Is this a cold take? I think its not hot nor cold. Its a medium take.
I think it depends what someone wants out of a game, and I think most people would agree that classes having just brick wall hard counters can be annoying in games where you play as a single character, like everything should have some chance of fighting everything else, even if disadvantaged by class type etc.
Like imagine a game like marvel rivals, but where you just straight up couldn’t hit ironman as wolverine or similar. I think people would dislike that.
In like a real time strategy game though, thats different.
My true desire was for this town to never have a direction or goal marker, not even once. It’s intellectually offensive. Who do you have to be thrust a map marker under a free person’s nose, saying "Here is your goal. You’re too lazy and stupid to figure it out on your own, and I am not without mercy towards lesser minds, so I’ll do the work for you. Go there. Go and don’t forget to thank me for choosing your goal for you. Love, The Powers That Be.
Oh you died? Here’s a debuff. Oh you thought you could save scum to get around the debuff? Ha! That debuff is on all your saves.
Why? We’re Russian devs. Life is brutual and hard and so should this game.
And for those who don’t want to play it, but still want to experience its world and themes, HBomberguy made a fascinating 2-hours video essay about the first game: Pathologic is Genius, And Here’s Why about the first game.
You want someone to test your games for ways to break it? I know just the guy!
“Hey there, it’s Josh. Today we’re checking out The Milgram Experiment. Thank you devs for the complimentary game code. This is a horror/moral choice simulator. And we all know how trustworthy MY morals and choices are! But enough about that, it’s time for NEW GAME!!!”
20 minutes later
“Well, everything’s on fire. Everyone’s dead. And the frame rate is a staggering 3 frames per year! So that seems like a great place to call it a day. I hope you had fun, I know I did, and I’d like to thank the devs for this copy of their broken game. I’ll see ya next time!”
I do admire his line of reasoning. Just every time. Like I used to do silly things in the sims and theme park, but his natural curiosity is next level. HOLD PLEASE.
And some people STILL can’t beat it without parries.
Granted, I’m in Act 2 (Expert), and I think the ludicrous level factor into damage is to blame. The fact every other (mini)boss you fight is overlevelled, and just a few levels seem to be a 2-3x damage difference, is so stupid, I imagine someone running into 3 in a row and just giving up.
Someone on YouTube made their first playthrough an all-hit run without parries or dodges. On Expert. They had to grind a bit but made it work. I think the Curator fight where he teaches you jumping was the hardest because his damage scales with your level.
spoilerThey even beat Simon without one-shotting him. Impressive stuff.
It really proves that the game can be a normal JRPG, albeit a grindy one in the beginning.
It really proves that the game can be a normal JRPG, albeit a grindy one in the beginning.
It’s unrelated to difficulty, but, is it a good one though? Being grindy to me is generally a pretty terrible thing in a JRPG. Part of marketing for SMTV’s rerelease was nerfing the impact of level on damage, and basically everyone loved that.
I also don’t see many defensive options for the half of the game I’m at besides Maelle’s redirect, or maybe absurd defense/HP stacking, if defense even works.
This goes for every JRPG: if clicking and winning is bad, how is chess popular? It’d just mean the RPG part isn’t balanced (or is not your type of game)
Mario&Luigi, the only series close to this I’ve played, just does it way better, some dodges require holding, almost all include figuring out who to dodge with, different effects depending on when you jump etc. Parries in E33 come down to timing one button, and occasionally pressing the others with very clear telegraphs. And dodging seems barely more helpful
I absolutely hate parry systems and cheated my way through it, although I lost interest once something spoilery happened to the main character you’ve been playing as.
I was actually optimistic, because I like Mario&Luigi, so these combat systems CAN work. The problem is, the parry systems in E33 are 80% of your success (if you don’t grind), yet are more shallow by comparison, and most of the depth is in the RPG parts that are just a supplement (unless you grind + play on easier difficulty settings, but it seems you need a Picto for AP on damage to let you have fun then)
Both Mario RPG and the M&L games have timing systems I don’t mind. They have pretty generous windows and don’t punish you too severely if you miss them. E33 was brutal on both fronts.
That’s also because M&L requires more attention to get the timing right. You need to look for cues who the attack will go to, see if you can jump on the attack or only over it, hold the dodge button rather than press, or multitask when both bros are being attacked. Or sometimes, DON’T jump, because you then take damage. The games are puzzle/action games with JRPG elements slapped in.
E33 is extremely telegraphed (barring the very rare jukes) so it needs to compensate with tight timing and erratic animations, requiring both higher skill + trial and error. Sometimes have to press another button, but you don’t even need to figure it out (I tried to jump some attacks because of Elden Ring habits lol), the enemy or whole screen telegraphs it. It’s a JRPG with action slapped in, at its core at least.
For another example, Deltarune and Undertale are basically action games too, but do a lot of stuff with their dodging, sometimes even switching genres to platformer/shooter etc.
Da Wei: gives step by step instructions only for players to ignore them and get stuck (reading is hard).
Also Da Wei: designs a fast, strong and tough endgame boss only for some psycho to hit-stun her, yeet her around the arena, kill her by fall damage and post it on Bilibili for the lolz.
I’m all for easy difficulty options in games, but I’m never, ever going to use them. I just can’t motivate myself to play if I’m not accomplishing something.
Well that’s not true either. I mean sometimes, sure, but in general if you know what you want and you work towards it, you can accomplish things and be rewarded.
This is the thing, everyone is different. What is difficult for some, will be easy for others, and it will even flip for the same people on different games.
The best option is having a wide array of difficulty options. In stone games I get bored of it’s too easy, in others I get bored of it’s too hard.
I tend to err on ‘normal’ to ‘slightly more difficult than normal’. But some games I don’t want difficulty at all because I’m there for the ride.
I keep on getting told this by people, especially fans of FeomSoft and soulslikes.
I figured I’d take a crack at them this year, and also Bloodborne is my boyfriend’s favorite game, so I played it. And that feeling that everyone describes about the satisfaction and accomplishment… Never happened. I beat the bosses and was just like… Okay, on to the next one then I guess. I did have a much better time playing through co-op with him, but I still wouldn’t say I felt accomplished by it.
I don’t really like tower defense games, but I would never dream about trying to tell devs that they’re doing it wrong because I don’t like how they do it. I just don’t play them.
Well… You totally can. I like towerr defense games too, but I’ve never played one that I would call perfect. Even my favorite games I could dig deep and give design notes on. Where it’s feasible a lot of games have mods or hacks. A lot of people like Pokemon romhacks more than actual games. I put hundreds of hours into Civ 6 starting vanilla, but mods can fix a lot of the little inconveniences and add new content to the game. I think I’m in the minority of Skyrim players who prefers to keep it vanilla- most people mod the hell out of it.
Bloodborne was still fun, especially on subsequent runs and with co-op. I think it would be a way better game overall if they designed any sort of real onboarding experience. A training dummy in the hunter’s dream, maybe the ability to try out different weapons there before investing resources into them. Using better language (shooting someone is not a “parry”, and why does the axe do blunt damage while the hammer does piercing damage?). An actual goddamn map. A journal system to keep track of what you’ve done in the game so it’s easier to pick up again 3 months later. Clear item descriptions that include numbers. Explanations for what the stats actually do. None of this is what I would call “difficulty”, and once you gain the initial knowledge and experience these problems aren’t as big of a deal, but it does make the game a lot less accessible for new players.
And I question how much value their absence really adds to the players who do stick around to push through and get that experience. It seems like more of a marketing gimmick to be “different” and foment an elitist, hipster-esque fan base. Or maybe it’s a question allocating of the development resources. It’s a shame because there’s a lot of great design too, it’s just hidden behind these frustrating problems that the rest of the industry solved decades ago.
If I wasn’t motivated to play it for my boyfriend I would have just dropped it early on. I don’t feel like I accomplished anything by suffering through that frustration, I just feel annoyed that I had to deal with these problems I feel like I should not have existed in a 2015 game.
For me, good story and/or fun gameplay is the accomplishment, whether it’s difficult or not. If it’s too difficult, I just won’t bother. I don’t have time for that.
So I remember once “playing” a visual novel.
Over the period of ~10 hrs of reading (maybe ~ 4 hrs for a normal-speed reader), there was exactly 1 (one) point, where I had a choice to make.
The rest was just clicking “next”.
That could have been a PDF (or 4, because there were 4 options in the choice) instead of a Windows executable.
Then there is this thing in scripted events, that some of the high budget games are guilty of.
It’s stuff like press button to open door or sth, where you are essentially stuck in place with nothing else to do other than press the button and whatever action is done, doesn’t end up increasing immersion in the least, because it is just like a cut-scene getting paused in between, just to say, ‘press button to continue watching the cut-scene’.
I recently played the new silent hill and I didn’t hesitate to put combat difficulty on easy, it was a matter of my own health at that point.
I could endure a horror story, but the stress of getting beaten up and having to run away from grotesque monsters while trying to solve cryptic puzzles was too much for me.
E: Lmao at the person who downvoted possibly the greatest game in recent times. I’m sure you think yourself above 350,000 people who enjoy the game concurrently.
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