SEKIRO: SHADOWS DIE TWICE 💀

[Rudie]

[Rudie]

I thought one of the bosses was based off a real human but instead it is just based off a Masahiro Shinoda film? Ahh a 1970s nihilistic Japanese film where everything sucks forever.

[parker]

@Felix

I definitely don’t think the game should have an “easy mode” and I think all of the discussion I’ve seen to that effect is cheapening; even most of the mechanical compromises that seemingly already exist to make the game easier feel worse in my book.

whether it’s a problem or not that there seem to be a decent chunk of people, myself included who find this a lot less accommodating or engaging than prior souls titles really really shouldn’t be reduced to an “easy mode”

why would an easy mode be “cheap” but summoning a whole other person to come demolish everything your stuck on not be

[Broco]

Agreed it’s really weird. I got stuck for a while between the exact same two bosses. It seems like Gyoubu is set up to be the big chokepoint but then he’s kind of not

[Felix]

because summons totally blow it half the time and then you’re stuck with a harder boss which is funny

[parker]

I thought I was going to get murdered coming back to the game after a week. I had made it to the ghost pope boss when I quit. but it’ll only took 3 tries, once to immediately get murdered while reremembering the controls and flow and speed of the game. one try to kind of study his moves. and then I just used a bunch of items (mostly throwing ash in his eyes) and fireworks to help and I got them.

I had killed o’rin before that by jumping on her head from behind so she stumbles forward and you can get a deathblow in. just follow the ABC’s of the shinobi and Always Be Cheating

[physical]

imo you could probably ease the early difficulty problems by giving the player more than a single use of the healing gourd so they have more opportunity to learn before losing half their shit and getting kicked back to a checkpoint. part of the frustration for me was having to sit thru a long load screen then fight the same 5-10 goons before retrying the boss

[Tulpa]

The long load screen definitely sucks and I hope they patch that to something less ridiculous

[GherkinForce]

I used that same trick on O’rin, old shinobi technique: look it up on google

[GherkinForce]

I’m not even sure why there even are loading screens on death when the checkpoint is typically not too far away and they can instantaneously respawn enemies anyway. Just put a swirly filter on the screen, warp player to checkpoint and trigger the rest function

[Felix]

it is the kind of thing that is theoretically very possible to optimize (I think Bloodborne’s first patch cut load times on retry on half which was a massive improvement) but it’s also very easy to forego if you’re trying to ship your game and you don’t want to make any assumptions about what’s in memory when you reload assets & reset the world state

[anothersphere]

Ahhh, I knew she was familiar somehow, never seen the movie nor am I familiar with them but had seen goze and I think pics of her before. Ty for info!

[Alterity]

The game loads pretty quickly on PC fwiw

[physical]

i mean if i had an ssd in my ps4 i’m sure it would load faster lol

[physical]

this reminds me, there’s a great bit in that polygon morrowind oral history where they talk about how it was just easier to put up a loading image and reboot the game completely than for the engine to actually clean up after itself when moving to another map. i love “just ship it” hacks so much

[Chevluh]

Even in non-janky engines that can clean up after themselves the whole thing about streaming world systems is that the loading times are there but hidden by the time it takes you to physically travel and physical continuity. Random access (in the data context where random means non-contiguous) is the worst case because there’s no assumption you can make as to how much data’s gonna change and how the layouts are gonna relate to the ones you have when you die and all kinds of structures that are designed to be fast in the specific context of gradual change will have to be rebuilt. Loading from scratch is not just the easy option, it’s the one feasible option.

[GherkinForce]

Actually, that reminds me that one time I used the shortcut between The dilapidated temple and the castle, it failed to load the area in time and so for a solid minute it looked like I was floating above the mountains watching as buildings and parts of the room slowly popped into place

[hysteresis]

I think it also compliments the game design: it gives you a pause time to reflect on why you lost before going back at it.

If it was instant, I’d just go again at the challenge without thinking and try again the same bad strategy that won’t work, only by chance.

[Chevluh]

A great old timer anecdote about level streaming systems and the tricks used to make them work is that in the first Jack & Daxter if the streaming block you were running toward wasn’t loaded yet due to some unforeseen slowdown in the pipeline the game would make you trip on an imaginary pebble just so the animation would buy time for the block to finish loading.

[Tulpa]

sometimes the camera in jak and daxter would also take over, making you look at a wall instead of the level you’re going towards