I haven't played Silksong yet, in part because truthfully, Hollow Knight was alright but not my favorite Metroidvania. The one thing I really disliked about the original was the runbacks. I remember getting stuck on one platforming section, and I could easily get to the halfway point where I kept dying to retrieve my money, but then drop it again because there was no turning back from this halfway point, had to keep trying to finish it. I wanted to just explore a different part of the map and come back to this section later, but sunk cost fallacy forced me to keep bashing my skull against it.
Which then felt like this mechanic conflicted with the exploration I expect from a Metroidvania. That's the real problem IMO.
You yourself admit it's a fallacy! This isn't exactly a "skill issue" situation, but in future efforts on these kind of games you might try being more thoughtful about when to take a break and spend accumulated currency.
Although as others have pointed out elsewhere in the thread, learning to accept not retrieving your stuff is sometimes necessary too. I lost around 1500 at a certain boss by getting too cocky trying to fight enemies on the runback instead of skipping them, and it took me a while to make peace with it lol.
If you do end up playing Silksong you should know that there is a mechanic specifically addressing this, where you can convert your currency into consumable items at a bit of a loss to keep them across deaths.
There are mechanisms in both games that allow you to remotely retrieve your body if you are desperate not to lose it. Hollow Knight is definitely less forgiving than Silksong in this respect though.
Exploration is a task that has inherent difficulty in the genre, it's uncommon to have actual points of no return as you describe, but if you can't see through a particular segment to the next checkpoint, yeah sometimes giving up will cost you. An actual point of no return probably means you're on the cusp of a sweet new ability though.
I am returning to Hollow Knight thanks to the Silksong hype. I had dropped it before because I was unsure where I needed to go to progress and was getting sick of running around the map trying to figure out which paths were actually available to me and which needed some equipment I didn’t have. Well, I did figure it out and basically have everything important unlocked so now I am enjoying it again.
If you do pick it up again, I have some advice. First, there’s a relic in an area called the Hive that will give you passive health regen if there’s a long enough gap between instances of damage. This means you can keep messing up a platforming section and as long as you don’t rush it you can heal back after messing up without needing new sources of soul. Second, there are some sections that are traversable with minimal equipment but become trivial with more. Deepnest was really annoying to me when I went through it and I frankly would have probably enjoyed it if I had one really helpful item unlocked (or even just a bit more health). Third, don’t worry too much about money. Normal enemies don’t give you much from farming and I think I’ve run out of stuff to spend it on mostly from other sources. So don’t be afraid to let it go. If you’ve unlocked the fast travel thing, just head back to vendors when you’ve noticed you accumulated a decent amount.
Like I said, I’m enjoying the game again after years away, but I really wish they had a better way of letting you know where you should go next and what isn’t available to you. Needing to go through zones again to check if something is now unlocked or not is tiresome. The pins help but they are not enough, and I didn’t think to reserve certain colors for certain types of obstacles the first time.
Regarding difficulty: I’ve lived through the 80’s, where difficulty was ramped up to make the game last longer, as you only had precious few kilobytes to fill with content. I’ve grown to hate difficult games.
It is your right as creator to go that way if you wish, but it is my right as player to hate your guts if I buy your game and it kills me over and over again in the first minutes.
If it is clear that the topic is Impressionist art, I would not go. If I buy the ticket to see Expressionism and get Impressionism instead, I would fell upset.
Difficulty is subjective. Creating multiple levels of difficulty either takes tremendous effort to do well or, as is the case with most games, an adjustment to some numbers that is less an increase/decrease in difficulty and more an increase/decrease to the tediousness of combat.
Puzzle games with difficulty settings alter the complexity of the puzzles. Action games can alter the encounters themselves (how many, of what kind of enemies and their placement in the arena), or even changing the enemy behavior to be more/less complex. Yet this kind of difficulty adjustment isn’t common at all anymore.
I haven’t played this yet, so I don’t know anything about what difficulty settings it may or may not have But in general, I see difficulty settings as an accessibility feature.
I liked the way that Ender Magnolia did it, where, at a save point, you could adjust several settings to customize the difficulty. I was able to temporarily make it slightly easier just for a few bosses that I lost my patience for.
Mandragora had the exact same difficulty system, you could adjust enemy HP, Damage and even Stamina cost at every bonfire. Great accessibility feature.
I think we don’t have enough language to talk about difficulty in a productive way.
You could keep all the boss mechanics the same in a game but add a 1 minute unstoppable cut scene at the start and the game is “more difficult” because it takes you longer to learn boss patterns and experiment with different strategies. But that feels very different to narrowing the windows to react or expanding the move set of a boss which feels different again to changing the values so you need to grind more/fewer levels or resources to pass it.
“Runback too long” and “git gud” sound a lot like people talking past eachother, but maybe thats just an artifact of the journalist reporting rather than the discussion itself
I like the game, but I definitely think it deserves some criticism. I really don’t get the thinking behind not placing a bench directly in front of every boss arena. The run-backs don’t make the game harder, just more frustrating. It’s also something I disliked in older Souls games, but thankfully they realized the problem and fixed it in Elden Ring. And some mechanics are just baffling, like benches that are locked behind a paywall, which you have to pay every time you want to access the bench. Why on earth would they do this, with currency already being as sparse as it is?
The paid one time bench thing etc is for a narrative reason, the main point of the story as far as I played is about the church scamming people on every occasion. Money won’t be an issue once you reach act 2, I always have more money then I can spend even after buying out all merchants I’ve seen.
As for no benches in front of bosses it’s to discourage throwing yourself at the boss without reflecting on where to improve. The long runs I saw people complain about also were mostly like 2 screens. Worst bossrun so far was probably the judge which was only like 2 screens when you think about it.
I really enjoy the game so far, I’m about half way through act 2 I’d say so maybe it gets super hard later, but right now I think it’s very balanced between a bit challenging but not frustrating. I do feel that the game was created with players like me in mind, someone who did all pantheon, steal soul mode as well as all achievements in hk but is a little bit rusty from the long wait.
I'm in act 2 and while Im in love with the game, I can agree. The game could be impossible for people who aren't already very good at platformers. Benches are very sparse and money is always an issue. I hope Team Cherry make the game more reasonable through updates.
I have no idea what people were expecting to be honest. Hollow Knight was already known for being an extremely difficult game with punishing anti-fun elements like runbacks and corpse runs. Which game had everyone played that got them so hyped for Silksong?
There’s a reason I stayed away from HK, and I will be staying away from Silksong too. Game looks great but I won’t be able to beat it and I won’t have any fun failing to do so.
I think the big difference is that HK had a smooth difficulty curve as you slowly unlock new abilities. Silksong by comparison picks up where HK left off and is immediately hard which makes it hard to approach for new players. Early game areas feel as hard as late game areas from the first game. That's throwing everybody off who is either new to the franchise or hasn't played Hollow Knight since it came out checks notes 8 years ago
Early game areas feel as hard as late game areas from the first game.
Are you sure about that? It's been a while since I played Hollow Knight, but other than Hunter's Marsh I think Sillksong has been comparable to or slightly harder than equivalent parts of the Hollow Knight. The enemies are tougher, but you also get more tools to deal with them so it evens out. Mostly thinking of the projectiles here, but the mobility difference also can't be understated; you can abuse dash attacks in Silksong in a way you never could in Hollow Knight. Also I haven't quite (or at all really) gotten the hang of it but the game might've been designed with parrying in mind, which would allow you to avoid a lot of damage because many of the harder enemies are warrior types.
Ya, Hollow Knight's first areas like forgotten crossroads and greenpath were a lot easier. There werent any mechanics you have to worry about other than jumping and attacking, and most enemies you faced just walk slowly towards you. Bosses were also fairly straightforward.
By comparison Silksong has you fighting tougher enemies that could deal 2x damage, and quick bosses right off the bat like Bell Beast which kills you in 3 hits. Healing taking your entire bar also makes platforming more difficult because newbies will often be low HP and not have enough silk to heal.
Yes, Hornet is way faster and stronger than the knight but that kinda assumes you're good at dashing and pogo jumping, which many people fail at in the start.
Excuse my observation but this is just a Rog Ally with Xbox sticker on it no? Besides that are we just using Xbox label to call things Xbox now ? I guess I don’t get the originality of this
It’s a little confusing because of things shifting around but my understanding is that this the launch of Microsoft’s debloated and handheld gaming targeted version of Windows. Basically they saw what a better experience SteamOS was and realized it was a problem.
I think it’s actually the opposite, as they claimed to have optimised it for gaming with interface and QOL catered to the purpose. That’s more bloat when Microsoft does it.
I’m not a MS fanboy (incredibly far from it) but your comment sparked a vision in my head of an immutable variant of LTSC/iot that function liked a Debian or arch base with vendors building x window interfaces on top of it i(the name is already there). interfaces that are hardware or platform specific (e.g. here’s your Ubisoft skin, here’s your Epic Skin, etc…).
If only we lived in a tech utopia instead of… whatever the fuck the mba’s have spent the last few decades shitting out.
I hate having thoughts of utopia in an orphan crushing world.
I dunno, it literally just looks like a mod for BF3 or BF4. Which would have been fine for just a graphics update and some QoL improvements back in the day, but now all this will be is a Skinner box designed to force you to buy as many microtransactions as possible… Which begs the question of why bother playing this when you could just play BF4 which seems pretty similar but won’t be harassing you endlessly to give EA more money?
That’s how I see it too. Having fun with BF2142 and BF3 playing with bots. I have no intention of giving them money for this expensive online-only spinoff.
The way they use the term ‘expansion’ in the article confused me. They are just talking about how the free content updates have been moved to be sooner than originally planned. They aren’t taking about DLC or an entire paid expansion.
It’s probably good the content comes out sooner seeing as how many lose interest at the current drip feed if content. I wish they would fix the games actual problems though. Or even just the hardware issues.
If I had to take a wild guess, it’s higher-ups sacking employees to get a quick payday.
Microsoft keeps buying up dev teams, promising games, and then prevents games from releasing. I have been questioning their desire to make future consoles, to be honest. It seems like they’re trying to focus on gamepass and maneuvering out of the console market. Especially with their new handheld being made by a different company.
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