I’m not going to win any converts here, and I’m only quoting your post to use it as a frame for a few last thoughts I want to write down so don’t read this as a refutation or anything.
As a dude who plays a lot of choose-your-own-adventure stuff these days (and has balked at the complexity or perhaps just the user interfaces of Crusader Kings and King of Dragon Pass and their ilk) I felt like the game hit a sweet spot where most choices returned interesting little pieces of world-building and had enough consequence to make me feel like it was better than just reading plain text. And for me at least that makes up for the lack of investment in the player character. Here’s the part where I admit I’m a huge sucker for the flavor text on Magic the Gathering cards, so that’s where I’m coming from. It is a bit of slog to get to a lot of the better vignettes but when I do it makes the right parts of my brain light up so this lab rat is going to keep hammering the fuck out of that red button.
Re: the combat. Yeah the combat amounts to trying to eke out a sliver of positional advantage and winning the tempo battle between your cooldowns and the enemy’s. It becomes fairly rote, but I’ll argue that it should be in the form it is rather than being menu-based like the rest of the game because then that would be an unbearably dry bit of game to swallow. The first time I ran headlong into a higher-level enemy and got killed I had a much stronger “ah, fuck fuck fuck” reaction as I desperately tried to backpedal away. I’ve also narrowly escaped death by using islands for cover so I could flee and that was way more satisfying than choosing “try to escape” and winning a dice roll. I recall playing A Dark Room a while back and the first time I got murdered by some hellbeast watching those numbers just tick down was more of a flat feeling.
I dunno if anybody wants to cherry pick the related posts and start a new thread, but otherwise I’m probably content to leave y’all alone and just go enjoy the game quietly from here out.
I totally understand. I’m only on the fourth area and I’m already dreading how difficult and tedious it may become in the future if what I’ve already passed is any indication.
Still want to finish it if I can.
The graphics are still pretty great, though. They are very tastefully done in a way that holds up nicely for me. The roaming schools of fish and other aquatic fauna animate and move very naturally and gracefully.
The camera, on the other hand, is one of the single most damning things about the game.
i’ve been thinking about this game a lot recently, for some reason. a friend and i played thru it (well at least three quarters of it early last year).
dashing through networks of thin underground tunnels hoping not to drown is a feeling i havent found anywhere else
i also really like that bullshit shark boss a few levels in- the one where you have to get its head stuck in a rock. i’ve also been playing a fair bit of bloodborne and thinking about Dark souls and not surprisingly i think the most interesting bosses are the ones where you have to use the level geometry- the one reborn and capra demon come to mind. more geometry puzzle bosses, please
Okay, now that I’ve given Paladins some proper time, it’s shootman HotS, but instead of talent gating, you have card unlocks. Which is kind of a shame, since it’s a really solid shooter mechanically, but hiding that kind of stuff behind booster pack-style unlocks is kinda eh (even if you’re basically getting a card every win and you can craft).
Regular complaints about playerbases also apply here.
I gotta say I was pretty amused by the unopposed pondering as to whether MOBAs are antithetical to fun which diverted into talking Diablo 3, which is (perhaps to its credit) upfront about how pointless and soul-suckingly empty the entire ordeal will be from the jump.
I can’t imagine getting any enjoyment out of Diablo and Diablo-spawned games outside of playing with friends (and there, the social aspect is the actual pull, not the insipid grinding for randomized loot). Borderlands makes me want to kill people (not in the fun fantasy way).
This is, not coincidentally, one of many reasons why MOBAs are endlessly interesting and compelling to those who enjoy them; everything you do revolves around PvP as opposed to PvE, so improving actually matters. There is the potential for meaningful betterment and self-satisfaction derived from long-term improvement.
Diablo is basically just a timesink, and it really doesn’t even try to hide this fact from you. What skill or tactics are involved are entirely superfluous to the intended gameplay loop.
Bought and playing the game finally, based on this post. Really enjoying it so thank you for accidentally convincing me to finally take the plunge. Might finish it this week! It’s very charming but also pretty gosh darn difficult in spots already.
This is the first genuinely funny game I’ve played in a while. I was expecting more EarthBound-like light humor, but it’s playing with my expectations in ways that make me grin like an idiot. Very happy I finally tried this.
Finally played all the way through Shovel Knight for the first time over the past week. I always heard it was good (worthy of an amiibo, even), but I had no idea the level design would be this brilliant. Who the fuck was in charge of this? I’ve played tons of platformers and very few are at this level of variety and creativity. There are several segments where you’re fighting an armored enemy (the non-boss knight ones) and they’re so good at becoming Castlevania or Zelda II-esque skirmishes in their intimacy.
I loved fighting other shovel knights because they would know what the go-to strategies are and use them against you. Some would deflect your projectiles back at you, and one of them would even block your pogo attack, and throw you off if you lingered on them (which is bound to happen the first time out of surprise). It’s like in games where the sword-wielder fights another sword-wielder and they get into a stalemate over their equal skill, except here it’s actually a faithful analogy in gameplay form, instead of some dumb “clash your swords together, then mash a button to push them back” trope.
Also, I’ve played a few levels into the Plague Knight DLC campaign, and I’m even more surprised at how good it is. They could have phoned this in since it was FREE, but this is both fully entertaining and quite an experiment in platforming. Plague Knight’s controls are really unique, but by the end of the first level they’re perfectly understandable? And you can customize your attacks, which factor equally in to how you move around??
I’m almost embarrassed to be gushing about this after everybody’s already played it, but goddamn.
This is basically a design error, the damage levels of Gravelord Sword, Black Knight weapons and to some extent Drake Sword are off the charts, those weapons are available early and they trivialize the game. In theory the titanite levels given to you are supposed to control your damage to a certain maximum, but then there are these outs. Demon’s has the same problem. You can see From learned a lesson and there’s more rigorous discipline in terms of damage levels in DkS2 and especially Bloodborne.
Personally, after a few easy Gravelord playthroughs I decided to forswear use of it – I get it anyway, but keep it in my back pocket solely for use against invaders (who are all bringing similarly OP equipment or worse).
Oh, i dunno – i agree they’re stupidly overpowered, and the drop rate could perhaps be lower (i seem to recall it being much lower when i first got the game, before i installed all the patches) but they’re still random chance, and wielding them basically requires you to build your character around them. Like to even use the halberd two-handed i needed to have 22 strength and 18 dexterity, which is nothing to sneeze at.
Drake sword i’m willing to shrug off because the whole point is it’s an easter egg weapon that is strong in the beginning and sharply drops off by the midway point. Gravelord sword i’ll totally grant you though – it’s a piece of cake to acquire once you know how, has really low stat requirements and is prefab toxic infused which is just bonkers. I can’t believe joining the covenant just drops it in your lap.
Disagree heartily. Balance as a singleminded design goal ultimately contributes to a staid narrative environment and this is one of the reasons (among many others) that Dark 2 feels so flat and bland by comparison to 1.
I was primarily thinking of Bloodborne though. The reason Bloodborne’s bosses are the toughest in the series has a lot to do with damage control. I don’t remember aa much about DkS2 damage levels aside from blunt being OP in PvE, I think it was still a bit wonky but without huge outliers.
DkS2’s blandness is mostly about bad art direction, the balance is an orthogonal issue really.
And I just don’t see how wiping out Taurus Demon in 3 hits contributes to Dark Souls’s narrative excellence. Quite the opposite, my dramatic Taurus Demon experience was with a basic unupgraded weapon. It does make it feel like a bit of a rickety game that can be manipulated by a crafty player, which has its charm sure.
Best way to “kill” the Taurus Demon is having it jump off the wall to its death though. Dunno what that does for the narrative, but it’s funny as hell.
Taurus was an implacable wall on my first playthrough, as was the black knight in the burg. Now i know i can beat the former by using lightning resin and rolling towards him, attacking, rolling back, and repeating for two minutes. The latter i can just stand there and parry all day. If i want to take on these guys at level 1 with a dagger, the game lets me. If i want to grab the zweihander, level boost my character for it, use the resin and come crashing down from a tower on their heads and kill them in a single blow, i can do that too. I think of that as a feature, not a bug.
Tried getting back into Xenoblade X again. This is one of those game you have to keep with because I had to spend a good bit reacquainting myself with its system logic. If you love min/maxing this is a game for people like that. There’s almost to much to keep track of. There’s weapons and armor juggling attack speeds, clip size and cooldowns. You can further complicate them with addons you can craft which as a monster hunter player I could enjoy but since the game goes for MMO levels of cruft you never really intuit where to find those items without a wiki or you just really study this game. You also got soul voices where you get some kind of bonus that triggers from certain actions in combat. I just don’t have the patience for this kind of thing to find an optimal or suitable setup.
I feel at a loss since I’m a disgaea player that loves tweaking numbers but there its a bit more straight forward and it all comes down to finding the most efficient way to grow those numbers. Right now I’m just trudging through to get my giant robot so I can at least feel like I’ve got all the tools to properly explore the game.
Again, I disagree. The vitality of a fictional work owes to its ability to persuade us that unseen volumes exist within it. Balance slays verisimilitude because it makes it obvious that the world is created for us, specifically. Balance is a mark of intelligent design, rather than the evolutionary, subatomic randomness that reigns in our universe. To put it crudely: reality isn’t balanced.
As someone who sunk more time into DS2 than either previous game, for its honestly superior PvP game(and someone who’s burned out on the series and taking a pass on DS3 for now)… Yeah, kind of agree.
It felt unwilling to take risks in PvE. Like there was a set way to play and that’s just how it was going to be. The environment design was boring and boxy and fundamentally uninteresting, to match.
The really sad thing is, that 2 was the best pvp game is precisely why it was the worst game narratively and environmentally. The thoroughgoing balance that made all these equally viable builds contributed to its atmospheric tedium. I think it’s one of those things you really can’t have both ways.
I was actually thinking of this very sentiment yesterday for some reason. I think highly of games with airtight construction, but a game is also at its most “alive” when being broken.