Stillhart

I consider losing all the money and XP you've accumulated since the last save to be extremely punishing. Maybe it's just me, but I can't begin to express how much I hate losing progress. Everything I just did for the last X minutes since the last save was completely undone. Nothing to show for it, no XP, no money, no progress toward my next goal. Just a complete fucking waste of time and X minutes of stress I'll have to repeat. It's like I lost power and corrupted my save file. It's the worst feeling in gaming for me.

Yes, I realize you can get that XP/money back but it adds a level of stress that makes my stomach roil even thinking about it right now. No amount of suggestions on how to think of it differently has changed my perception of it significantly. I dealt with it in Elden Ring for a while but it's probably the main reason I stopped playing that game.

Playing a game with similar mechanics but without the death penalty makes me realize how much more fun Elden Ring would have been without it. IMHO of course. YMMV

I know it's about as subjective a thing as you can get, but I find the ergonomics of the DualSense to be atrocious. Like it's so bad that it hurts my hands to play for too long. I also hate the squishy feel of the triggers when they're not using the gimmicky feedback stuff. Overall, I was pretty amazed at how badly they ruined the controller for the PS5 compared to the PS4 one, IMHO.

It's funny to me to see people say they prefer it but hey... some (read: billions of) people also think Twitter was ever worth using. Different strokes for different folks.

I honestly have no idea why. I have had both the PS5 and XSX since launch (yes, I got very lucky), and I have been a PS fanboy since the original, but the XSX is just way better IMHO. I barely use the PS5 unless it's for exclusives, of which there are very few.

I feel like there is a lot of inertia keeping people with what they know, but if you were to give a PS5 owner an XSX for a month, they'd go, "Oooh, I get it now!" and switch.

At a bare minimum, the XSX is much better for everything besides gaming (streaming, etc), the controller is SIGNIFICANTLY better (subjective, but man...huge difference), Gamepass is way better than PS+, and there are more exclusives on Xbox.

I wish the PS5 were better because I'd rather not support MS. But the gulf is so wide, it's hard to validate buying the PS5 in my mind. There's a reason I have a second XSX while the PS5 is gathering dust until Spider-man 2.

They could to do that...

OR

They could let parents make their own decisions on what our children play and fuck off.

I think what it is is that there's friendly fire enabled. There's no incentive to go kill other people like in some souls games, but strangers on the internet will be strangers on the internet.

It's super simple to limit your load to "friends only" seeing as how it's the default mode and it's right there next to the "start game" button when you load in.

Oh I probably should have mentioned that I've only played solo so far. Are you saying it has invading pvp like Elden Ring? I didn't even realize that was in the game. I didn't change any settings to turn it off (though it's set to "friends only"... maybe that did it?).

I can definitely imagine that sucking. But it seems like the kind of thing that can easily be turned off...

Whoa, that's super cool! I need to see if my library does that. There are a lot of games I'd love to play but don't need to own.

Thanks for the kind words.

Sounds good, I'll check it out when I get bored of Remnant 2. :-D

Nova Drift is one of my favorite rogue-likes, highly recommended. Check out the youtube channel "Ultra C" for a ton of different rogue-likes.

You imply that easy mode = grind. I'm not sure why, they have nothing to do with each other. You can grind hard content just as much as easy content.

I've been meaning to try it out, it's on GamePass, but I worry that it's the kind of game that takes a lot of brainpower to "solve" while also requiring a lot of skill. I can do one or the other but both at once stresses me out! lol

That sounds like the D.C. government alright...