A high difficulty is not inherently good game design. Making a game more approachable through lower difficulty settings with additional checkpoints doesn’t make it worse for people who like a challenge. It just makes it enjoyable to more people.
Claiming it’s down to “artistic vision” just feels dishonest. You could claim Studio Ghibli movies should never be dubbed or subbed. You just have to learn Japanese to enjoy them, just don’t watch them if that’s not for you… but why? How is it a bad thing if more people can enjoy something?
Cup Head is a great example. It’s a fantastic game with an art style that younger kids love. But it’s too difficult for most kids, which doesn’t make the game better, it just locks them out from a game they’d otherwise love.
Is it not fair for the game developers’ artistic vision to not be accessible to all? Accessibility is nice, expands the potential audience, but if it compromises my artistic vision and I’m ok with giving up reach and money to preserve it, that doesn’t make my game bad or my vision invalid.
It would be ridiculous to call up the bar or the ama and complain to them that becoming a lawyer or a doctor is not accessible to all.
One last addition, adding control remapping, color options, and text to speech are true accessibility. Easy mode is fake accessibility
Easy mode is not fake accessibility. Celeste has the correct idea in allowing players adjust the difficulty for accessibility purposes. Not everyone has the same reaction speed, same cognitive abilities, same eyesight. There are people who can only use one hand and that automatically makes reacting to attacks many times harder, should they be excluded from being able to enjoy the game because they are not physically capable enough for the boss fights? And boss fights are probably 5% of the game anyway!
The runbacks don’t bother me too much so far. I do think there’s some skills in the runback, but it relies heavily on the level designer as well. An ideal runback:
is relatively short, you should have time to reflect on the boss, but not get sidetracked
has enemies that drop currency, so repeated runs slowly build you up (assuming you always collect your shade)
has enemies that train you on the bosses timings or counters (if the boss is parry heavy, put a tricky-to-parry enemy enroute back)
has a “speed route” that let’s you bypass most or all of the run once you’ve figured it out
These factors make a run both interesting game play and still a form of progression. A badly designed run lacks these factors, being just a slow slog to get back into the boss fight.
My biggest complaint so far is the double damage. Every boss and so many common enemies do nothing but double damage. Why even have 5 HP instead of 3? And it being 5 (and bind healing 3) have compounding effects with this problem. Taking a single hit on the way to a boss actually costs you an entire “boss hit” so runbacks are worse all around. Trying to heal mid boss only gets you “one and a half” hits back which takes a lot of silk to build up and probably is a worse deal for you than just using the silk to power more attacks.
Double damage would suck a lot less (and be a better mechanic) if you had 6 HP to start, or if you healed 4 at a time, or if bosses didnt always do 2 damage. There’s no tension to avoiding punishing hits because every move is equally punishing. It makes fights feel very conservative which is maybe intentionally meant to evoke Hornet as a careful hunter, using traps and plans to take down big foes.
I find the opposite though, she feels fragile and reactive. I wish starting damage was higher too. I had this issue in Hollow Knight as well, everything takes too many hits. Common enemies are spongy, bosses take at least 33% too long across the board. Especially it gets annoying since a lot of bosses so far get spammier and faster towards their final phases, so you spend so much time dodging the same attacks and looking for openings to chip hits in. Skills and traps don’t do enough damage to feel especially useful either.
I also hate, and this is another compounding factor, the complete lack of enemy HP bars. On regular enemies this is annoying (gotta count my hits) but on bosses it feels negligent. Bosses have multiple phases and take so long to kill, it would be nice to know if my last run was just a hit or 2 away from the end or if I still had a 3rd phase to plan for. It adds to the poor perception of skills and traps as well. Sting Shard and Thread Storm both seem to hit several times, around a half-dozen, but neither seems to do much more damage than a couple of regular hits.
Overall I’m really loving Silksong, the art and music are top notch. The DLC for HK convinced me that Team Cherry and I disagree about some fundamental ideas in game design, and HKSS bears that out.
I’m pretty early into the game as well, so I almost didn’t say anything. But even if theres a charm that adds HP bars later, I would be annoyed about it. Why wait so long? I’m over 10 hours in. Why take a slot with it? I get similar annoyances about the compass, but at least that one I can understand because maybe some people like the challenge of landmark navigation using just the maps. There is a skill there, and it is part of the skillset of Exploration (a major pillar of design in any metroidvania).
The yellow tools, in general, I’m iffy about the design of. So far I only have 3: compass, more shards, and auto-collect beads. Of these, auto-beads is the most obviously useful. You need many beads, and they get lost pretty easy. Shards are super common and don’t have many uses. But none of these are essential, and all of them get less useful the later into the game you get. The tradeoff is only meaningful early game, and seems to encourage a balance between memorizing the levels and grinding, neither are amazing activities.
Having the compass charm tied to ALL map markers would certainly up the utility of it, though it’s gating another feature behind both a purchase and a charm. I’ve also only found 1 semi useful trap\red-charm so far. Maybe having more traps and skills that required shell bits would put more pressure on needing them and make the charm that gives extras more appeal for a trap-heavy play style?
Again, I grant that maybe I’m too early in the game yet, but I feel like these systems should be coming together and cohering more after a half-dozen bosses and 10 hours of play.
I, uh, have kinda given up on progressing for the foreseeable future. I’m bad at platforming, and after struggling for probably around half an hour to get through one aection that was particularly difficult for me, I was met with a surprise boss fight. Nearest bench before that section. It’s brutal. It takes me about 5ish minutes to do that section now, but fuck I wish I were exaggerating. None of the other fights have anywhere near as nasty a runback and it honestly feels like they forgot a bench.
The game is hard and that’s fine, but that instance I feel ok bitching about and don’t feel like I’m a qhiny pathetic fuck for doing so, which is incredibly telling given how easy it is to make me feel like a whiny pathetic fuck.
yea, that’s entirely valid. I love these games (Metroidvanias) because of the exploration and worldbuilding. The combat is a way to advance further into that world, but it’s just a means to an end to me. Make it too tough, and you’re preventing me from enjoying the parts I like.
I played a good 4 or 5 hours of Silksong so far and loving it. It’s a little tough though, and I think it could use a nerf.
Bought the PS5 version at launch which is something I dont do with many games. Been fairly happy with the game but it does look a lot like Capcom is moving quickly towards enshittification with this much monetization.
The game is no world, but I do like it a lot more that Rise. There’s a lot more to explore, endemic life is more rich and combat feels more weighty.
Might give rise another go on pc later tough. Got bored with it on Switch near the end of high rank base game.
I’ve watched a video of hers before. My takeaway was that Microsoft is a heavily bloated company that suffocates internal development but with the OG Xbox and early 360, they were like a side bet that didn’t have a great deal of oversight from MS Windows/Office/Server mega money eyes.
They didn’t have a great deal of internal dev studios but they were really good at identifying third party exclusives to pursue and early on managed them and the few studios they did fully acquire well. It worked well for the first Xbox and first half 360. It differentiated the Xbox/360 from Nintendo and Playstation
Then I guess success led to changes in leadership aimed at growth and using Xbox as a platform to push more MS services and they lost the focus and ability to identify and secure great third party exclusives. That coupled with not having internal game dev teams in numbers and experience like Nintendo and Sony meant if they didn’t hit with their living room smart device dominance ambition, they’d just have a worse PlayStation. That’s what they ended up with with the XOne - a worse PS4. Then it happened again with the XSX because of lack of execution with their internal studios. An XSX just became a PS5-lite library-wise
Yeah, they think the Internet will get so quick that people will just stream every game from the cloud from any device and they want to be the leader of that.
@kandoh@simple i would rather say they are aiming for full control over the product ;) How dare you used a bug in our game to your advantage -> we block your acces to the game and of course to continous rising prices , cause there is no second hand deals ... let's hope that steam and gog will be really long available an people still buy games even it's much more expensive already ...
It’ll also save them from flops. They’ll be able to stick a game at the top of the front page and say it got 20 million streams like Netflix does with its shitty movies.
Nah fuck the political implications, the message is %100 correct. The current FPS games don’t give the same enjoyment as I used to get from the old MW3/CS:Source era, and I really enjoyed Splitgate 2 and truly think it can change up a lot of things in the FPS space.
I mean yeah but really no. The political implications are too big to ignore here. Especially given the event being in LA with all the shit going on. Also like as a particularly targeted person in this fascist administration, it really doesn’t feel great for people to use fascist iconography to make a stupid joke!
Also like splitgate 2? Really? The game that during this announcement announced a battle royale mode? The most tired shooter mode since hero shooters? And the one that had $145 microtransactions on launch? This is the savior of fps gaming?
Are you able to leave your house? People are going to wear shit and make jokes. There is no use getting hung up on things that are well out of your control.
So this is a little off topic but is SG2 any good?
I was in love with splitgate 1 at launch then stopped kinda played off and on during the last season and put down the game after they announced they’d stopped. I played some of the closed betas and stuff just felt off, 1 felt like maps were designed with portals in mind offering sight lines and some risky areas if you were gonna shoot thru portals, but 2 felt like they made a pretty cross between a hero/ability plus arena shooter then slapped portals on it, and it just didn’t feel like splitgate to me.
But like, I can’t get into a match where anyone is using portals. In the only arena from SG 1 you can actually See some intent in being Portal oriented, but in all New areas they just dont make sense to usw. The Objectives are placed completely Outside of any Portal areas, and even where they are placed its just like „If you run to the other side of the Map and back, you can flank some random angle no one will ever use
And why make every classes weapon different?
Also, power weapons are just not worth picking up, every 2. Player is a bot, and the game itself feels pretty soulless with this corporate arena vibe that the finals have done better already.
Yeah you’ve just summed up what I’ve been struggling to put into words it just feels off
Ngl if it wasn’t splitgate and remove the portals I think it could have been a good f2p shooter that’s a little bit of arena.
I was never good at portaling in 1 but it was fun, during the closed betas it felt like a way to shave off a couple seconds running instead of using it to flank or get wierd angles
Also yeah it felt very… sterile idk… like it was made for esports both in lore (which isn’t bad) and irl
If you didn’t have the portals, you could just play halo, which I’m doing now
About 1, it was always really fun having 2 ends of the maps as bases and just trying to hold it while trying to portal to the other. At least that’s what I remember. The weapons were also fun (which I can’t say about every weapon except from the fortitude class, since 1 aero’s feels like a paint gun damage wise and the energy gun is an SMG, if someone took it and just completely ruined it for CQC by making the projectiles have the travel time of a sniper firing at 1km.), and the gameplay itself was way less ability centred.
Also, making the lore of a game „Its esports” is just so generic. Sure, turn it into a Gulag people are thrown into by the rich. Turn one company into the bad guy if you want. But not this shit
Oh yeah the base felt really true on that one arena trying to hold your vertical area.
In Atlantis or the underwater map it felt like a “base” slowly rotated around the map for a really fun dynamic as well as that one industrial and lava maps
But yeah my original point was it feels like serveral good ideas (minus the lack of portals) mashed together in one hodge podge
Isn’t Splitgate 2 going to be a BR? Or is that just an optional mode? Because I don’t see diving straight into the dumpster that is Battle Royale as making FPS great again, even without the political undertones.
The political implications were the point though. Or do you think he had no idea what he was doing? The “We didn’t know it would be taken as a political statement” BS is just damage control
I don’t see the game getting either of those things.
Duos, you can already do, you just have to take on a rando as a third. They could scale the difficulty down for 2 players, sure, but Elden Ring’s mutiplayer scaling is notoriously terrible, in part because no amount of scaling can account for the lost potential for splitting aggro, in a game where splitting aggro is king.
Voice chat is something that FromSoft has INTENTIONALLY never included in any prior game, despite there being co-op in all of them. Making players coordinate with each other with very limited communication tools is one of FromSoft’s signature design choices. The fast pace of this game compared to prior games makes the lack of communication tools hurt a lot more, for sure, but it’s still very much playable. Anyone who dislikes this design choice is absolutely free to, but it’s not gonna change.
I was one of the ones to test this game back in March I think, I thought it was a lot of fun. And at that point there were only three classes and one final boss. I only played with randoms, as none of my friends got the invite. I’ll be picking this game up at some point for sure, maybe when it first goes on sale.
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