What are some games with good gameplay loops?
I'm especially fond of early Dark Cloud, where you needed to figure out how much food, water, keys, repair materials, etc to slot into your limited inventory then you'd go adventure, get stuff to enhance your town, and come back once your resources ran thin. I really liked that back and forth but I haven't really gotten that same feeling from many other games. The limited inventory in Legend of Dragoon could feel that way sometimes, too, but eventually wasn't an issue either.
TL;DR: Any games out there with rewarding inventory management / good gameplay loops?
>gameplay loops
Yeah.
Ideally with mechanics that make you want to engage with the game more. I mentioned Dark Cloud because I like how the town segments would reward you with lots of stuff to help you in the dungeons and the dungeons would, in turn, reward you with new elements to your towns.
Compare this to something like Persona 5, which can feel like such a slog because it's just VN segments for hours straight until you hit a dungeon that you, ideally, complete in a single run.
The term is relevant to Dark Cloud where you alternate between dungeon crawling and pgrading your town.
"Gameplay loop" is a moronic, made-up, 0 IQ, non-sense word used by grifters that has a meme "game design" degree, israeliteTube Patreon e-beggars, and npcs parroting it for true gamer clout™. You don't deserve a proper discussion, consider this thread nuked with futa and schizo shitflinging. Dumbfrick tourist OP.
I can imagine this guy finally releasing his RPG Maker project, the one that made him so bitter towards anyone remotely successful, and then people dislike it because it has a bad gameplay loop
Listen here, homosexual, literally every term ever is made up words you stupid piece of shit. Tell me how else you want to discuss creating delineated spaces of play in a game with the goal of the mechanics of one encouraging engagement in the other, you absolute fricking pedant, I've been here since '06 back when it was custom to lurk for years before posting trash like this and gatekeeping was done in bokus and picos
here's your ~~*you*~~
just say gameplay
Gameplay that I'm looking for specifically revolves around preparing for a dungeon crawl, then having to smartly use your resources in said crawl, then returning to some kind of hub.
There's that Moonlighter game but I'm unsure if it's any good. Looked like it was more bootleg, less interesting Recettear.
Conan Exiles
but gameplay is such a vague, general term. "gameplay loop" specifically refers to multiple distinct phases of gameplay and how they connect to each other
So you revealed yourself as an actual moronic Black person. No wonder you parrot words you don't understand, 1 INT NPC. Frick off back to
ok moron
Huh, there was a time when genuinly used to believe that Dark Cloud was a rip off of zelda.
It isn't? I only played a demo disk and that was the impression I got. There must be sections of it like Zelda at least because that was all I saw of what I played.
It's an action RPG dungeon crawler with randomly generated maps and town building. You also upgrade weapons with stat raising items, and there's multiple party members. And hunger and thirst meters.
The only part that resembles Zelda is how the main character looks, and maybe the camera distance
The two Dark Cloud games were absolutely fantastic, especially the second one. It's a shame that Sony didn't run with it as a full series.
>randomly generated maps
I really liked that part. Replaying the same level gets you a different map every single time. It's clever.
I loved that the second game had stronger map generation in general and also let every map double as a golf course minigame. Shit was choice.
Rogue Galaxy did not make for an effective spiritual successor and Level 5 haven't done shit that comes close to Dark Cloud yet, imo. I still enjoyed both Ni No Kuni games but they aren't on the level.
Rogue Galaxy was a disappointment. Overall it was just mediocre in comparison tot he Dark Cloud games. Ni No Kuni was basically the Pokemon JRPG Nintendo never delivered, and it has a charm to it because of it.
Dark Cloud is my favorite video game. Love it to bits.
Do you remember the Fish Battle minigame in Dark Cloud 2? I was obsessed with it.
I remember giving Ni Nu Kuni: Wrath Of The White Witch a try to support Level 5. I found the game to be boring, childish dribble. So I never tried the second one. And I have still never played Rogue Galaxy.
It is a rare case that a JRPG isn't too long for its own good.
>I remember giving Ni Nu Kuni: Wrath Of The White Witch a try to support Level 5.
I tried because I saw Hisaishi made the ost, I barely made it to the desert town before dropping it, the game played itself and the story/setting were straight up trash. Big disappointment after hearing it get hyped up like a Miyazaki movie in videogame form.
Ni No Kuni 2 is also childish but on the flip side it's also about the president of the United States being isekai'd into a fantasy world where the first thing he does is shoot several mouse-people with his handgun. So it's a mixed bag. I enjoyed it but it's definitely more of a children's game.
>Level 5 haven't done shit that comes close to Dark Cloud yet
White Knight Chronicles had the town building down, I almost want to replay that game since it was added to the new ps plus thing but so much of that games enjoyment was tied to the online play
Dark Clpud 2/Dark Chronicle is the best RPG of all time.
I liked everything they did with the dungeons and characters (though the ridepod and monica's monster transformations always felt undertuned) but the town building aspects were much worse than the previous games.
I’m not big on town building in general, I found it functional and I was glad it got out of the way. The monster transformations I’d agree were weak, but the ridepod was strong as an ox. First time I played I went all in on ridepod and ignored both characters and got absolutely fricked on red seal levels
I tend to play the characters about equally and the ridepod never quite outperformed them in DPS. It was a good option to have though, especially with some of the more maneuverable setups you could get it and various weapon loadouts.
I liked that the townbuilding in the first game had unique assets for each town and unique NPCs for that town. In 2, everything is built with the same building blocks AND you're limited in how much you can actually put down AND you're just moving in characters you already have met and know so towns tend to look like barren little four-house plots even if you max the items put down. The towns in the first game just had a lot more character. I know the whole future segments try to compensate for this but there could've been a much better marriage of the two systems. Opening an Atla and getting a specific person's unique house or a character you've been hearing about/waiting to populate was always more exciting than some shit like FENCE x20.
The ridepod peaks earlier but if you powergame the inventions it steamrolls everything for all of the early game. Add meme shit like the motorcycle wheels and it changes the game totally or min max with roller skate legs to be able to dodge any attack and strafe the enemies. Ridepod was great, almost too good a crutch and takes valuable xp from your main characters. I preferred already knowing the characters, have them more personality, but like I said I really dislike town building so I was glad it got out of the way more in the second.
I always found I didn't really have the fuel to make good use of it until the third dungeon. I recall certain missle/gun arms being pretty powerful along with the dual katana. Maybe I should do a ridepod-only playthrough? Though the sealed rooms would suck.
In my recent replay of the first game, I challenged myself to only use the character you got in each town (so I used Toan until I got Xiao, then Xiao until I got Goro, etc etc) and with just juggling one synth sphere that I never fused into a weapon that ended up being pretty approachable and surprisingly fun.
Damn you seem pretty cool anon. Would love to see updates on your ridepod-only run. Post pictures of your towns.
>though the ridepod and monica's monster transformations always felt undertuned
I dunno about the tranformations because frick farming them, but the ridepod is obscenely op if ypu actually bother with the invention mechanics.
I've gone whole hog on inventions and always found the ridepod to be underwhelming compared to how strong the characters were but then again it's pretty easy to be one-shotting everything by the third dungeon.
Do you really think that or did you just not use it much and don’t want to admit you’re wrong on Ganker? Not judging I get like that too
I used it plenty. The only point in the game where it is consistently more powerful than your characters is during the first two dungeons and you can't even use it for most of the first dungeon. Once you get to the sea cave, it's easy to have enough medals to just rename Max into having one of his final guns. Even if you don't do that, you're likely rivaling it in terms of damage output at that point.
As soon as you get the propeller legs, you do get a lot more maneuverability for Steve and at that point it might be faster to use it to get through levels, maybe?
It's been years since I've played the game though, so I could be misremembering. I'm considering giving it another playthrough and trying to ride-pod and monica-transform only as a challenge.
Ok that is a fair opinion. Not sure what you mean about renaming Max. Did you grind at all? For the medals or anything? Please keep updated on your madlad run
If you save up 40 Medals, you can exchange them for a Name Change ticket. Using this to rename a weapon to the exact name of another weapon will transform it into that other weapon with the starting stats of that target weapon. So you can just give Max the Supernova as soon as you're able to get 40 medals.
I typically don't grind and would only return to stages if there was something I really wanted to get from bonus objectives that I might have missed on a first pass.
Man monicas transform is so weird its even worse than rue's thing in threads of fate
The ride pod is fine anyone who can complain about clown/rollerskates/gatling has no soul and actually using it just to get around when ut becomes a bike with awful controls is fine too
It's much more a Soul Blazer / Act Raiser spiritual successor. The whole game is about randomized dungeon crawls to recover parts of whatever town is your current hub, then you go and build/customize your town. The RPG gimmick is various resource management (Health, Thirst, Weapon Durability) and your weapons leveling up instead of you.
Dark Cloud doesn't have any puzzles or much gameplay like any Zelda, really. The main character just wears a green hat.
I loved the Dark Cloud games (oarticularly the music, great shit), but to be honest the gameplay loop was suboptimal in both.
It's great at the beginnin but it really starts to drag after a while, both games would have been better if the dungeons had half the levels.
Particularly in light of the rng aspect, if you can revisit an old level to get a "new" one there's really no point in forcing the player to go through a billion same-y corridors between one plot event and the next.
Yeah, definitely why I specified 'early' Dark Cloud. Eventually, the resource management lightens up a ton and the dungeons grow tedious.
Replayed Dark Cloud this year and was surprised that the dungeons weren't quite as long as I remembered them being. Still too long at the very end for sure but not as bad as they were in my memory.
I just remember Dark Cloud one having a huge wall in the form of the Seaside Towns boos fight. The fight was some water themed boss.
It was so much harder then everything up to that point. I could never really figure out how to beat it and never beat the game.
Each of the bosses had a gimmick where they'd have a phase that you needed to use the new character you got to make them able to take damage, then you could swap to Toan to attack them.
The Ice Witch boss has a barrier that you need to blast down with Ruby's elemental magic before you can hurt her, iirc.
But yeah she also hits like a truck and has attacks that are hard to avoid. She can inflict FREEZE status which just fricks you sideways if you're not prepped to deal with it and is even a headache if you are.
I basically recall dying to her, then doing a well prepared run where I grinded out a bunch of items specially for the fight.
I died again, had used a bunch of items and didn't want to grind them out again, and went and played Fantavision which was the only other PS2 game I had at the time.
I liked what it was selling though. I found the town building super fun, but I always love that in games. Seeing things grow like that is a deep seated pleasure for me.
The whole 'seeing things grow' aspect is literally what powered me through the entirety of Soul Blazer.
I played that during a retro binge during the first summer of COVID when I got temporarily laid off. All I knew going into it was that it was part of the Quintent SNES trilogy, but I ended up loving it. It really made me miss Dark Cloud.
The Quintet trilogy is special stuff. Quintet was a special company.
For her I bought a full inventory of bombs or fire crystals or something and just offloaded them all
Even then I don't think that killed her and I had to finish her off normally
Ended up quitting at the desert dungeon, I'll have to beat it one of these days
These vidya magazines were so fricking dumb. Dark Cloud wasn't even remotely similar to Zelda. It was an RPG dungeon crawler with city building elements.
Darkest Dungeon is exactly what you're talking about. You manage a small hamlet and develop it by venturing out into the local areas and bringing home loot. Each cycle is a day and during that day you do all sorts of things to manage your roster of up to 20 mercenaries as well as the town and then you pick an area to go quest in. Each time you go to an area you have to custom pack all of your supplies each time as well as monitor your party's health, hunger and stress levels. Some missions allow you to set up campsites. It's a difficult game, but it's a lot of fun.
>gameplay loop
you can just say gameplay
>TL;DR: Any games out there with rewarding inventory management
Sounds boring tbh.
Yeah, if that kind of game was for everyone then there would be more of them and I wouldn't have to make a request thread.
I'd recommend Azure Dreams, it's a dungeon crawler that has you upgrade your house and home town with the money you earn from selling loot. You slowly progress up a tower but have to leave after a while to heal, hatch monsters, progress npc questlines, and sell crap.