Yes, well- those were two of the more reasonable issues. Mostly it was stuff like whether I’d done a satisfactory job on my dude’s features back in the character creation screen, or whether it was “cheating” to summon other players for assistance.
It’s cheating when exploring an area, but not when fighting a boss.
I still need to beat Lawrence. That’s the only thing I left undone in Bloodborne, I think.
The philosophy I’ve played by is that it’s also cheating when fighting a boss, but it’s not cheating to efficiently train by getting summoned to other players’ games before soloing it yourself.
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its never cheating
i need to finish my recent playthrough of this, just need to do the last couple of chalices for the full platinum !!
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its never cheating
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i played through BB without Online and found the AI you can summon to be totally useless, so i treated this as creating an unnecessary layer of difficulty for myself and used it as an excuse to abuse youtube walkthroughs anytime i got stuck
I more or less agree it’s “cheating” but that doesn’t mean I have a problem with it on bosses that I was Not In The Damn Mood For? offhand I know I summoned AI helpers for ludwig in bb and sulyvahn in dks3 and did not regret it, but I definitely wanted to beat eg orphan of kos and ebrietas on my own
I also prefer to only summon AI because it seems a little more fair/interesting to know they’re gonna tank for half the fight then fuck up
Play games however you want. I can probably help you with any boss in any souls game.
Multiple people asserting that a built in game feature is cheating is why Souls threads are exactly the last thing curious novices should read
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I like to hold myself to an artificially high standard in lots of ways, deal with it
also, the vast majority of boss AI behavior in these games is really bad and broken at handling multiple players, hence there’s a basis for saying that approaching them this way automatically “defeats” the most challenging aspect. I didn’t say “you’re a bad person if you do it like this” or “you suck git gud,” but it is still technically more of a cheat than not in my eyes
holy shit the games are literally designed around summoning folks. what the fuck
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For the record, I was joking about any approach being “cheating.” When I played Demon’s Souls, I could never find anyone to summon, so I used every trick I could find to beat bosses in roundabout ways (especially poison).
I think it would be fun to run through one of these games entirely co-op. I’d like to eventually do that on a replay. Maybe with DS2, since I have not experienced the rearranged PS4 version yet anyway.
Maybe we could even try scheduling a SB co-op event of some type at some point. It would be fun to have random forum members jumping in and out of the game.
Summoning is more like a difficulty slider than a cheat. Only better than that because it’s diagetic, still requires a modicum of player skill and comes with penalties built in if you still fail.
I dont like calling it cheating because it discourages a valid, intentional practice the devs want you to take advantage of (as well as other tactics besides “git gud”), and
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I like that view because it also means that the “hardest” mode is technically the default, and you can opt to drop it down at any time on a sort of one-off basis, which is a much more good faith way to approach “I want to be challenged” than having to toggle a game to hard mode at the start and worrying about whether it’s just gonna buff enemies’ stats and make everything more of a slog
adding a single ally is still disproportionately easier due to the way the boss AI generally behaves – and to me this is still fundamentally a shame because the boss design in these games is so good and none of them are really designed to be difficult with multiple players – but then you get the fun edge case of “my shitty partner ate it less than halfway through, I wonder if I can still beat the boss who has way more health now”
the games aren’t necessarily designed to be difficult, though (cruel, yes). they are designed to make you think outside the box and take advantage of all the tools the game offers if you don’t possess the raw fighting ability to take down the boss, or the crowd control to handle big groups. is shooting the bridge dragon’s tail off “cheating”? it’s an intentional option for players to be creative and “exploit” the game.
dark souls 2 in particular designs many encounters around the possibility and even likelihood of summoning (ruin sentinels, luna belfry gargoyles, elana, 2x pet in ivory, etc.).
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that’s fair – the connotations around “cheating” and “exploit” are obviously pretty close & sensitive to interpretation! again, wasn’t trying to sound judgmental about it, only noting that the boss design, taken as its own thing, often does seem to be completely broken by co-op. obviously this is deliberate on the creators’ part.
Fine, but I don’t think that personal approach requires you to use a term that’s inextricably tied to the honor-based True Gamer Club mentality of Gamers, i.e. if you didn’t play balls deep your experience was a neutered ultimately invalid one
We could probably use a new term, then, to cover ‘allowed dominant strategy’. I’d also include kill mechanics in stealth games, which trivialize stealth design and are limited mostly through narrative elements (shame on you for killing, etc).
I wouldn’t have plucked the word out of thin air myself – I was responding to earlier posts – but it still seemed apropos to me because in my view it’s still basically opting out of one of the most significant aspects of these games’ design (although not necessarily across the board). it didn’t register as insufferable to me because I spend basically no time around True Gamer discussion circles, and because I don’t generally subscribe to the view that single-player games should be made unintimidating to people – but I can see why it would.