Oh is that what the problem is? I have uhhh 900 unread posts in the Sekiro thread, cause I don’t wanna spoil it (lol)
I just have the distinct memory of having played an enormous amount of Demon’s and a large amount of Dark, getting Bloodbourne, playing it for 3 or 4 hours and being like “whoa this is hard”, then coming on here and people saying “shoot to parry” and I was like “oh damn maybe I should do that and it wouldn’t be so hard,” and then never playing Bloodbourne again. So I was like, 2/3 joking.
Nah I like Souls games because of what they lack from fightman heritage, not from how close they are to it. I am absolutely no fan of whatever they call them, character action games I guess??, single-player fighting games like DMC and Bayonetta and Platinum stuff. I don’t care at all about learning frame traps and combos, my brain is just a smooth blank space where the enjoyment center for that kind of engagement is supposed to be. The reason I love the souls games is that I don’t really have to engage them on that level, because 1. they are much slower 2. they have a jillion weird side options that allow you to bypass the framedata stuff and 3. you can always level up.
Basically Bloodbourne is right on this edge of requiring a kind of competence I have no interest in developing, combined with a hugely compelling aesthetic and atmosphere, where I know I’ll proooobably never put it back in my PS3 and play it, but I feel guilty about it.
Am with you on this entirely, though I’d suggest that Sekiro hasn’t managed to avoid this stuff as much as the earlier titles, where you really can fudge a lot of mechanical competence via other systems. It’s why I ultimately don’t like it as much as those, which I consider real chicken-soup comfy, despite it doing some things very well indeed (chiefly, level design). It’s running a tighter ship but I find I prefer a well-furnished cruise that doesn’t necessarily treat me like a drooling idiot for the privilege
That stated, if in general a title does want to trend towards more technical combat, something in the material can and probably should support that more transparently, though it’s hard to do that gracefully. You can do it in an actual fighting game because no one gives a fuck about the integrity of the narrative experience there really
What does fightman genetic material mean in this context? Is it things like patience, staying in safe distances/spaces, and waiting for your “turn” to attack? That’s my first thought and I feel like outside of the 2-player competitive aspect those elements are always present in the action genre, especially things like classic action games like Altered Beast and Streets of Rage, where you’re trying to find the optimal space to attack enemies while they can’t reach you or patiently waiting for an enemy to do a telegraphed attack before dodging it and doing your own. Fighting games are like someone makes Mario walk to the right position to space his jump onto a goomba but player 2 can move the goomba out of the way at the last second and then walk back into Mario.
I also, uh, think I’m like 300 posts behind (didn’t want to be spoiled on The Old Hunters) so sorry if this covered.
Going through some of that tutorial talk my first gut reaction was to think that a manual could help explain mechanics instead of trying to come up with in-game tutorials that may or may not work, but I guess AAA games were all starting to implement in-game tutorials before manuals got phased out, didn’t they?
it’s that + the speed + no levelling + the game being somewhat more oblique about whether you are or are not equipped for a challenge you’ve encountered (when previously the answer was pretty much always yes except maybe your stats or gear could be 20% better). I don’t think it’s strictly more difficult but it is more demanding on balance (basically, it’s one notch further on the spectrum Cuba was describing than Bloodborne).
I saw Derek Yu tweeting about (and @BustedAstromech alluding to) the idea of an easy mode alleviating this and I think that would be strictly worse than any of their previous solutions to compensating for the challenge. But (like I mentioned in the Sekiro thread), this game’s version of compensating is more… literally thus? rather than seeping in through the meta that’s already there.
Yeah, I think From underestimated/forgot how important the RPG grind and summoning help were for new and lower-skilled players. Remove those self-selecting difficulty options and why not bump it faster anyway and you’re doing something that cuts off a lot of people who previously even thought they were in the club.
Though this type of designing in ignorance of their players has always been their genius, I think this takes it a bit too far.
Though this has been done a bit to death and is currently at a 40+ email chain at work that I refuse to touch (even as I’m responsible for combat and balance but that’s why I talk to you folks) so I’m sympathetic to leaving this for a while, I think I’ve said my piece.
One of the coolest things about Sekiro is the optional midbosses hanging out in the world everywhere not gating anything in particular, and I’m realizing over time that the removal of leveling supports that. Instead of simply symbolic challenge encounters that I would probably be inclined to put off till the end of the game (and just steamroll the easier ones by that point), I find myself instead routing which ones might be easiest to pick off right away, so I can harvest those precious Prayer Beads from them.
Sekiro is the first game developed by modern From where you are always equipped for a challenge you encounter and different gear or stats only exists to make you maybe 5% more efficient (and even then, having played through the game twice now, I can say with certainty that the further you go, the less you need depend on anything but the fundamental tools of combat; deflecting, dodging, jumping, countering)
The soulsborne games, on the other hand, depended heavily on ‘you built your character wrong and you might as well start over because the way to completely trivialize everything is different from what you were doing’
Hmm, I would make a distinction between builds and power level. Sekiro seems to have separated those concerns much more crisply than Soulsbornes, making the build progression grindable and the power level progression requiring overcoming defined challenges.
The build you commit to in Sekiro is a particular investment on the skill trees and the prosthetic upgrade tree, and I agree that seems not terribly crucial (in comparison to e.g. how committing to a shieldless style made certain bosses much harder in DkS).
However, Sekiro power level (attack power, health, and above all flask count) does improve a lot over the game as you beat bosses and explore. And personally, I happened to progress Hirata Estate as my first priority, and after having an easy enough time with everything else, I found Lady Butterfly was suddenly a brick wall, with my mere 3 flasks. I went back to her yesterday with 8 flasks and beat her by the skin of my teeth. I think my experience there supports what Felix is arguing.
I’m with Tulpa on this one, I find it much easier to fight bosses without extra tools in Sekiro, with tools and upgrades mostly being ways to get in extra hits and afford more errors, which is handy when you can’t figure out a boss’ rythm.
(also I have no idea why the sekiro discussion moved here)
anyway, the way soulsborne games implemented an easy mode was always something I thought was clever and very From in nature. The starting class and equipment would determine how easy or hard the game was in the first maybe dozen hours. Sometimes longer! Bloodborne with the axe/pistol and a high vit background was essentially a new player friendly easy mode. Dark Souls with the drake sword and master key meant you could circumvent so many of the challenges and generally have a pretty easy time with the game.
Over here I’m just going to be blunt and say I like seeing from make games that raise the collective bar in a certain way, even if it loses some along it
What I love about From’s difficulty gating is that you cannot simply play the games according to your own expectations of how they should play. You are required to adjust to what they expect you to do. Sometimes this is a big ask of the players, and other times it is intuitive to some and impenetrable to others. But you are always expected to play From games on their terms, not your own, and I respect that.
They’re games that frequently reward me for my patience and willingness to relearn skills I thought I had.
I think, especially with Hidetaka Miyazaki’s games, they actually try to make the games as easy and accessible as possible without betraying the sense of “you have to learn how to play this game and not just take for granted the skills you’ve gained from other games in the same genre or even series.”
DkS3 absolutely let me succeed by blindly applying my habits though. Something about making a game with the same title turned off those instincts.
(Relatedly, I remember how much Miyazaki insisted that Dark Souls is not a sequel to Demon’s Souls, which struck me as strange after playing DkS because it’s totally close enough to count as a sequel by my lights.)
I haven’t played Sekiro at all so I am only slightly less qualified than Felix to discuss it (hey-oh~), but from the outside it seems like a company that has been known to make a certain kind of game for the past decade made one that is superficially similar but surprisingly different under the hood… and there is confusion that this has resulted in a subset of fans made over the past decade being at least a bit turned off? I’m pretty sure that happens every time whenever something similar occurs regardless of medium and putting any kind of “no, it is you who don’t get it!” argument forward is… silly?
I mean I didn’t pick Sekiro up because the setting looked boring as heck so I’m probably not the person to listen to, but I also on average dislike stylish action games and for the most part can’t parry to save my life and the Souls games make up most of my favorite games of the past ten years. Odds are if I picked it up any of you could shout at me about tutorials or expectations or practice dummies and I’d still end up smashing my head against it in frustration and end up feeling pretty sour about the whole thing as the guys and gals who made some of my favorite things decided they’d rather go do something aimed at people who are definitely not me.
That’d suck for those in such a situation, and I think it is important for those not in said group to keep that in mind, that no none would really choose of their own free will to end up in such a situation. Similarly, it is important for those stuck in such a situation to try and not let their individual disappointment or frustration “leak” out of them and rain on the parades of those still having a good time. Criticism is fine obviously, but try not to let the negativity poison things.
I know most of you know this but some of the stuff written over the past couple days or so have been rather… dickish for SB so hey, maybe we need to chill out a bit.