The problem is the huuuuuuuge input lag, and that doesn’t really have any meaning.
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it represents that I’ve lost control of my marriage. why have you done this to me, wanda
loved sotc but had to quit when a boss kept charging at me during my recovery animation. death loop! threw the game out the window
isn’t the controller re-configurable in sotc?
Ah the 11th colossus, easily the low point of the game.
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Started playing DS2 Scholar of the First Sin that’s been sitting in my Steam account for a while. Figured this week would be my last chance to see a somewhat active online presence in the game before Dark Souls 3.
This game starts off real tough! Have only got up to the first bonfire in the forest castle but enemies will just overwhelm you if you’re not paying attention to every seemingly dead corpse, hidden corner and unreachable ridge. The next area just seems filled with bowmen and firebombers stationed just out of your reach own reach but can still hit you from miles off. A lot of my surprise probably just comes from the last Souls I played being Demon’s which was a relative walk in the park after having beaten DaS1. Placing those pigs in the Majula though that NEVER stop chasing you and take forever to kill currently is just a dick move though. I’m guessing they’re just there for you to grind Cracked Eye Orbs?
The durability system is real weird? I hear they fixed the 60 FPS durability bug the old PC port had with this release but weapons still seem to break apart REALLY quickly. When they’re automatically repaired at the bonfire though that’s not too much of an issue yet though.
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I think SotC’s controls only vexed me in the final battle. They got the job done just fine! It’s worth playing if you can.
How so? That one sticks out in my memory as the first one that’s more scared of you than you’re scared of it. You ward it off the ledge with a torch!
I’d say the 7th colossus is where the kinetic unpleasantness is worst with a combination of water + climbing in intervals that get just to the end of your stamina but I hate swimming in games.
It’s the worst because you can literally get into a death loop if you don’t manage to grab a torch fast enough (colossus rams you into a wall, ~7 seconds pass before you stand back up, and just as you do, you are rammed into the wall again before you can even input commands), but if you do there’s literally no challenge to the boss at all. It’s completely boring from a design standpoint and utterly fails to play to the strengths of the game, there’s no puzzle design to the boss, if you make a mistake you have to wait to die and then reset (so there’s no recovering from mistakes or room for experimentation), fighting a single tiny fast enemy is much less thrilling than climbing onto a slow, terrifying colossus.
It’s just all around a completely failed design. They should have cut it, because the 14th colossus does the ‘fighting a small fast colossus’ design much more successfully.
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Oh damn. That’s a regular happening? I assumed @teh_blend’s issue was a bug. I lucked into following the scripting.
It very well may be a bug in the hd version of the game, but I also remember hearing some complaints about this back around the initial release of the game.
It is also a bug if you emulate SOTC (which I just did recently)
In DS 2, some ‘power moves’ or w/e cost durability to use, most notably on the old whip.
I was THAT close!? D:
EDIT - was playing on a PS2
I found the controls to be much tighter in the hd remaster? is that just me?
Well, I do respect that now that you bring it up. (In that light, is the true successor to SotC… GIRP?)
I suppose my problem with it also relates to actiony physics+puzzle hybrids in general. Those are really quite difficult to do right, and circling back to the PS2-generation “dark age” conversation, it’s also a characteristic of the overambitious game designs of that era to have such hybrid challenges, and fail at it (it’s also one of my problems with Wind Waker).
The problem is that if the player tries a puzzle solution, and it doesn’t work, it’s not clear whether the solution idea was wrong or it was an execution failure. It leads to endless attempts of trying out the wrong idea hoping that this time will work, and worse, ruling out the correct idea because of an initial execution failure. And when as in SotC, the controls are laggy and solution attempts are on a short timer between lengthy hanging-on animations and getting flung to the ground, the cycle becomes that much slower.
More modern attempts at this kind of game design like Portal, The Last of Us (I assume also the Uncharted series), and in the indie world Braid and Escape Goat navigate the problem successfully without undue frustration though. I assume that comes out of a more rigorous approach to playtesting followed up by sufficiently clear feedback about success/failure/partial-success states to avoid the player falling into the vicious cycle.
uncharted is actually the perfect comparison point to make SotC’s controls seem praiseworthy, because uncharted’s platforming is so sticky and “perfect” and boring.
I’m not sure how much of SotC’s input lag is fixed by the PS3 version or emulation because I haven’t played it since 2005, but I really don’t think there’s been a better prince-of-persia style platformer since, because trying to take that design philosophy to a slicker, objectively-better solution isn’t actually interesting.
the only thing that comes to mind is grow home, which is similarly great precisely because of its weird physicality.
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I know that’s a typo but now I’m trying to imagine a hybrid of “grow rpg” and “gone home”
toups have you not played grow home