieve the same results if you can keep the internal temperature at a lower temperature for longer.

The guidelines for cooking are assuming some potential for exposure to contamination somewhere in the process.

For beef you’re generally fine if you kill surface germs. You can serve steaks rare because it’s not really a risk.

Ground beef is not because the surface germs get mixed in.

Combat also varies heavily between weapon types and equipment weight. You have to approach combat completely differently with different gear, so you can play it again with less of a feel of exploration (probably not none; it’s huge), but completely different battles.

That’s basically what comments are most useful for. When you’re doing something that’s not obvious, and want to make sure the “why” doesn’t get lost to time.

Yeah this is an ad.

It’s one of the best written games I’ve played.

Even ignoring the actually rare setting and well done world building, Aloy’s growth from kid out of her depth into the Savior of the planet, and how she reacts to primitive tribal cultures with beliefs she knows are outright laughable are really well done and really well executed. I’m more of a “play games for the mechanics” person and that’s what originally got and kept me hooked, but the writing works well.

I get them. I don’t always answer.

I tend not to get along well with the kind of people who think I have to drop everything to respond to them, so it’s fine.

Everything has a huge opportunity cost. You’re giving up alternatives for every choice you make. Lowering variance of high impact attacks has value if you choose to play that way. Missing can turn a battle.

It doesn’t have to be useful to every choice of every build to have its existence justified. There are plenty of choices of spells, equipment, etc that I can look at and tell you “I’ll play 20 different times 20 different ways and never be tempted to use that once”. That’s perfectly fine.