you keep going off and setting up this weird dichotomy where apparently we’re supposed to be famously arch and esoteric yet we are somehow accusing you of elitism by implying that you were more intuitively able to grasp an obtuse mechanic or something and both positions are silly
It’s not even about archness and esotericism dogg, it’s just annoying when i think we all get what 1-1 in Super Mario Bros represents, and yet miss ways where newer games nail the same shit and then turn our misses into condemnations!
Also i don’t think that’s an adequate excuse for you to try out weird online social dunks on me!
it’s not a power move I swear, I usually go with “easy tiger” but I just watched the marine biologist and I figured a whale was close enough
plus I was already kind of annoyed before you just did it again so I figured I’d bring it up
on the other hand, posting screens of the tutorial messages in the Hunter’s Dream was 100% a power move, and i should like to imagine that it resulted in Father Torque staggering and me striding up and hitting R1 to rip his guts out, metaphorically speaking
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I died to the first enemy in the game repeatedly as I somehow forgot to equip any weapon.
On the other hand, I did find the tutorial message about the gun parries.
On the other other hand I had played Demon’s Souls and it had the same “die to early enemy and go to hub littered with tutorial messages” set-up so I knew to look for those.
On the fourth hand my parrying timing was so bad that I mostly gave up on it due to always running out of bullets.
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I think From is outstanding at teaching subtle aspects like appropriate player pacing and mood through elegant level design. Some concepts, like stay design, appear to be mysterious but are likely accidentally complex and poorly explained (they were one of the few with a select-button tooltip on stats pages; I don’t think this was obfuscated). Concepts like buttons and basic combat and character functions are things they struggle with.
Remember the famed Mario 1-1 tutorial was done assuming a controller with 4 buttons, not 17+.
As veterans we tend to have enough game knowledge that we’re able to interpret intended functions and figure out the intent. But have empathy for people who miss things or lack a decade of games background. Is not understanding buttons part of the intended experience? If not, it’s on the developer.
Conversely, patronizing tutorials can be obnoxious even to new players, especially given directions like “use stick to move”. Designers are being patronizing when they don’t think clearly enough nor do enough playtesting to learn what players actually need.
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it’s called a visceral attack because you attack the viscera
bloodborne owns
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Nope next time I’ll complain about tutorial levels too.
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Instead of ever playing this one I watched an lp. I needed a good one though because I wasn’t about to pause the thing to read item descriptions, so it had to be someone who talked and explained things but wasn’t annoying, I went with LotusGramarye, they had a real good voice, so I’d recommend that one if anyone wants a bloodborne lp. the only thing I didn’t like was the dlc came out towards the end and so I got a little confused about all the crossing over into different dreamworlds. I wish that had been separated from the main thing.
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the hunter’s dream tutorial messages were bad because at that point you might as well include a video game manual for me to read that just explains this shit. There was like 30 of them and I just got tired of them.
Anyway, gascoigne mechanically teaches you staggering by staggering YOU, which is cool, but gascoigne is also a huge speed bump for like… most people who started playing bloodborne and haven’t quite mastered the mechanics. The further I get from BB the less I care for what it did mechanically? Like… it all fit the tone and narrative of the game but I just don’t really enjoy what I was expected to do in the combat?
When you put it this way it seems like kind of an impossible line to walk, i think you’ve told me as much elsewhere on this board.
The ideal tutorial is probably still like Gears of War or Demon’s Souls where you can choose to skip it when you replay the game, honestly
i apologize if i seemed overly combative about this (i was shooting for “just combative enough”) it’s just funny to me when a game literally spells out a mechanic and that’s a problem, but then if it didn’t it would also be a problem lol
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It’s like this problem was solved, and then cost cutting capitalism unsolved it for us all and oh great.
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There’s enough fightman genetic material in these games that one does start to wonder if fightman-level guidance systems - something most of those games still fuck up considerably - wouldn’t go amiss
Anything that starts to rely on frame reading/traps, cooldowns, spacing isn’t an immediately grasp if the player has never really chewed into at title that deeply before
I have no immediate clue how a Souls game could communicate that without totalling the atmosphere though, the number printing is dislocating as it is. I don’t think more HUD is the answer
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Fwiw I liked Hanbei in Sekiro, and honestly don’t think I used much beyond what I gathered in those little interactions in the rest of the game’s combat, though there’s still a chunk of trial/error working out how his moves there look in other opponents
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wow what the heck happened to this place! maybe now wasn’t the best time to sign up
i don’t understand this attitude like videogames owe you something for your time, or that there’s one “correct” form of fun and everything should be designed around that. there’s so many myriad ways to think about and approach them, imo people need to be more willing to chill out and let a work’s idiosyncrasies sink in. the fact that this was the hurdle many outsiders had to overcome to get into demons’/dark in the first place makes it all the stranger that fans have developed such rigid expectations.
i love spending my time getting used to unfamiliar media, learning someone else’s way of seeing and crafting things! i think that’s an amazing privilege to experience
fwiw i do have an actual effortpost i want to make related to this topic’s original focus but it will have to wait until i get my shit together a bit more
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I think you’re reading too much into “I don’t know what the buttons do”
we’re not, like, taking an unprecedented pro-tutorializing stance
maybe, but also it’s hard not to perceive some underlying narrow attitude with takes delivered in such a curt, sarcastic fashion. possibly you don’t have time to say anything else but idk it just seems a little inconsiderate
i didn’t read 100% of the sekiro thread this micro-drama seemed to spiral out from, so can’t necessarily vouch for the legitimacy of sleepy’s temperament, but i thought i’d at least make my own philosophy about this sort of thing clear
Fwiw the difficulty discourse has been a thing on twitter too and i might have walked in with a chip on my shoulder. was trying to affect more of a “i feel like i’m freakin takin crazy pills here!!!” tone though rather than cause drama
A thing that bothers me is just how much these games are marketed as being super ultra hard and difficult to puzzle out, that’s been bothering me pretty much since i played Dark Souls 1. i think it misleads people into presuming that a frustrating, repetitive trial-and-error experience is the intended one and it simultaneously drives people away from the experience, and feeds into the shitty git gud gate keeping elitism. That gets on my nerves simply because the games are more nuanced than that (and when they’re really being interesting, they’re either difficult in more subtle ways than “gotta dodge good” or not even difficult at all)
That’s not the fault of anyone here, or even necessary what’s going on in this conversation but it’s something that ive been thinking about w/r/t Sekiro and From games and hard games in general
Also been thinking about how much of the enjoyment is supposed to come from dying a lot in these games… the notion that repeated failure is impeding your fun in these experiences and not part of the fun seems wrongheaded to me. A couple people mentioned enjoying but not finishing Sekiro because the last boss was too hard and straining their patience and idk, i think that’s as valid an experience to have as anyone who beat it
idk just throwing some spaghetti at the wall here
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yeah that’s also why I made so many posts about how Sekiro seemed to lean into the suffering angle and away from all the stuff that used to make them palatable for me! not that it’s necessarily more difficult per se or that being more difficult is a good or a bad thing.
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I certainly have a problem with this - when I fail at something in a From game, sometimes I assume it’s because I suck at execution so I just try the same thing again instead of trying to be clever.
“It’s supposed to be hard and make me feel like shit”