Stolen from myself 6 months ago at https://lemmyverse.link/lemmy.zip/post/35616522
I know I remember seeing some people talk about how nice some of the environments in Hitman were, and that they’d just walk around as a tourist from time to time, treating it like a walking simulator/virtual tourism thing instead of the stealth assassination game it is. Curious about other things like that, where you play a game totally differently than it was meant to be played.
Its funny how much of the random PVP crowd still cries about Seamless Coop. I have been playing open PVP games since Ultima Online and frankly open PVP has never been fun. See the fans of this mechanic will say “well you’re just afraid to take risks carebear” but in reality they’re the ones closer to carebear mentality than the people running valuables through risky places. The victim is ironically the only person taking any real risk, because the attacker can choose their battles and take only equipment they’re willing to lose.
Once I figured this out I built myself to trick people into attacking me and then they’d find out I’m entirely specced for player killing, usually much too late to do anything about it. The tears from the people who call others carebears are the best tears of all.
My first experience with open pvp was darkfall, and the imbalance between pvers and pvpers broke the game the first go round. It was ridiculous how poorly anything pve was rewarded, so it would take hours to accomplish anything, while a single 10 minute pvp excursion would net you (potentially) all those hours of others’ work. Eventually people realized it wasn’t even worth trying to pve, resources quit coming in, and the game died. They had to reboot and ramp up pve rewards just to get people out in the world instead of hiding in their clan forts.
I feel like elden ring, even more so than dark souls, punished the players who were having fun exploring with their friends. It wasn’t balanced for jolly cooperation fun. It felt like that first darkfall experience where everyone just got grumpy. Souls was much more focused on the bosses with what felt like little exploration, so a pvp incursion wasn’t a big setback, but elden ring could just draaaag if you wanted to find a new secret and a little red guy popped up. Plus elden ring had a lot of late game meta items that could ruin a newbie’s day with little recourse.
I didn’t play Darkfall but I know people who did, and I was completely unsurprised when it failed the first time because it had the same problem as Ultima Online but much worse: the people engaging in PVE are the only ones actually taking any risks.
EVE has the same problem if you’re running high end gear or implants (people will always kill your escape pod in the hope of causing you this pain). The factors that are supposed to discourage random killing are easily subverted with only minor investment, and there is a culture of “milking tears” that has persisted even into what passes for adulthood for many of these people.