there’s nothing inherently wrong about dodge rolling
it’s just that it’s the one thing everyone takes away from the game, especially people making games
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talking to normies about them is so fucking bad that I had literally vowed not to play any more of them out of spite until I started posting on here and people asked me why I didn’t like souls games in a completely normal way. The dude I was friends with in high school who was obsessed with dark souls was an incel who spent all summer crying to clannad and refusing to leave his house while constantly bitching at us to come over and TRY DARK SOULS in front of him. His rich parents bought him a half-ocelot cat that would claw the shit out of you every time you tried to fight a boss. Sitting in this dude’s fucking room which smelled like it was being fumigated and having him force us to try and get the claymore on the dragon bridge for like an hour is one of the worst things I have ever been forced to do in my life. People on here are at least 80% more normal than that
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Happy to encourage a healthy relationship with Souls games
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I think that this series getting popular while simultaneously being a “hardcore” niche franchise has created a genre of godawful elitist gatekeeping nerd that gets in the way of the actual quality of the games, which is consistently pretty good at worst. And honestly not that hard until like, Bloodborne which is the first one where fromsoft tried to make more of a character action game than an rpg.
I played the first Dark Souls because everyone here on sb talked about it and Demon’s Souls, and i think they were the best fans to get me into the series and into Fromsoft games. I think they have one weird trick to make their games seem tough and intimidating, which is to make everything in the first half of the game way stronger than you, but at a really flat level, and in a big open world so you can always stop and explore a different branch when you get overwhelmed. It was cool going back to play the King’s Fields and realize they have been building on that for years. Like King’s Field 2 isn’t a really hard game in the long run, but everyone remembers the first hour where everything within a two mile radius can kill you and you don’t know where to find a save point, so you have to keep starting over
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Also I don’t think playing a character where you do a lot of dodge rolling gets that fun until Dark Souls 2, because it’s so clunky in the first 2 games (you can only roll in 4 directions!). And then after 2 it becomes mandatory.
In 2 you make your dodge rolling better by increasing a stat. I used to hate that and now i just think it’s kind of funny. It’s the best stat in the game if you’re good at Dodge Rolling
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I like how difficulty works in demon souls because world tendency is a completely esoteric mechanic unless you look it up and the concept of being able to make the game into an utter nightmare because I’m a dumbass is fucking hilarious to me
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also also a hot take i just had. bloodborne is fromsoft trying to do souls game that’s all about mastering dodges (but not dodge rolls which actually suck in that one), and sekiro is fromsoft taking their ideas for a souls game that’s all about sword and board/precise shield play and mashing it up with tenchu
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My sekiro take which I will imagine will not change with this new information of “I like souls games now” is that I wish they had just made a straight Tenchu sequel
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World Tendency is one of those ideas that’s so awesome in concept and terrible in execution that they implemented it as a line in the manual and balanced it out of existence in the game, so it only exists as a whispered playground threat, which is exactly what it should be.
Nobody can say that it doesn’t exist, it’s right there in the pause menu, but it’s almost impossible to get a clear definition out of your friends or see it move in person so it just squats.
It’s almost as beautiful as the D-COUNTER in Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, counting down with each and every step until you lose your body and murder your friends.
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World tendency is such a cool idea that i don’t even care that it barely affects anything and is a pain in the ass to try to manipulate
Actually i kind of love that trying to do world tendency shit is boring and it’s supposed to just happen to you
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world tendency is kind of more present now that the servers are down because you’re not constantly being shifted towards the server average anymore and if you, say, don’t know that dying in your Body lowers world tendency you could potentially find yourself having accidentally manipulated the world tendency in a negative way
but yeah I agree I love it so much as a one line existential threat in the manual that I cribbed the entire system as a joke for an arma 3 mission I made once and kept my players on edge the entire time by displaying a message box every time the world tendency increased or decreased. It didn’t actually affect anything but if tendency reached pure black it would cause a midi of Crack Addict by Limp Bizkit but every instrument is the tim allen grunt so loudly that it sounded fucking horrifying, like this awful world-ending alien droning, and caused an earthquake that usually crashed the server. Really think I captured the spirit of the system
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I’m of the mind that it actually rules in execution because getting to full black WT requires you actively go to body form and die over and over, which can only happen if you specifically want to be at full black WT to farm specific enemies for materials.
Even if you’re the worst player ever, dying in body form basically does nothing, because most first-timers get body form by killing the boss instead of farming or duping the humanity item analog. You’ll always sit in neutral WT unless you specifically seek out the ways to change it, even when playing offline.
More games need to implement systems that allow you to manipulate invisible statistics to modify drop rates. That’s my gamer brain hot take. WT rules and I wish more games implemented it to some degree.
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I’ve barely played demons souls with online! i have actually mostly experienced the games solo. the impact of their weird gimmicky multiplayer getting popular and them trying to balance everything to work in pvp is its own kettle of fish
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I’m a systems materialist; if the system is unseen by the players and doesn’t affect them, then can it really be said to exist? It’s just designers making toys for themselves.
World tendency has all the trappings of useless terrible esoterica except it is revealed in a threatening way, which makes all the difference.
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yeah so the NA server world tendency was always a little below pure white. but on days like halloween and stuff it’d shift the world tendency to pure black. The way it worked online is weird because afaik your tendency wasn’t saved between sessions, it’d always reset to the server median tendency each session. to replicate this behavior the private server just cycles between world tendencies every now and then, but also has some weird shit going on where placing certain messages in the game world lets you change your tendency to pure white/neutral/pure black without much hassle
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The system is seen (as you mention, revealed in a threatening way) and does affect them, though, it just doesn’t force a choice on you until you’re ready to engage with it (namely, grinding for materials). It simply returns to neutral for the average uninformed player. If anything that’s the platonic ideal of an optional loot system.
yeah I like the way fromsoft games threaten me a lot more than they actually do, the way world tendency is presented really is the perfect example
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so do you mean it’s about the backstep dodge? looking for protips here
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the best part of Demon’s/Dark for me was primarily the level design geometry which pretty much set a new benchmark for 3d games imo. the experience of getting through that whole 1-1 and wrapping around back to where you started maybe seems quaint now but at the time (2011ish for me) it was extremely satisfying.
the excellent, ponderous combat just made getting through the weird environments all the more satisfying
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D’you mean for Bloodborne or for Sekiro?