omg someone please defend not pushing a button to ledge drop. i said this earlier itt but it seems like such an obvious player friendly move that i really donāt get complaining about it. How many times have you pushed the stick a little bit the wrong way because the camera shifted, and fell off a ledge or climbed up when you didnāt want to!!
If itās just about the button prompts: ok, sure. Please let us turn that shit off, game developers, and please make it modular, you have zero reasons not to
As in, youād prefer to not have to push a button to hang off a ledge?
Sekiro has to figure out if a player near an edge wants to:
Stop, because they didnāt mean to walk off
Move off, because they totally meant it
Hang off
Iām pretty sure theyāre doing the standard things: checking how directly the character is facing the edge, how quickly theyāre walking towards it ā trying to guess if user intent is to walk off or stick.
They made some smart design decisions like setting narrow pathways to absolutely sticky, but thereās a more systemic system on normal edges to keep you from sliding off during combat or accidentally. Itās very well-tuned in Sekiro and Iāve only seen it mess up a few times.
Now, they got here by de-prioritizing the ledge hang feature and shoving it into a button. It simplifies their intent problem (good), but makes that action harder to do. As long as they can commit to it not being an important action, thatās pretty good, but it does beg the question of if they need an above-ledge-to-grab action in the first place. But the nasty chain of design that leads here is, players can grab the ledge, so without a supported action they will try jumping off and re-negotiating to the ledge from below, which is obnoxious, so maybe itās easier to just directly climb down like a human can, but thatās a rare and strange action so itās hidden behind a button, soā¦
These are the fiddly bits that chew up meeting space.
As in, i would absolutely prefer to have to push a button to hang off/drop from/climb up a ledge, it closes the distance between what you want to do and what you want your avatar to do immediately, and utilizing the langauage of games (i.e. buttons) as smartly as i could imagine
Up/down on the stick (or D-pad but who uses THOSE anymore lol) is more spatially intuitive in our brains, but imo/ime it does not often transmit well
Oh, I see the contours more clearly. Yes, separating it into a button action in Sekiro is a design decision that they couldnāt well-enough decide player intent near edges to support three potential actions. Western developers often believe they can and have higher player input failure reads as a result; Japanese developers, whose admirable input purity (direct fast motion! always!) often flips to stubbornness (the astounding lack of analog movement support even through the PS2) tend to design away from this.
Or yes, I think itās a smarter design to use a button for the third action.
I think it was mostly about the context in which it was taught, to be honest ā getting back to my initial feelings about the game being obliged to be in-your-face-tutorial clear about some interactions, and deliberately oblique about others.
yeah I agree the game is very weak in terms of teaching you stuff
(but so has every souls gameā¦ like I never got far in demons or dark until I started watching youtube videos and reading fextralife articles on how to handle combat and stuff)
yeah but itās still weird to consider in terms of like, perpetual access to wikis and youtube from day one, because I feel like a lot of the more obscure stuff in demonās and dark was like ādid you know you could go down their weird rabbit hole and enjoy this totally optional stuff thatās even more neater for being totally optionalā as opposed to āthis one weird trick makes the encounter design actually make sense (x10)ā
Demonās Souls is still my favorite From game, largely because of this. Itās just a remarkably well structured game that uses what it has exceptionally well and sets up everything in new and interesting ways, across all of its design. The game encourages you to be creative in your solutions and to explore what may not be (at first) obvious solutions, due to neither being overly punishing nor overly forgiving. It strikes a balance Fromās other games have never really achieved. That said, I think Dark Sous 2 actually encourages you to explore the most (to a fault, I think), whereas the other games in the series have continued to become more and more restrictive of exploring play and instead seem to encourage a much more linear solution to most encounters (Gascoigne really being the sort of logical end of that thread, while Phalanx is the exact opposite). Meanwhile, though Demonās Souls is the most linear game level-wise, itās easily the game where encounters constantly encourage you to explore what you can do with what you have. I think Dark Souls really introduced the world / environment formally as a threat (Senās Fortress really exemplifying this) while Demonās Souls was much more interested in the world as a context - and the Souls series was much more defined by Dark Souls than Demonās Souls.
Itās been interesting how some of your takes even bowing out very quickly from the actual hands on, are still similar to how I feel 130 hrs spent. Having mostly loved it. Obviously youāre extrapolating a good degree but yes, my own expectations here deal with what I find deft vs not being too sparse.
If Sekiro inspires a subgenre of posture battlers, then all the weird quirks will feel perfectly natural in retrospect, and it will take an effort of imagination to remember why we were so confused in 2019
Iām not sure about thisā¦ Dark Souls 1 was my first FromSoft game, and nuances of stamina/staggering/stability had some tough-love teaching such as stunlocked KOās courtesy of Capra Demon & its dogs (and I still didnāt get the memo due to a janky hit ān run tactic standing on an archway in the back of the room). Itās easy to take Soulsā systems for granted now, but I remember how the gargoyles crushed me until I read you could summon an AI helper (huh, phantoms arenāt online-only?), BUT it only appears in this one specific spot, and only if Iām human at the time (oh so thatās the mysterious number in the corner of the screen that fluctuates between 00 and 01 and sometimes glows white?). Thereās such a range of things going on that itās easy for someone to make incorrect assumptions and stumble for hours ignorant of system details. Itās possibly my favorite game of that generation and I canāt get some of my best friends to give it another chance because they had this experience.
I think Sekiro has fewer āknowledge gatesā; the hurdle was instead just staying alive long enough to internalize cues and build some muscle memory and confidence. The combat started to click once I got out of the early game and found some gourd seeds, and that made the high damage enemies dish out make more sense. I think the devs wanted to discourage sloppy brawls where both sides trade and absorb hits, instead focusing on fast, decisive bursts of action where you might have one of those hot streaks Broco was talking about, and the better you get the more those opportunities present themselves. If you screw up and get hit once or twice, you wonāt die, but youāll need to back off, heal and reset the situation. In the early game youāre so limited on healing that you canāt do this much and just see the death screen a lot, but once you start bouncing back with gourds it flowed much better, I started experimenting with deflects more, etc.
Everybody including From knows the information is out there from day 2, so not availing yourself of wikis and youtubes is a personally imposed artificial rule that could be put in the same general category as never summoning. The games are designed to be played with those āchallenge modesā on, while also expecting such temptation-resisting players to appreciate they have opted into a bumpy ride where they will feel āunfairlyā stuck in some places.
Demonās Souls had Yurt and weapon upgrade obscurity for instance, Dark Souls had the curse mechanic where the recommended way to solve it (rooftop red guy) is incredibly difficult (it took me maybe 5-10 hours?) but it can also be trivialized if you know where to find a Purging Stone. Dark Souls 2 to Bloodborne moved away from this philosophy a bit, though.
thereās a difference in how low-level those systems are vs. these ones, though, and not knowing what advantages are available to you in combat can interact particularly negatively with the tonal masochism (perceived or otherwise), especially if the idea that you should be able to intuit how to play the game is important to you.
OK, but also I didnāt fully understand dodge iframes, shield stability, and poise until DkS2, and I think Sekiro is the first From game to fully clarify how aggro works.
Dodge iframes are really the big one there. How many players intuitively rolled into bosses?