(no subject)

[theweaselking]

Dead Island Important Tip #5: Melee weapons are friendly - you can't hurt your allies with them. Ranged weapons? Friendly. High explosives? NOT friendly. Vehicular manslaughter? NOT friendly. The importance of this distinction cannot be overemphasized.

Dead Island Important Tip #6: Alcoholic beverages equip THEMSELVES. Watch out for this or you will get REEEEAAAALLY drunk and not know why. And you will also be out of alcohol.

Dead Island Important Tip #7: A Ram that's just walking along is immune to almost all melee and ranged attacks. To paraphrase a wise man, "a Ram at rest... CANNOT BE STOPPED! Yeah baby yeah!". So get it moving before you hit it - or just set it on fire.

Dead Island Important Tip #8: It is better to waste a molotov on on a walker that you've misidentified than it is to get in close with a Thug you think is a Walker. And besides, if it sets a zombie on fire, is any molotov REALLY wasted?

Dead Island Important Tip #9: The menus at the top of the Shop screen, the Workbench screen, and the Inventory/Skill/Other Players/Map screen are there. And clickable. And expose different menus. They're just easy to miss because they don't stand out.

Dead Island Important Tip #10: A kick will interrupt a walker or infected attack, and stagger them, and leave them open for a counter. Hitting them with a weapon will reset their stance and they'll attack again immediately - even if they were going to fall down if you *hadn't* hit 'em. So let them fall down! And if they're not going to fall (most Infected won't), just be ready for them to come back at you faster than you might expect.

Comments

[twilightbloo.livejournal.com]

Yeah! Keep playing with fire, superpants, you don't know how much fire you're playing with! Ah-hahahaha!

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

It's the only jib I got, baby!

[negumi.livejournal.com]

Tip #6 has to do with how picking up items work, there's a world of difference between "tapping" pick up and "pressing" pick up. If I'm remembering it right pressing it picks it up and equips it while tapping it only picks it up. Unfortunately the difference between the two is pretty slim and easy to mess up while you're running around. I've been told there's a mod to change it so there's a greater error margin but I haven't found it.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Except that's not it. Press-and-hold-to-replace-current-weapon is pretty distinct - but the game WILL exchange your current weapon for a "better" weapon if you just "pick up" a better weapon. And "alcohol" tends to be "the best weapon" for some stupid fucking reason.

A mod so that "picked up" items are NEVER EVER EVER EVER equipped, unless they stack with a currently equipped weapon in the same slot as said weapon? Would make me very happy.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

9. I just started playing Star Wars: The Old Republic, and roughly 95% of the UI is basically the same as WoW's, just flipped vertically. This extends to stupidity where you're using windows like the main options screen or mission pane which have a page selector bar on the left, but a tab bar for navigating within the pages at the bottom of the window instead of where you would expect it at the top. Keybindings are hidden like this under the Options->Controls page, or the in-game encyclopedia tab on the mission pane. This also means that your player/pet info gets stacked out of the way in the bottom left while the chat window takes up gobs of visual field space in the upper left.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

Found a screenshot; note how the unselected tabs on the right are very low contrast, while the selected one on the left is so noisy it blends in the general window border.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Yikes.

I'll screenshot Dead Island tomorrow. I'm not starting it right now.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

Yeah, same, I just Googled for that one, trying to polish off my friends list for the night before bed.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Dead Island has tabs across the top of the window, but slides the current tab into the middle of the screen on the Shop and Craft interfaces when you select it - which is fine, since there's just three tabs for those, so even with "active tab always in middle" you can still see and select the other two no matter which you're one.

But that means that the page you're looking at as a nice big visible "what I am doing" label in the bar at the top, and then greyed-out inactive buttons for the next things over. Which don't highlight until you mouseover. And it's REALLY easy to miss that they're selectable in the middle of a game, especially when you're playing multiplayer and going quickly to avoid making people wait.

And, I mean, it makes SENSE that you click on a "shop" dude and he sells you stuff, and that you click on a repair bench and you can repair your weapons - but the shop dude also has the "sell" tab for getting rid of stuff you don't want, and the "buy back" tab for getting your items back if you sold 'em by accident. And the repair bench also has the "upgrade" item and the "create" item tabs, letting you boost the stats on your weapons and mod them and put recipes together for explosives and ammo and stuff.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

Heh, SWTOR also has a mod bench. There's one in the newbie area right next to all the vendors. It lets you use it. You use it and it says "hey! here's some items you have that you can modify!" And then you think "hey! I want to modify an item!" So you click it. Which empties the bench window, and leaves the cancel and apply buttons in the lower right of the window. Which don't work. You have to Escape out of the window to get rid of it.

Thankfully, there is a sign next to this bench that tells you how the whole modding system works. This sign is not enabled, you cannot click it, until you get your first modifiable item at the end of the newbie quest line. Then you find out that you can only modify items that have slots for mods to plug in to. So basically the bench lies to you for almost the entire learning segment of the game.

[iponly.livejournal.com]

The bench is a leftover from beta and now completely irrelevant anyway. (Which does not make this any better.)

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

Heh, I noticed that too. It does let you pry out mods, though, which I didn't seem to be able to do out in the wild.

[iponly.livejournal.com]

try dragging them to your inventory. There's a charge, but you should be able to remove them anywhere.

My usual way around the messy mod UI was to drag everything out of all the items, swap it around, and then replace it. That, or do it all on paper. -_-