the allowed dominant strategy in various super mario bros is to use warp pipes/vases/warp whistles/star world to skip to world 8
undermining one of the most significant aspects of these games’ design
real players don’t activate switch palaces in SMW. fukken cheaters
I never summoned anyone in DS1 because the online portion didn’t work when I played it. Also I never finished the game.
How far did you get?
I don’t summon, personally, cuz the difficulty of playing solo hits the perfect sweet spot for me, most of the time. I do, however, have absolutely zero scruples about cheesing bosses in any way possible. Actually, anytime someone I know is playing the games for the first time, that’s my main bit of advice: nothing is cheating in dark souls (even literal glitches and exploits). The games are tough and you shouldn’t feel bad about using any method to win 
this is true of literally every from software game i can think of except maybe like echo night or something
it’s not like the ac devs didn’t know you could trivialize swaths of most of the games with dual gatling guns
!
I got stuck on some tiny surly dragons
This is the only way I’ve ever been able to beat any AC game. ;__;
same tbh lol
i am going to do a let’s play of AC1 before too long, maybe i’ll play a no-gat conduct
I’ve never heard of someone getting blockaded by the valley of drakes. That owns. I remember it being a bit of an annoyance when I didn’t know how to efficiently (intentionally?) access New Londo’s boss
I don’t actually remember if that’s what stopped me, but it’s the last place I remember. I think it might have been the ultra-dark place that I couldn’t really figure out how to navigate.
the only True Dark Souls is to play through the entire game while edging imo
Yeah I don’t really appreciate the True Gamer mentality that summoning is cheating or somehow a lesser experience.
I summon indiscriminately during my first run through a souls game. I tend to play games exploring width-first, depth-second, so It’s more comfortable for me to be able to fully cover the game’s space and when I get a good sense of its structure and length, go for the challenge or fiddle with the mechanics.
I’m told that some people do the opposite and never summon on their first run, but do it on subsequent ones. That’s ok too and the fact that the games accomodate both styles while offering a comparable experience both times is a testament to how versatile their design is.
I like the reward for a tough boss fight being the exploration of a new area, that’s why i never summon on my first playthrough. It gives the challenge a more organic meaning and creates some welcome variation in the pacing.
I think the next time one of these comes out, I’ll also set a personal rule to kill all regular enemies I walk past on my first time through areas, since running past enemies is brokenly effective to the point that solo boss fights have felt to me like the only challenge in DkS3 and Bloodborne, and From seems to have no plan to ever deny that strategy.
Basically I feel like the experience is more coherent if you can’t just breeze through the hellishly-themed areas presented, and it’s less about pride than just getting the most out of it given that I’ve played many of these before. Like a new player can still experience some satisfying sense of overcoming because they might die even though they summoned, and they can’t react or orient themselves fast enough to run past everything else. But once you’ve beat five of these games, some self imposed rules are useful for it not to just turn into a ruins walking simulator.
Personally I like to pick up every shiny thing and stand around looking at stuff for a while, which is impossible if you run past. So I have a self-imposed rule to kill everything.
Yeah. I mean, a lot of the fun of these games for me is taking in the environments, appreciating the details, exploring, poking around. That’s not possible when you have mobs hounding you. I don’t understand why you’d want to run past everything as a rule unless you’ve died twenty times to a boss and don’t have the patience to engage a lead-up gauntlet anymore. Seems like a detachedly mechanistic view of game design.
I’d also add that I like engaging stuff because it helps me to understand the design’s possibilities and ostensible intentions. It creates new scenarios when you try to fight stuff in a different order or in a new spot, and that creates the variety that I think helps make the games repayable (to a degree).
Clearly the True Gamer crowd is missing something about how to appreciate games, but the nothing-but-casual camp is, too. Playing optimally and minmaxing means the gameplay is a pointed, clever debate between the designer and the player, instead of talking-past-each-other monologues of the design placing nominal challenges that the player largely ignores as they arbitrarily act however they feel like. It reveals depths and nuances to the mechanics that would remain uncovered without pressure to discover them.
In some cases like the running-away example, the debate is also unfortunately shut down by the engaged player because of a hole in the designer’s logic that makes the rest of their argument moot. But in those cases rather than revert to a slack and somewhat meaningless mode of discussion, I think it’s better to put the designer’s logic on a firmer footing with a house rule, an extra axiom so to speak, letting the rich debate resume.
I think there’s no necessary contradiction between mechanical and experiential interest, when the design avoids or clearly delineates shallower optimal strategies. And one of the reasons this series is great is precisely because it’s on the whole successful at resolving this tension – and I think it was especially innovative on the delineation front, with the white phantoms.
I fight through every encounter so that I know how to successfully run past them when I’m feeling annoyed.
https://www.freem.ne.jp/win/game/15873
dark souls 4 looking good
(yes this is a real game and yes its name is NOSE)