The difference the online is actually in the single player. Not a separate mode.MonkeyPunch said:Yahtzee Croshaw said:
I... that... what... but...
Double standards ahoy, Captain!
BF3/MW3
Death Mechanics and Dark Souls
- Thread starter Yahtzee Croshaw
- Start date
I actually thought that Prince of Persia did infinite lives well - when you screwed something up, you turned back the clock to before you messed up. And while I haven't played I want to be the guy, I have seen it played and it seemed to work fairly well.Sargonza said:
Just my two cents.
I like the "something snapped" part. That's so true. It's like the 5 stages of grief:
1. Denial: This game isn't so bad, I can do it. This will be easy!
2. Anger: FFFFFUUUUUUCCCCKKKK!!!! YOU FUCKING COCK MONGER! DIIIEEEEEE
3. Bargaining: Ok, ok, what if I just try 1 more time? Then you'll let me beat it? What if I swap these rings, will you let me pass?
4. Depression: I'm fucked. This whole game is fucked. I should stop playing, this is just pathetic.
5. Acceptance: Whatever. Fuck it, here I go again. Just dodge here, swing there... HEY! I WON! WWWWWOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!
Yep. Honestly though, that's pretty much me fighting Ceaseless Discharge for about 1.5 hours (in around 3 or 4 sittings). Fuck that fucker. God fucking damnit. *cough* Anyway, I did eventually start playing other, easier games, and I just haven't had the urge to get back into Dark Souls and finish it off... one day I will.
1. Denial: This game isn't so bad, I can do it. This will be easy!
2. Anger: FFFFFUUUUUUCCCCKKKK!!!! YOU FUCKING COCK MONGER! DIIIEEEEEE
3. Bargaining: Ok, ok, what if I just try 1 more time? Then you'll let me beat it? What if I swap these rings, will you let me pass?
4. Depression: I'm fucked. This whole game is fucked. I should stop playing, this is just pathetic.
5. Acceptance: Whatever. Fuck it, here I go again. Just dodge here, swing there... HEY! I WON! WWWWWOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!
Yep. Honestly though, that's pretty much me fighting Ceaseless Discharge for about 1.5 hours (in around 3 or 4 sittings). Fuck that fucker. God fucking damnit. *cough* Anyway, I did eventually start playing other, easier games, and I just haven't had the urge to get back into Dark Souls and finish it off... one day I will.
IWBTG's R to restart button is actually kind of great. Because you can hit it at any point. You don't HAVE to hear the ending riff, because most people who have played through the game will have hit it before they've even touched the spikes. Yes, it's an extra step over automatic, but it's instantaneous, and sometimes even faster than Super Meat Boy.Sargonza said:
Because (it seems) you can't claim to have a "FULL" experience if your PS3/360 is unplugged from the web... Unlike MW3/BF3 which have fully functional campaigns that don't depend on whether you are online or not.MonkeyPunch said:
Also, I guess a lot of people would have complained if he didn't review MW3/BF3, especially since its his "shooters/games with a 3" season
I've been playing a lot of Dark Souls lately and had pretty much the same experience.
The first few hours are maddening, obtuse, confusing, frustrating, and then after you beat the Taurus Demon and reach the parish, something just clicks. You learn to take it slow, to enjoy it for the oppressive, cruel but mostly fair beast that it is.
By the time you kill the Bell Gargoyles you'll have felt a kind of rewarding feeling that very few games these days can offer.
The first few hours are maddening, obtuse, confusing, frustrating, and then after you beat the Taurus Demon and reach the parish, something just clicks. You learn to take it slow, to enjoy it for the oppressive, cruel but mostly fair beast that it is.
By the time you kill the Bell Gargoyles you'll have felt a kind of rewarding feeling that very few games these days can offer.
I'm one of those people who doesn't think Demon's/Dark Souls is so difficult, though it certainly takes a while to understand what you need to do. I remember putting four or five hours into Demon's Souls with a melee-based character and dying constantly, at which point I decided to restart the game as a magic user and had a much easier time, especially against the bosses. And I went into Dark Souls both familiar with the combat system from having beaten its predecessor twice and having chosen my class after extensive consultation of the online wikis.
As for the whole death thing, I'll argue that the Souls games are actually significantly MORE forgiving about death than most other titles on the market. When you die, you lose all your souls, but you keep any other items you picked up, and any shortcuts you opened and miniboss-or-larger enemies you killed do not respawn. And if you really can't get past a certain area, there's always other areas of the game to explore, especially if you have the Master Key, which helps you unlock alternate routes into areas and shortcuts back.
All that, plus the general enemy placement and combat system, results in two game that I found significantly LESS frustrating than, say, the total bullshit of Uncharted 2 and 3 where several heavily armored guys who each take more shotgun blasts to the head to kill than you do converge on your position while distant snipers and dudes with grenade launchers draw a bead on your position and you can't unstick yourself from the nearest piece of cover in time to retaliate.
As for the whole death thing, I'll argue that the Souls games are actually significantly MORE forgiving about death than most other titles on the market. When you die, you lose all your souls, but you keep any other items you picked up, and any shortcuts you opened and miniboss-or-larger enemies you killed do not respawn. And if you really can't get past a certain area, there's always other areas of the game to explore, especially if you have the Master Key, which helps you unlock alternate routes into areas and shortcuts back.
All that, plus the general enemy placement and combat system, results in two game that I found significantly LESS frustrating than, say, the total bullshit of Uncharted 2 and 3 where several heavily armored guys who each take more shotgun blasts to the head to kill than you do converge on your position while distant snipers and dudes with grenade launchers draw a bead on your position and you can't unstick yourself from the nearest piece of cover in time to retaliate.
Many a game designs itself as one consistent flow, almost as steady as a movie's running time, and I'm not convinced that this is the right model for every game to follow. Some games aren't actually about the victory/defeat model, and I don't believe that a death clause should be thrown in for those.
With other games, that are certainly a win-lose model, having such little consequence to death at all - to the point where there's not even a second between 'game over' and your next attempt - encourage the player to ignore the reasons behind their defeat. Instinctively built into us is a desire to be invincible, and when something like failure pops up to remind us that, no, we have much yet to learn, we want to pretend it didn't happen. We'd rather carry on, oblivious, until the attempt when we win, since that's the only one that matters to us. I know, since this is exactly the pitfall I've fallen into many times.
That's part of why I respect the model of Dark Souls' and its predecessor so much - because as my knight slowly, reluctantly keels over to his wounds and painfully dies, the game wants me to remember that it happened. It wants me to ask why it happened, and what can I do next time to avoid it. From this, I genuinely learn from every moment, until I learn even from points like getting hit in the first place, and my own successes. Levelling up in Dark Souls has become inconsequential as a result; I don't need to be more powerful to beat the boss or make it to the next bonfire; the wisdom I have is enough.
Let me thank you for spending as much time with Dark Souls as you did. While it's a game I know isn't for everyone and for every time, I also want everyone to try it. I'll lament that I will never hear about your opinion on its integrated approach toward storytelling, but I I appreciate this much.
And about that minotaur in Dark Souls - did you try climbing the tower to leap down and do a plunging attack? Three of those and it's a goner; just be sure to leave enough space between you and it when you climb the ladder.
I kind of like how Demon's Souls and it's sequel punish you for tripping up, I find it makes me pay more attention to what the hell is happening, hence less likely to do it again. This results in me willingly learning, and improving at the game, rather than being forced to figure it all out an the last second on the end boss. Demon's Souls and Dark Souls are a great example of training your player to adapt to a harder difficulty in order to challenge themselves and provide a huge incentive, other than an extra snippet of plot that you can get off Wiki, to actually succeed at it. Nothing is more gratifying than when you actually manage to defeat a boss in that game, it's like passing a level you've been stuck on in the old 16 bit platformers.
Yatzhee! you have finally become a gamer in mind. Most gamers get dopamine when they are loosing as well as winning, this keeps them from getting discouraged. This is measurable and the same mechanisms are at work in compulsive gamblers. I could find some articles about that...
The original Aliens Vs Predator (the 2000 game, not the abortion released last year) was criticized because you had to start the level over if you died. And the human and alien characters died if an enemy so much as noticed them. An update added a very interesting mechanic to satisfy these complaints.
They gave you a limited number of "saves" based on the play difficulty. So now choosing to save or not was turned into a strategic gameplay element instead of an obligatory extra button push every time you passed a save point, or every 30 seconds in the case of games with quicksave like doom3.
If you screwed up and saved in the wrong place there was a chance you couldn't beat the level and had to start over. If you were too conservative then you had to go pretty far back to your last safe location.
It was a great way to modernize the gameplay while still retaining the tension inherent in the "make one mistake and lose" situation and a very long level.
They gave you a limited number of "saves" based on the play difficulty. So now choosing to save or not was turned into a strategic gameplay element instead of an obligatory extra button push every time you passed a save point, or every 30 seconds in the case of games with quicksave like doom3.
If you screwed up and saved in the wrong place there was a chance you couldn't beat the level and had to start over. If you were too conservative then you had to go pretty far back to your last safe location.
It was a great way to modernize the gameplay while still retaining the tension inherent in the "make one mistake and lose" situation and a very long level.
The online component lets you enter other peoples' single-player worlds for various purposes. You can summon other players to your world to fight through an area or beat a boss together. On the other hand, there are various ways to disrupt other people's games. You can invade another person's world and try to kill them, which creates some of the game's most spectacular fights. Plus, you can leave hints on the ground for other players, and other players can rate those hints for helpfulness, which can confer a bonus for you. In short, the game is built around this subtle cooperation, and to play without it can be very frustrating.MonkeyPunch said:
Dark/Demons souls deathsystem is similer to and more forgiving than diablo 2. In diablo 2 you dont get to keep your gear when you die, and on nightmare or hell difficulty you even lose xp that you CANT recover unless you start killing again.
So whats so damn wrong with the system in this game? If you die, its most likely your fault anyway.
So whats so damn wrong with the system in this game? If you die, its most likely your fault anyway.
Indeed: that's actually one of the reasons I quit playing Demon's Souls: I got into that game so late, that most of the people playing it weren't playing it when I was. As a result, I'd get all this good karma for giving positive advice when I wasn't playing, which serves me nothing. I'd rather get some XP if I'm offline but...oh well. Then the Sony servers went kablewy and I just figured; fuck it, I want a beer.Zetona said:
Not to be pedantic, but that sums up every single video game character ever created. The only difference is if you decide to invest emotionally in a character. Mario, Commander Shepherd and Bayonetta have no more thoughts, feelings or drives than do the characters you play in Dark Souls or Skyrim.CyricZ said:
I totally respect your personal choice and preference in games, but I don't know if I respect your arbitrary metric for engagement in a particular game. You can't tell me that Rayman Origins or Super Meat Boy is any less a numbers game than Dark Souls. It's all code under the surface, just arranged in different ways.
Well, I'd say Yahtzee's problems/difficulties/dislikes with Dark Souls (and Demon's Souls) have less to do with the games themselves and entirely to do with personal preference. Not everyone will "get" a game like Dark Souls, especially a game like this that can be so challenging. Yes, it is punishing, but it's also very rewarding when you figure out what you're doing wrong.Yahtzee Croshaw said:
Take the Taurus demon for example. If you pop out on that bridge and go meet that thing head on, most likely at that stage of the game it's going to turn you into paste. However, if you notice that there's a ladder up the tower you come out of and/or someone has left a message that says "Try a plunging attack" all of a sudden you're like, "Hey! So obvious!" so next time around you climb that ladder, kill the two dudes up there and then jump on that demon's head twice and all of a sudden you've beaten it and hardly broken a sweat. Much of the game is like that. You bumble along, encountering huge enemies and saying "how the fuck do I beat this guy?!" and then you discover the "trick" and you beat them.
I also wonder if Yahtzee is playing the game "right". A lot of us have been trained by modern games that if we simply run in to a mob of enemies and mash the buttons eventually we will win. We'll chop down the last guy, heal up and move on to the next group. Dark Souls doesn't work like that. You have to go slowly, you have to draw enemies out one at a time, you have to think about defense and offense if you wish to win. Run in swinging and most likely you die. I actually think that Yahtzee probably is playing teh game "right" because he strikes me as a fairly intelligent guy, but I get the sense that he's either too impatient for a game like this (gratification now, ************!) or maybe he's just not good enough at playing the game.
"only to find that I was supposed to be going another way all along."
And when has this ever been a problem? We all holler about player freedom and open worlds and then a game gives you the option to take different routes and you complain? Granted, some of those routes are much tougher than others, but again, isn't that what we wanted? Everyone hated that the enemies scaled in Oblivion and we all wanted some areas to be easier and some to be tougher so that if you went to the wrong place you'd get your ass handed to you. And Dark Souls gives you this and in Yahtzee's opinion it's a "bad" thing? If there's any media consumer that is more schizophrenic in what they want and don't want, it's gamers.
Whatever the reason, I respect his preferences and I'm not going to try and convince anyone that a game they don't like is for them. Just like no one will convince me that I'll have fun playing MW online, because I won't. It's not my bag, baby.
However, when you go into a game knowing you won't like it, well, you probably won't like it. Personally, I think that both Demon's Souls and Dark Souls had great life/death mechanics. Demon's Souls always started you in the same place, but once you got far enough and opened up the shortcuts it was only a short journey to get back to where you died. And Dark Souls bonfires is a nice change up to that, but modified in an interesting way. They're pretty much exactly like checkpoints, but farther apart and more important to the total game. Sometimes when you've gotten really far and you've got a ton of souls and only one or two estus flasks left you feel like you must be close to a bonfire... but where is it? Can you reach it without dying? Can you even find it? Some are hidden! Yup, it's frustrating to die in that situation, but at the same time, you've (hopefully) learned the route, learned what enemies are there and will return to the same spot and farther, to boot.
To each his own, I suppose. And, I guess that these just aren't the games for Yahtzee. Then again, I'm not really sure which are the games for him. Guy doesn't seem to like anything.