no, the camera during boss fights is pretty bad. it gets even worse during the second guardian ape fight where you have to fight two of them.
My problem with that is that most if not all zones also seem to have paths where you can kill almost everyone stealthily without triggering alerts (just like how they all seem to have traversal paths for not fighting anyone but bosses) if youāre not into the death butterfly thing, so getting into the kill-alert-wait cycle is still not trying to play with the stealth tools the tutorial explained to you but jumping into things without having properly analyzed the local layout, which you inevitably have ways to examine beforehand, in which case rather than jumping in again with the same strategy that leads to it being too long you should think about who last spotted you and find a way to kill them earlier the next time, which is absolutely more optimal in terms of time, my most important resource. Itās like punching a boss again and again rather than learning its patterns. The boring optimal choice only seems optimal because theyāre not trying to find a better one at all. Thereās a bunch of ways of playing this right which is why of course Iām gonna be scoffing when people stick to the boring way of playing it instead.
@physical I do agree that the camera can be a real problem.
Thanks Chevuh for chiming in. Your reasoning helps a lot putting in perspective the stealth āproblemā of trying-hiding-going back. Unfortunately, comments I had found around internet regarding that review were random bashing without giving any real insight or motivation, which kept me feeling a bit perplexed.
Play around with the stealth AI and youāll find theyāre three steps simpler than normal for modern action stealth, which the level design takes its cues from. They have very restricted sight and hearing, they investigate disturbances for a very short time, and they have short communication radii to allies when alerted. They also return to normal behavior after being alerted very quickly. Many enemies are stationary, or have very short patrol paths, reducing layout entropy.
Combined with the generous backstab spacing and short kills even if a fight breaks out and itās clear their goal is to shorten the stealth-into-action loop of the basic encampments in games like Assassinās Creed, Arkham, and Far Cry.
But how do they teach you to go faster? Previously Iāve marveled at how Demonās Souls taught its cautious, wary gameplay style nonverbally through ambushes, aggro spacing, and surprising traps.
But how do they teach you that youāre safe than you think?
A lot of learning the bounds of this stealth comes through repetition. Having a boss with a camp in the approach lets a player experiment with optimizing their route to kill. The relatively static placement means the player doesnāt have to wait for opportunities to show up, and can grow confident in their speed.
They donāt use tools like time pressure (draining resources, a literal timer) or movement pressure (an approaching wall, for instance) to force it. Since stealth is a brittle game state which can easily be lost, it can be hard to convince players to experiment. Their decisions are also contrary to intuition - go faster, be more lethal, noise isnāt as loud as it sounds to you. And they moved to human enemies which look more intelligent than before.
I think they would have been well-served to remove the stealth toggle, as itās barely needed for stealth and communicates that the player should move more slowly. Removing it would push on hiding grass and blocking obstacles and dashing between cover and kills and grappling away. Or, equalize its movement speed with normal running (it feels like an expected affordance and its lack might divert frustrations just due to player expectations and shinobi roleplay).
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Made the Lone Swordsman fight one of the tougher ones Iāve faced so far, so I feel your pain on that.
Iām struggling to think of a melee focused high speed action game that doesnāt have some camera issues (doesnāt mean there arenāt better ones). No doubt thatās one of Sekiroās flaws, aggravated by fast moving enemies in tight spaces it falls from āoh I lost trackā into āwhatās even happening??!ā
The stealth is very lightly applied to design here, it exists to reduce numbers in some areas tactically, others stylishly, and in the case of bosses, very advantageously. Used right items like the shards/whistle can create enemy attraction or diversion, but itās far from integral or an evolution on anything in Soulsborne. Basically what was said above^ Aside from hanging-ledge kills thereās really no other stay-hidden, removed from visibility trick that doesnāt leave you near or suddenly instigating battle.
Getting a stealth kill and then running away till alertness/positions reset, then being bored/annoyed with the setup as faulty isnāt exactly the gameās mixed message, it spends so much more time giving you techniques and instructions on battle. No offense but Iām surprised folks donāt realize āthis slogs because Iām making it that wayā
for me it was almost like the opposite ā I did perceive fairly quickly that the game wasnāt expecting me to play it perfectly stealthily, and it was pretty quickly apparent how abnormally dumb the enemies were made to be to support this game design, the issue was more āoh, geez, I have to internalize the same discovered -> not discovered gameplay loop in a souls game as I did in metro and uncharted and whatever else? and for what?ā
itās obviously a popular genre conceit but Iām surprised they didnāt anticipate more fatigue there ā part of the reason I like their earlier work is that it didnāt apply this kind of toggled performativeness ā or think that theyād almost made it too silly to be bothered to engage with by making the enemies as blind and deaf as they are.
One of the only unavoidable encounters in the Hirata Estate is a very small bottleneck staircase that has two shield dudes and a sword dude. Thereās a spot where you can hug the wall unnoticed and watch the sword dude do his little patrol. My takeaway from this was: watch the sword dude, wait until his back is turned, then kill him. Then take on the shield dudes.
Of course, in practice, thereās almost zero difference between just running straight into his face and stabbing him right there. No sneaking required. But by providing a hiding spot, the game is communicating the opposite.
On the other end of the scale, right after the horse guy thereās a gunner who you just, likeā¦canāt sneak up on. So you just run up and stab him. Thatās a much better signifier of what the game actually wants you to do.
ALSO I didnāt know there was a fucking run button until, like, 2 hours into the game? Yes I should have pressed all the buttons but guess what? You canāt run until you get your sword, so the first 15-20 minutes it doesnāt do anything anyway? And thereās no tooltip or tutorial or loading screen message or anything, soā¦yeah I dunno. The first hour just reinforces over and over: STEALTH. And then the AI encourages a cheesy approach to it because itās easier to stab a dude, run away, then come back when everyone is normal again than it is to find a proper hiding spot.
Anyway, I really like this game but I think itās extremely flawed in the opening hours and is probably driving away people who would actually enjoy it very much.
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sorry this is me feeling like i canāt talk about dark souls because i am bad at it. itās all spilling out.
sometimes souls games are bad at things!!
and now i can talk about it because iām at least somewhat contemporary with the Sekiro Chat
but this game is really good and i like it
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This is a good point; the tutorial level teaches you the basics of awareness, patrols, investigation that form the standard stealth mechanics but it imparts the opposite lesson of reality, that youāre fragile and scurrying
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The tutorial that halfway through makes way for battles with regular opponents, and an intro to mini-bosses? Iām not sure.
Itās only a brief period but the shaping effects of the first and most directly controlled experience in the game should not be underestimated. The first five minutes are drastically important.
If youāre someone with Sekiro in your hands, it doesnāt have to stoop that short.
I also had to replay the swordless section about 3 or 4 times because i suck at video games so
iām gonna say again that the game does a horrible job teaching you what it expects. the first level emphasizes stealth and avoiding unnecessary fights, so you keep doing that and can wind up missing combat tutorial info. eventually you run into a mandatory boss, but you donāt know how to deal with stuff like sweep attacks because the game spent so much time teaching you to avoid fighting
Funny story: you can sneak up on him fine, thatās what that platform on the left is for. The only un-sneak-kill-able enemies on the segment between horse and bull may be the dogs and Iām not even sure about that.
Thereās a path above the dogs if you head right next to the rights, and that empties into a back passage to the watchtower above the mochi pounders where you can hop down, death-from-above one of the two guards in front of the boss gate, and sword the other in the face before rushing in.
Yeah, I know about that path, one of two you can take to get through unnoticed, but I was wondering if thereās a sneak strategy for killing the dogs themselves other than dropping on the guard in the middle of them and then just killing the surrounding dogs.
Ah, yeah. They seem to treat the dog groups as big packs resistant to stealth; they tend to alert each other in a much larger radius and have a long chase distance. It helps that they only do the one attack, are susceptible to fireworks, and can always be one-shot.
only speaking to my own experience. with Demons/Dark and Bloodborne, I would always at some point run up against a boss or enemy section where I found it so maddeningly obtuse as to how Iām actually supposed to fight or navigate it that I inevitably put the game down and have zero desire to go back to it. the idea of going back to Bloodborne for meāafter 30 hours of finally āclickingā with it (after 2 years of not being able to beat the first boss)āwas killed by the Darkbeast Paarl. I just have zero desire to go back to that. maybe I will one day.
but Sekiro? Sekiro is like, yeah ABSOLUTELY HECK YEAH I will spend 6 hours fighting this one boss because the movement and combat mechanics are so much freakinā fun. itās not just like circle strafing and rolling for ten minutes to get a hit in, then rinse and repeat like most Souls bosses. and theyāre more forgiving about not having to run through a river of shit to get back to said boss. thereās so much more going on here. itās soo fast paced, and there are a variety of different tools at my disposal to figure out a strategy that works for me. occasionally Iād look for tips from this thread but aside from one or two things they were never of much help, because they werenāt tuned to my specific nervous system.
the only time Iāve gotten legit angry at the game was the Lone Swordsman that physical was talking about, that fight suuucckked. thankfully, all I had to do was forget about him and go on to some other area in this vast open beautiful seamlessly connected world to try my luck with something else. and that worked! I got through Big Baby Drunk Boy and Granny Daggers (the aforementioned 6 hour boss session), and after having upgraded my Attack power and Vitality from all that, not to mentioned just improved my skills and reaction times, I came back to the Lone Swordsman and managed to beat him in no time, comparatively. at the end of it I had no healing items and a sliver of health remaining that was almost invisible. heck yeah.
I donāt know that Iāve ever felt that way about Souls gamesāthat thereās a skillset that Iām actually improving at, rather than just rote pattern recognition and better timed dodging.
I think this is why my favorite fights in Bloodborne were the occasional fights against other hunters. those seem like prototypes for the Sekiro-style human-to-human fights.
anyways. I love this game.
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