you best believe I did that ladder thing. and the game still played great. also this still doesn't explain to me why wouldn't you just house rule away the shield thing. cause from everything I've heard you say about the game the shield ting might as well be like the RE4 exploit or that arrow exploit.Phoenixmgs said:
Poise and damage were different with various shields. It took most of the game to find and level enough to use a ?safe? shield like Artorias?. And even then it doesn?t protect against everything. There?s still magic and other elemental damage to consider. Overrelying or abusing shield use can cause problems in certain situations too, like more hostile environmental conditions or mobs, or both.Phoenixmgs said:
Well, Bloodborne is basically refined Souls' combat with the shield house-ruled out. The shield is poorly implement on all fronts in DS1 with bad controls and bad RPG balancing.Bombiz said:
I only played DS1 and you can use the spider shield and block just about every enemy in the game just fine. Sure, I don't think it blocked magic but the amount of mages in the game was probably less than 10. I felt plenty safe with my dex-based character in rags and a spider shield throughout the whole game. I went into DS1 with the mindset that this is going to be some really hard game from the community & memes along with the marketing, and I couldn't believe how easy the game is if you just play with the mindset of surviving. It wasn't a hard game in skill, in mechanics, or in tactics/positioning either. I really didn't understand how the games came to be known as hard, which Miyazaki probably didn't intend to make a game that was hard or even to become the new standard in hard but that's what happened. You can play any standard online shooter and those games require so much more tactical/positioning skill than a Souls game; online shooters are 90% positioning and 10% gunskills. I was let down on all fronts with Dark Souls with regards to difficulty whether it was on the skill-based side or not, I guess the new generation just has 0 patience because that's all you need to play well in a Souls game. The things the Souls games excel at is level design and atmosphere and they're OK at just about everything else.hanselthecaretaker said:
Phoenixmgs said:
this doesn't answer my question though. why not just not use the shield in a souls game? we've already established that you choose not to do certain things in same games if it would ruin the fun or break the games so why not do that here? I mainly ask this cause it seems like that's one of if not thee major problem you have with the souls games.Phoenixmgs said:
Replace 'shield' with 'gun' and 'DS1' with 'Bloodborne'. At least the shield is a solid defense mechanic, whereas the gun is just.. trash.Phoenixmgs said:
That makes it too easy for him though. He is a supreme gamer, if you haven?t deduced it yet since the days of him arguing with Ezekiel almost constantly.Casual Shinji said:
Well, I also just kinda like shitting on the gun mechanic in Bloodborne, and will grab any oppertunity to do so.hanselthecaretaker said:
I was saying that the sorta "non-skill" skills (like positioning) are far more crucial in something as basic an online shooter as COD. I was hoping and expecting Dark Souls to be a punishing game in that regard where every attack, block, movement had to be well thought-out and managed (via stamina) but that isn't the case at all with the games, I was rather disappointed in that regard. The only skills the Souls games demand more than the average game is just paying attention and being cautious, that's all you have to do to succeed. I was basically expecting to have to defeat dungeons devilishly created by a bloodthirsty DnD DM from enemies (of course) to traps to puzzles. I was constantly waiting for DS1 to "kick into gear" and I thought Sen's Fortress would be kinda the start of that but the traps were so damn obvious if you simply don't run through the level. I wouldn't say at all I found DS1 easy due to above average gaming skills, all I did was pay attention.hanselthecaretaker said:
Much of what I expected from DS1 is above. I used the shield most of the way because I was expecting a really difficult game from enemies to traps and everything inbetween. I thought the point of the game was succeeding by using everything at your disposal to defeat brutally designed dungeons.Bombiz said:
Well, BB forces you to play the "fun" way and usually tops the list of best Souls' game...Avnger said:
The gun is better than the shield at least. The gun has it problems as you can just look at a PvP fight and it also makes those hunter fights (since the AI gets infinite ammo for some reason) rather annoying when they should be some of the funnest fights in the game. At least the gun requires timing and resource management (to a degree).Casual Shinji said:
I merely don't like poor game design and mechanics. Difficulty doesn't make a mechanic good or bad. I play board games now more than video games because the game design there is far superior. It's not at all being some "l33t" gamer but just playing games that are worth the time to play. I'm currently playing the PS4 remake of Shadow of the Colossus because it's jut an amazing game and trying to play Hob as well but not really digging it much. So many video games nowadays are just about throwing whatever is popular vs designing mechanics to fit the game and core experience. Just like a great movie where everything gets edited out that is superfluous, games should be designed in the same manner.hanselthecaretaker said:
The fact that it's completely dependent on the worst mechanic in Soulsborne (the lock-on) makes the gun by extension the worst weapon in Soulsborne. In Souls you couldn't manually aim your spells, which was already kinda shit, but hey, it's magic, so you can make the argument that it operates on a different set of laws. You could however manually aim bows. The fact that you can't manually aim your gun in Bloodborne is bafflingly stupid.Phoenixmgs said:
okay. then I can say the same for a game like RE4. I expected a horror survival game so I'm justified in exploiting the game and am justified to say the game is bad because of those exploits. I mean why would I not play that way? after all it's a horror/action survival game. I could probably say similar things about Horizon Zero dawn. that game is all about hunting monsters so I'm justified in using the most exploitive way.Phoenixmgs said:
None of the offensive weapons in Souls were meant for parrying though, and Bloodborne is an action game with a gun used for a parry mechanic. Only a fraction of them are useful for actual damage, and that?s with a certain build requirement using a monocle if outside of lock-on range. Thinking of the freedom of movement and the speed of the action it would be cumbersome to have to manually aim at every enemy, which can be done as it is but not very well within the context of the game design.Casual Shinji said:
Phoenixmgs said:
I tried it too, but I love difficulty curves too much and new game plus pretty much gets rid of that, whether it's God of War or Resident Evil 4. With GoW it's kinda frustrating though, because NG+ is probably the only way to take advantage of the Skills bonus stats.CoCage said:
I totally agree the lock-on mechanic is archaic and makes Souls actually harder because you'll die because of the lock-on quite often. In BB, you mainly use the gun in 1v1 fights against bosses, big enemies, or the hunters and lock-on performs fine in those type of fights. Where lock-on is shit in mob fights but the gun isn't really used in those situations anyway. IIRC, the blunderbuss (what I used all game) had a pretty good chance at hitting without being lock-on because it's spread was pretty wide. I think the lock-on hurts the shield more because I couldn't stand how the shield controls different when locked-on/not locked-on that blocking in a mob fight was more about fighting the controls than the enemies. BB vastly improved your parry ability with the gun because just about any enemy that looked like they could be parried into a visceral attack could whereas in DS (at least DS1) you needed a FAQ up to know which enemies you could parry with a shield.Casual Shinji said:
For me, RE4 was the one and only RE I've ever played. I didn't go in with any preconceived notions outside of the gameplay vids I checked out so I basically knew how it played from that. I don't think the RE community or RE4 reviews boasted about how hard the games were either like Dark Souls. I saw so many memes about the Souls difficulty (and I personally avoid meme stuff as much as possible), of course the "git gud" (that they stole from MGO), along with reading comments of how people literally claimed DS is the hardest game they ever played. I don't recall any difficulty speak anywhere near that when playing RE4.Bombiz said:
I'm not trying to say to make the Souls games hard on a skill-based level but a mental level. One of the things I heard about before playing the Souls games was that you have to study each enemy and figure out how to kill them, but that wasn't true at all. The game is so tactically simple and that was my main disappointment, not that the enemies required very little skill in killing with regards to execution. When the enemies move slow not requiring good reflexes to kill nor is there really anything to consider tactically, combat isn't very engaging then. At least give me 1 of those 2 qualities. Something like Shadow of the Colossus is a good example (in a sense) where killing the colossi once you know how to is really easy as there's very little skill-based difficulty in defeating them. Even Horizon did a far better job in rewarding the player quite a lot for finding all the little tricks to defeating each of the machines, not to mention the machines are quicker than a normal Souls enemy too. And, of course, I'd love to see traps require more awareness to uncover because like I said, Sen's Fortress had the most obvious traps, it was basically like a DM telling the players there's a hole in the wall there with a slightly raised plate on the floor to boot. And, I'd love to see puzzles in a Souls game as well. I've said many times my ideal Souls game would be an environmental puzzle game (mainly) with like 10% of the combat encounters of a typical Souls game (keeping the bosses of course). I believe that would be in tune with what the Souls games do best, level design and atmosphere, vs being such a combat oriented game.hanselthecaretaker said:
Oh. So you actually have no reason then.Phoenixmgs said:
That last post wasn't about why you shouldn't house-rule stuff out of Dark Souls, but why I didn't when I played it. Bloodborne is the best playing Souls game mainly because it basically house-ruled a bunch of shit out of Souls. What I heard about Dark Souls (from real life friends to the community to reviews) before playing very much seemed like the games were a legitimate challenge and just beating it was basically the point so I played it in that manner. Sure, RE4 was categorized as survival horror but it was never talked about as being some difficulty benchmark. Even the previous games that I saw friends play here and there, you could just run around zombies and such. Again, that's why I played RE4 with a more "fun" mindset vs my "win at all costs" mindset while playing DS; not saying you can't or shouldn't house-rule DS but why I didn't and it probably would've been a more fun game if I had at the time as I much preferred BB over DS1 for doing it for me pretty much. Basically, you should house-rule stuff out of any game that you think will make it better.Bombiz said:
