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bluegate

bluegate

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meiam said:
and I easily creamed it (it took like 15 minutes, but it wasn't hard at all just long).
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Dodge, roll, pirouette, dodge, slash, dodge, roll, pirouette, slash...

I remember never using potions because I didn't want to run out of them... Took me a long time before I figured out that once made, they will refill with alcohol when resting... Whoops.
 
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Bob_McMillan

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meiam said:
or gear/crafting (which is what 90% of the point of interest on the map boil down to). And so just like that about three quarter of the game just felt like a boring slog.
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I think that's a little unfair. A lot of the gear hunts in Witcher 3 have at least a little bit of a narrative element, ones that I found quite fun. I couldn't care less about the stats they gave me as well, they just looked fucking baller.
 
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Old_Hunter_77

Old_Hunter_77

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meiam said:
I don't know about those grouping, I couldn't care less about score and was never an arcade kid, but I want game to be challenging and quickly grow bored of easy game. I find a lot of aspect of game are just better when difficulty is high. Like, why do I care about looting if I know I can easily breeze trough everything even with super basic gear? This then has repercussion on exploration, crafting and such. It can also affect story, if the story is always trying to act like "this place/these people are soooooo dangerous" but I can clear it all with one hand while on the toilet in another house, it really rob me of any immersion. My biggest example of that is mass effect 2, on anything but legendary, its so easy the whole plot of "OMG Shepard, unless your super prepared you'll never be able to survive the omega relay and the collector" really doesn't work when everytime I meet collector they melt from a stern glare. But suddenly on legendary when I melt from having my head out of cover for 0.5 seconds, I'm a lot more receptive.

The other example to this is witcher 3, I played on the highest difficulty and ran across what, I didn't realize at the time, was an end game monster pretty much at the start of the game, and I easily creamed it (it took like 15 minutes, but it wasn't hard at all just long). This meant I knew I didn't need any of the talent tree upgrades (which do almost nothing to modify the gameplay) or gear/crafting (which is what 90% of the point of interest on the map boil down to). And so just like that about three quarter of the game just felt like a boring slog.
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Defeating a high level boss at the beginning of Witcher 3 on Death March on a first time play-through means you didn't get hit while spending a long time chipping away at its health after being able to immediately read and understand the enemy's moves while mastering control fo the character. So congratulations gamer god but for me, this is just not my lived reality. Maybe.. maybe.. I could do that now, but only because I've played through that game like ten times.

There has to be some middle ground between "one hand on the toilet" and hand-breaking time wasting cruelty for those of us who do want to push through some resistance while experiencing narrative progression.
 
meiam

meiam

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Bob_McMillan said:
I think that's a little unfair. A lot of the gear hunts in Witcher 3 have at least a little bit of a narrative element, ones that I found quite fun. I couldn't care less about the stats they gave me as well, they just looked fucking baller.
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Maybe not 90% but its at least 3/4, there's very little to do in most of the map beyond fighting a random monster for gear or picking up treasure.

Old_Hunter_77 said:
Defeating a high level boss at the beginning of Witcher 3 on Death March on a first time play-through means you didn't get hit while spending a long time chipping away at its health after being able to immediately read and understand the enemy's moves while mastering control fo the character. So congratulations gamer god but for me, this is just not my lived reality. Maybe.. maybe.. I could do that now, but only because I've played through that game like ten times.

There has to be some middle ground between "one hand on the toilet" and hand-breaking time wasting cruelty for those of us who do want to push through some resistance while experiencing narrative progression.
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Witcher 3 start you with a spell that negate one hit from any enemy (realistically should be a talent tree caper spell), most enemy don't have combo, they just have single strong attack. So long as you dodge maybe half of them (which is very easy), or even keep your distance for a little bit of time, you can just re cast the spell on every hit, because there's no mana nothing stop you, your start the game functionally immortal. For group encounter, the mind control spell work every time, and other enemy will gleefully attack their friend and one shoot them, making it effectively an instant death spell.
 
Old_Hunter_77

Old_Hunter_77

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meiam said:
Maybe not 90% but its at least 3/4, there's very little to do in most of the map beyond fighting a random monster for gear or picking up treasure.


Witcher 3 start you with a spell that negate one hit from any enemy (realistically should be a talent tree caper spell), most enemy don't have combo, they just have single strong attack. So long as you dodge maybe half of them (which is very easy), or even keep your distance for a little bit of time, you can just re cast the spell on every hit, because there's no mana nothing stop you, your start the game functionally immortal. For group encounter, the mind control spell work every time, and other enemy will gleefully attack their friend and one shoot them, making it effectively an instant death spell.
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Axii puppet (mind control) is notoriously finnicky and useless, I don't know what patch or version you were playing back then or whatever.
 
Chimpzy

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What year is it? Tho I do enjoy the Sega scream at the end.
 
Gordon_4

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Old_Hunter_77 said:
I know we hate Kotaku but here is the rare opinion piece I agree with. Well, at least it accurately addresses some of the stuff I been trying to say and how I feel about modern gaming.

The Debate Over Silksong Points To A Growing Divide In Gaming

If you don't wanna click the link, basically what he's saying is that he finds it helpful to look at two mindsets in gaming: the folks that want a challenge and the folks that want a story and progress. He traces the former to arcades, where high scores and the social competitiveness of gaming was about performance and skill and there was no "finishing" a game. The latter traces to the rise of single player campaigns in games where you have some kind of a narrative and difficulty options and generally it was expected and desired to get to an actual "end."

So yeah it's another "difficulty in gaming" argument but also more specific and fair.

The article spoke to me because it made me realize how my tastes in gaming shift as I myself shifted between these two groups. I was an 80s arcade and NES kid so the social aspect of it and feeding quarters to machines was what gaming was to me- the first group, the OG git gud crowd.
Probably the first game I felt the need to get to the end was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. But then after that I kind of stopped gaming seriously for a long while. It as Assassin's Creed 2 and Uncharted 2 that drew me back in but that was all solo gaming at home and with stories so I re-entered gaming as the second group, the finish a story group.
Then I somehow got addicted to FromSoftware and was squarely in both groups for a bit but still they are single player games with sort of a story and finishing them was part of it. We talk about FromSoftware's impact on gaming all the time but really I think what it did was collapse these two groups and hence all the difficulty in gaming arguments.

I am now finding myself completely again in the second group- I buy a game, I wanna finish it. Hearing and reading people's experiences with Silksong makes me feel like I'm listening to cult members- "it's miserable that's why I love it! I can't believe how great this game is I wanted to throw my controller out the window during that one part where I had to fight a hundred dudes 10/10." As always I'm glad folks who enjoy this stuff are enjoying it, I'm gonna go back to saving my high school from the evil persona monsters...
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The only time I have ever appreciated and indeed enjoyed hyper timing and counters and the like has been in Tekken. Very Arcady game, some narrative - fuck off Tekken 6, nobody liked you - but it’s all about the fighting. Now this mind set is the same as you’d need to get good at stuff like Dark Souls and Sekiro etc. So I think the key difference is, I did martial arts - Jiujitsu if anyone cares - for over twelve years. I understood the kind of work that goes into the mastery of skill Tekken is letting me pretend I have.

So getting my shit kicked in by the CPU or better players instead gave me the same feeling I got from failed belt grading, and I did fail a few times, which was to get back up and go again. Bit a Souls-like with its much greater level of fantasy as gameplay doesn’t connect with me the same way.
 
meiam

meiam

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Chimpzy said:

Aside from the setting, looking like a pretty unremarkable soulslike, but there is that one moment at around the 3:10 mark I find kinda interesting.

A bollywood soulslike where you aura farm on enemies, Singham style, as a central mechanic would be neat.
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Forget the india part, Soulslike in modern setting is pretty cool thought, the only other one was the industrial one, and that was more close future.
 
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Xprimentyl

Xprimentyl

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This guy, I imagine, is the person Miyazaki probably envisioned when he wanted gamers to consume his cryptic way of world-building and storytelling. This dude is just a joy to watch, and he seems so enthusiastic with every item he picks up once he learns how much of the story is buried in the item descriptions, chewing on the lore and trying to piece every bit of info together into his own speculative narrative. I finished his DS1 run, and am currently about halfway through his DS2 run, and I must say, I enjoy his time with DS2 way more than my own time in that game. He loves it as someone untainted by bias from experience and opinion from others; he's just a guy enjoying Souls games for the first time, and it's making me miss that I was that guy at one time.

GAMES CAN BE A JOY, PEOPLE!!

 
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Bedinsis

Bedinsis

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An article about The Sims and how it had been a safe space for trans people, in light of the recent purchase of publisher EA:
slate.com

This Video Game Was a Safe Haven for Millions. Now It Belongs to People Who Hate Them.

The Sims helped me—and countless other queer players—see ourselves. The new owners could erase that legacy.
slate.com slate.com
I wish there had been some example of a studio purchase leading to a downplay of queer content, just so we had some historic example to go on instead of loose speculation.
 
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