you just killed the troops
in other news I’ve played about an hour of stellaris and the pacing seems questionable. my initial impression is that everything it’s done to be more accessible than ck2 is basically just more limiting in the early going, and the tech trees (now that it has regular ol’ tech trees) are really muddy compared to civ. the flavour text is characteristically good but the worldbuilding is going to have a hard time topping its predecessor even so:
I’m not too sure about 2016 games so far. a lot of big releases (dks3, sausage roll, xcom 2, stellaris, hyper light, overwatch) have either not quite clicked with me or been merely great rather than somehow exceptional. the only thing I’ve really loved so far was the witness (and to a lesser extent ultimate chicken horse).
if you want to continue down the path of weird RM2k3 RPGs, Space Funeral can be finished in around an hour and was made by our very own @thecatamites
and i’m always obligated to mention yume nikki and its cousins (like .flow or maybe The Mirror Lied) when this kind of thing comes up, but you probably know about some of those already if you’ve played OFF
if you’re just looking for a cool RPG with a cool setting, some social commentary and capitalist criticism, then hey, that’s an excuse for me to post about master of the wind again:
(download link here)
I’m well familiar with Space Funeral and Yume Nikki, and made a KOP thread about Weird Indie RPGs in general some months back, but was surprised to learn in that thread that thecatamites was actually an SBer. Everything always comes back to SB.
I hadn’t heard about Master of the Wind, though! It’s a shame that it appears to mostly use generic assets, but the quote you posted sounds really cool. I should probably give it a shot.
yeah, almost all of the art is generic outside of the faces and battle sprites (and even that was a huge amount of work for them) but they at least make gradually smarter use of the assets they have as it goes on. the game was released episodically over the course of seven years and there are parts where that shows, in good ways and bad. i think it hits its stride in arc ii, around three hours in, so that’s a good place to decide whether it’s worth sticking with or not.
edit: though, uh, i have to try hard not to gush about it, so i guess take anything i write here with a grain of salt. or a boulder.
I’m actually a little surprised to hear that anyone wouldn’t react strongly to Demon’s Souls 1-1, even seven years later. it makes an impression.
in any case, it’s mostly unforgiving rather than outrageously difficult. and the later games are all more forgiving than Demon’s (but more difficult moment-to-moment).
It’s definitely a masterstroke in level design, and still holds up to today’s standards (lol)
Yeah Demons is fantastic and I only played it this year. 1-1 certainly hooked me. I started Dark Souls about a week ago and just can’t get on board with it.
finally completed bloodborne. after 2 weeks of banging my head against orphan of kos, I defeated him. without even using many cheap parry exploits or anything in his second half! it felt like a real legit victory. then I beat gerhman and the moon presence in one try lol
really want to play ds3 next but I don’t really have $60 to spare for awhile. probably gonna play demon’s souls, which I haven’t ever spent much time with until now, instead. probably gonna be kinda jarring going there from blooborne tho
I don’t think anyone plays D Souls games for the novelty (there are always antecedents, as far back as Ultima Underworld)
It’s entirely about execution
I’ve actually never heard anyone suggest baroque was an influence on D Souls design!
Probably the best choice. It’s still Splinter Cell, but I recall it aging a lot better than the first two games.
Your condescension is perfectly Souls fanclub-y.
i dunno, that’s pretty spot-on, certainly w/r/t how many HPs monsters can take off of you.
Souls is only really hard compared to the games around it. this isn’t a novel opinion at all but it most strongly reminds me of tough older games like Castlevania or Ghouls & Ghosts, where it’s overwhelming at first but becomes easier and easier as you memorize patterns and level layouts. it’s more about flow – ie how you are forced to repeat larger sections of game because of few/no checkpoints – than about raw moment-to-moment challenge. Demon’s handles that the best though its ultimately the easiest to cheese.
I dunno, I just hate the tough guy posturing around the Souls games, and that certainly reeks of that to me. There is a whole lot of Souls fandom that seems to be gamers wanting to pat themselves on the back for some kind of accomplishment, and I dunno, I don’t really consider doing anything in a videogame to be an accomplishment. “This game will be hard only to people who play games on their communicated-as-intended difficulty,” is pretty “look at me be the TRU GAMER” bleh.
To wit, I never play games on Hard the first time, and I didn’t have any problem with Souls difficulty. The only time I did accidentally play a game on Hard the first time was the original release of DMC3, where it wasn’t an option (literally, the US Normal was the Japanese Hard, it was silly). That game was way harder than Souls, though.
Argh, I really just shouldn’t talk about these games with people.
Yea, Chaos Theory is when the series started to distinguish itself. Amon Tobin did the soundtrack and it’s still incredible today.
Yeah I kind of agree with you? I get why these games are perceived as hard: they’re harder than other current-gen AAA games which are so stupidly easy most of the time that they end up boring. They’re not really harder than many games from ps2 era and earlier. put another way: They’re only hard if you’ve only played games released after 2007