My absolutely dense read on Sekiro is it wrestles with overthinking
Well, dodge mechanics are pretty common. and the I-frame window in Dark Souls is pretty darn big. Such that, you donât need to have detailed knowledge of it. Iâm sure a lot of people were dodging boss strikes, especially from certain bosses, fairly easily.
I think Dark Souls 2âs tighter i-framing was a response to that. You have to be a lot more deliberate about timing your roles in that game. And thatâs something you can feel right away. Even later, with your stats juiced up.
I absolutely agree. There are many things in the souls games about the core systems, which could be communicated better. I mean, Demonâs Souls is setup so that the main blacksmith of the game requires a key item to be traded to him, before he can be utilized. But you donât know that until you find him. And that key item sits in your inventory like any other item and can be consumed much like several other similar things. and you donât find him for awhile. Maybe even a long while, depending upon how you choose to path through the gameâs zones. Along the way, you could easily consume that item and then be screwed outta that blacksmith.
unpatched Demonâs Souls Asian version is a hell of a thing, too. World Tendency shifts darker after every. single. death.
Iâm probably forgetting something, but I canât think of another game I played with iframe dodge before Demonâs. And I think I first learned the word âiframeâ in ~2012, and prior to that I only associated the wordless concept with blinking-after-damage or bugs, not dodges.
Iâm assuming there is a whole subgenre of PS2-era 3d console action games with them, but those never caught my attention. This goes back to my point above about âintuitive to those immersed in the videogame genreâ. People are struggling more with Sekiro because, although I doubt it invented the posture mechanics wholesale, whatever inspiration itâs drawing from is a lot more obscure than usual.
Yeah and my point is that the dodge in Dark Souls is so generous, knowing technical details about I-frames isnât needed. and then if you move to Dark Souls 2, youâll likely feel that the dodge there is less generous and requires more deliberate timing from you. Again, still not needing I-frame details. Because this is something a player can reasonably âfeelâ from interacting with the game, through an action they perform many times.
The trick here is that Dark Souls 2 allows you to pump a stat for more I-frames and there is no visual representation of your dodge/I-frames increasing anywhere in your characterâs stats. So figuring out all on your own which stat did that, is a pretty long shot. Even if you did pump it by accident and thought to yourself âI think my dodge is betterâ, most people probably wouldnât have figured it out. So yeah, at that point its players who are already looking for technical details like this, who fed wikis and that information became important to the general Dark Souls player (I would argue) for the first time.
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i will always remember the first time i sat at Firelink Shrineâs bonfire and tried to âkindleâ and got the message âCannot kindle while hollowedâ, and when i tried to âreverse hollowingâ got âNeed humanityâ all with no further explanation. and i just thought âwtf. cool. lol.â
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Please donât hate me, I know you probably just forgot to say â3Dâ.
But from day one of these games with me, while rolling, I could simply not forget the long hours of arcades having friends beating the SFII out of me with KOF96, while rolling out of my every move.
Those hours were also painful, and expensive for a teenage kid.
Fighting games beforehand but Devil May Cryâs roll-dodge is where I first noticed looking for those windows as a big thing.
I only played it the usual casual amount and didnât know that Street Fighter had an iframe dodge on any character, I only knew about blocking and jumping out of the way. The other fighting games Iâve played more than a few minutes of are OMF2097, Garou and Guilty Gear XX, and I donât remember an iframe dodge there either (possibly wrongly as well â I know airdash was a big thing in GG but I canât recall whether it has iframes or not, as I didnât know that was something I should be looking for).
No no. King of Fighter 96 did.
I played a lot of SFII on megadrive, and my friends were beating the SFII OUT of me, pretty much as sekiro does for heavy BB people.
Also Garou also has dodge roll, and DMC the step dodge iframes too. But hey, DMC⌠after all the game kinda established many of the early standards for 3D 3rd person hack&slashes /action-games. I think.
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It is not Adventure Island but I feel like thereâs some similar aesthetic NES game that allowed you toâŚ
I think pre 3D boom and certain fighters many are remembered like Mega Man Xâs dash where thereâs generally no invincibility just quick movement.
Now my mindâs flashing to Pocky and Rocky style, thereâs gotta be some arcade type shooter (though not shmup) where one button or a direction + button provided some clear moment of invulnerability while the character spun with movement onscreen.
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I bet it starts as a soft player advantage like smaller hitboxes on the player in a shooter and jump forgiveness after running of a platform edge, things that passed as trade wisdom for years, separating the good games from the punishing and janky, until player communities eventually figured it out and started talking amongst themselves and developing their own, explicit rules for the genre.
Invincible dodges are be less needed in 2D where collision is a lot easier to read, so it makes sense to map closely to sprite intersection, but in 3D, where it can be hard to gauge size against distance, being fuzzy in the playerâs favor would cut out frustration.
I-frame knowledge can be real bad. I went into God of War (2018) believing it would follow dodge rules from the Souls games and kept frustratingly getting locked into corners and eating hits. Later my mind exploded when I learned that you donât get i-frames on forward evades, but do on side and back evades!
Hmm, actually thatâs inconsistent enough that itâd be agonizing if I had fewer expectations.
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The late emergence seems to prove itâs the opposite of elemental. Actually quite unnatural to have them as an option on top of getting out the way. It seems to be a solution to letting players feel empowered and aggressive in increasingly unreadable situations that arose in more complex games. Later Shmups did it a different way, by shrinking the hitbox and giving an invincible bomb
This line of thinking also reminds me of hitscan enemies in FPSes that gradually turned into âtake damage if you stay out of cover longer than X secondsâ rules.
Boy, videogames are full of bullshit skeuomorphic facades, arenât they. It makes me wish more games openly embraced their inherent arbitrariness and abstraction, like Digidrive does
Yeah. Itâs always a useful exercise to ask, Chow would a human act?â because we spend most of our time in the abstraction of Game and rules and standard practices and need to remind ourselves of the underlying metaphor or fantasy.
How to Avoid Making Diablo III
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I donât necessarily agree thatâs a good universal goal. If anything, IMO games try too hard to do that all the time, and you can just as well go for the opposite â expose the mechanics you want to the surface, even if that means embracing the inhuman or unphysical in all respects. Brutalist gaming, I might call it.
The thing to avoid is the uncanny valley. I would have less problems with iframe dodges if it was a wizard teleporting themselves out of the way. Or if it was some circles and triangles zooming about.
I didnât like Diablo 3 either, but I donât think it was due to abstraction. It was just very repetitive and visually noisy (possibly a consequence of the particular kinds of abstraction they went for, to be sure)
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I am actually amazed that the iframe roll gave away to such discussion.
KOF is only the most vivid memory I have from it, probably because of all the pain and frustration involved (I really thought I was good at fighting games before my friends showed me good).
But yeah, from about DMC point, the âquick movement with OP iframesâ button, just started feeling natural. However I cant remember people caring so much for how many exact frames it had until DS. Maybe the difficulty? I think so, but coupled with the precision and careful programing design of the base engine that made it so⌠much a center of attention.
I think more important than caring about these design choices of a roll or whatever, is how those are treated at the base coding. How precise and trusty they are to hold on a very high difficulty setting, where the player feels the need to push all those precise specifications to a limit, and they still hold (guess From has really good stress testers?)
Btw, gonna keep playing and streaming my weird âgather 4 bosses as close as you can, and defeat Corrupted Monk before Lady Butterfly and Genichiroâ run.
Come and check (shameless self-advertisement).
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my take would be that if you donât substantiate those underlying mechanics in the gameâs overt presentation, theyâll just be sensed by the player anyway once muscle memory sinks in. after playing any game long enough to develop an impression of its âfeelâ, i notice it completely affects the way i âreadâ the screen. often, a kind of tunnel vision forms where i automatically discard much of the visual detail as it doesnât communicate anything to the gameplay.
people said dark souls 2 felt weird and wondered if animations were to blame; i donât think so. it would always be after taking myself out of the game loop a bit to equip a new armour set or something that Iâd be like âhey, this looks good - i like the way my character moves now.â only once i tuned in to the gameâs actions and goals would the awkward, sludgy sensation seem apparent.
for this reason, i think Iâve developed a strong preference for games to be as direct as possible about expressing their programming. anything else feels dishonest, and ultimately pointless. so much of the âHDâ graphical push rubbed me wrong because i could tell nothing about depth of field or bloom lighting was going to inform how i play, making it feel extravagant and wasteful.
all action games should just be Bare Geometry imo
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At the same time, rhythm games like Dance Dance Revolution and other abstract action games like Jeff Minter tempestlikes are conscious of and playful with that tunnel vision by deliberately introducing a huge amount of visual noise behind and around the clear abstractions. And puzzle games have gradually chosen to become noisier since Tetrisâs bare simplicity â in fact, Tetris Effect is a perfect example of this. There is some kind of difference between good noise and bad noise but I havenât thought this through enough to be able to describe what it is.
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oh sure - i think thereâs abundant potential in toying with the playerâs ability to separate meaningful signal from noise, especially under pressure. just that, in many cases i donât think the noise amounts to much more than trying to sell something impressive at face value.
in a sense, WarioWare is a whole game built around the challenge of rapidly decoding an arbitrary metaphor into concrete action.
also Bloodborne is an obscenely detailed game but i feel it kinda works on that level: trying to comb through and discover the real shape of the level design amidst all the baroque ornamentation and other multiplicitous details, especially when the way to go is actually some easily-missed recession or a crumbled part of wall. it makes it that you never know how youâll engage with a visible landmark until youâre actually there
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