Oh look, a boss fight. Will this be a fair-and-balanced skill-based experience? Or will it be a DPS race against the clock and hoping I get good RNG on the enemy attack patterns so I don’t die to mostly unavoidable or unreactable damage?
No clue what you’re talking about with bad hitboxes. Dark Souls 1 suffered from this a bit. Dark Souls 2 as well. Bloodborne, Dark Souls 3, Sekiro, and Elden Ring had near damn perfect hitboxes.
It's a Dark Souls boss, not an Armored Core boss. AC bosses in previous games were usually (with the exception of For Answer) just other ACs with really good AI piloting them, not giant, unique things with mechanics that you don't see anywhere else.
That alone is enough for me to wish they'd called it something else.
Yeah the arena disappointed the very shit right out of my ass. I just finished it last night and expected the S-rank contenders to be even slightly more difficult than the D-rank ones, but they weren't.
Arena should have been increasingly demanding fights that each require a unique build to conquer. Or even better, each fight should have made you use a pre-set loadout, so you’d have to explore and learn new builds, and that knowledge could then be carried into designing mechs for the campaign missions.
I bet theres a lot of people out there not changing it up at all, missing out on an a lot that the game has to offer.
Ideally each one could have made you adapt to and learn new mechanics.
But it seems each one is just a randomized loadout or a character from the story, with the exact same AI slapped on.
The arena is honestly pretty close to how it was in the old games. Hell, in 4A, if you beat White Glint in the story missions before beating her in the arena, you got to skip the arena fight entirely on account of her being dead.
Forcing players to use a specific build goes against the entire spirit of the series, though.
It’s just an idea I had from a game design perspective.
Nier: Automata is one game with which I saw a lot of people complain, as the game does nearly nothing to get you to actually experiment with different weapon combinations and plug-in chips, and a lot of people overlook those systems because of it. And hence the experience of some players suffered.
Pre-set loadouts in arenas could have been used to address that design problem by showing players the possibilities.
Although, it wouldn’t necessarily need to be mandatory. Each arena fight could come with a “recommended AC” for countering the opponent, while still allowing players to take in their own mech should they want to. This could have come with the fights being a lot harder as well, making using your own design viable only if you know what you’re doing.
If you want to play the game as a glass cannon DPS machine, you can do that with the right parts. But there's nothing stopping you from actually reading boss patterns and dodging them. The only boss this doesn't apply to is the first one, and I suspect it will get nerfed because of how many people are complaining about it. Some damage is unavoidable but it's minor, every big attack is dodgable and even accompanied by a loud warning sound. I don't think it's unfair.
I think the boss is fairly readable and I can take it down quickly, it’s just annoying that it can fly out of bounds where I can’t hit it but it can still fire at me. That and your starting mech isn’t the best either but I got an S rank on that level after 4-5 attempts.
Yeah the first boss isn’t a great first impression. I knew I could beat it in <5 tries but what annoyed me was how boring it was. Basically shoot at the broad side of a barn while hiding behind cover.
I went the other way around. I went all in with my energy sword. Stayed mid air under it as much as possible to use the rockets. When the second blade combo attack hits, it get staggered and you just pummel the boss. Rince and repeat
But there’s nothing stopping you from actually reading boss patterns and dodging them.
Is there enough information to do this on the first time through, if you have enough skill? Or is it necessary to try and fail multiple times to see and learn each pattern?
I definitely dislike this dynamic in games. If you’re only able to win because you built up muscle memory for that specific segment of the game, it doesn’t feel like a real win, feels almost as unrewarding as grinding XP to make things easier.
If you don’t enjoy practicing bosses, FromSoft games will probably not be for you.
This is not a dunk! There is nothing inherently superior or worthwhile about games that require practice. I personally enjoy Soulslike games, but people who claim they’re they’re the One True Genre are just fooling themselves.
Probably, though I did beat and enjoy the first three games in the Dark Souls series (if you include Demon’s Souls) before I got tired of it, despite having to iterate on some bosses. There are a few saving graces that make it tolerable: effective options for cheesing, being able to grind XP/gear to make it easier, mandatory downtime between fights that punishes trying to brute force practice them, the option to give up for a while and go explore somewhere else, the presence of more dynamics to fights to optimize than correctly reacting to patterns to the point where you can remain mostly ignorant of them and still win another way. Playing DS3 I got the feeling that maybe the issue was getting worse and I was kind of burned out on the gameplay overall so I dropped it.
I would cite Super Meat Boy as a more pure example of the problem I’m talking about, that game left me feeling brain fried and like I hadn’t learned or accomplished anything.
mandatory downtime between fights that punishes trying to brute force practice them
Fascinating. This would frustrate the hell out of me - if I’m trying to get better at something, the last thing I want is enforced wait-time between practice attempts! Still, I’m glad you’ve found other games that you enjoy more rather than being influenced by the Internet’s collective fan-boner for FromSoft.
I'd like to direct your attention to the prior games in the series we're discussing, which have no such issues despite being made by Fromsoft. This "hurr durr issa Fromsoft boss get used to it" schtick is fucking insufferable and ignores the 15 years of history that company had before making those godawful Dark Souls games.
How would the game give you any more information than it already does without worsening gameplay? Like sure, you can make the boss' moves slower and more telegraphed. Put in Atreus to tell you the Boss' weakness or something while you fight him. I'm personally not a fan of that.
In my experience, you don’t have to compromise. You can take meta dual shotguns and two heavy hitting shoulder mounts and just vaporize enemies. Almost trivially, in fact.
The problem is, the game is not more fun if you force yourself into something like a melee hybrid build. It’s significantly harder and there’s less room for error when piloting lightweight ACs, so it’s no surprise that most people find the most comfortable build to be one where you have high health and damage mitigation, insane burst DPS, and stunlock potential.
In short, there’s not a good balance between the different playstyles and difficulty. Some bosses are actually really fun to fight, but two or three of them have made my shit list already just due to the nonsense you are forced to put up with. Juggernaut, Balteus, and Sea Spider are the three biggest offenders right now.
I had very little trouble with Juggernaut once I started fighting him from the air. He has a very low max firing angle and you can get a nice, clear shot on his butthole from directly above him.
My gripe with him isn’t so much his fight mechanic, it’s his absolutely massive hitbox that activates whenever it moves a centimeter.
Fighting him from the air is the most efficient, I’ve discovered, but I spent a good few attempts trying to get in close with the plasma blade and would see three quarters of my HP bar disappear because my recovery animation overlapped with the startup of his charge attack that shouldn’t have been able to hit me because I was to his side or rear.
The Cataphract has been my favorite fight so far. Really challenging, but really rewarding.
I haven’t played AC6 yet but the fact that you’re bothered by unreactable damage makes me think you’re playing this like Souls. But it’s not Souls, it’s a shooter. Be preemptive? Make your own movement pattern hard to follow.
A very glorified DPS race is more or less what a duel is in a shooter.
This is how we know they really nailed it on AC6, this is exactly the experience. Well, whenever I didn’t say FUCK IT, and equipped dual Zimmermans and the stun nail launcher.
If you want 90% of the stuff indexed on pirate sites is dead or with only 1 seed, I haven’t found tools that take it automatically.
But there is this initiatives for books, books or paid courses are more subject to copyright strikes than entertainment material, therefore more difficult for students or workers to find.
It sounds really good, but I’m protesting commercials on a service that promised to be commercial free. I will watch it vicariously through online discussions.
Maybe it’s just the only way I learned to play, but armored core 3 I found only the floating legs were very viable. Then I would equip self aimed missiles and found arena quite simple. The missions you could use different set ups, but I could never win arena much with any other legs.
In 2 and (I think) 3, there was a fifth class of legs called "hover" that basically acted like quads do in hover mode in AC6, but bound to the ground unless you boosted. IIRC, they had the easiest time getting airborne from a boost, but had no unboosted jump. Basically, they were faster treads that could move sideways.
Good: Nice special effects, nice wardrobes, nice sets, the ludicrous violence fits right in with the universe, and particularly the performances from the actors are very good. At least visually, it looks way better and the effects look way more convincing than 3 Body Problem, to use another recent show as a comparison.
Bad: apparently the show disregards New Vegas lore (personally idk I never played it), I think the editing is super bad, the story is average.
Yeah, I was looking for a good CMYK fountain pen ink set. Nobody seems to make such a set. I could get a lot of half-solutions that would kind of work, but nothing beats the colour space coverage of a complement of CMY inks that were specifically designed to cover the whole colour space. They’re also about 10 times cheaper than fountain pen ink.
(And I got my printer ink for free on top of that from a print shop that just discontinued sales of their manual printer ink refills. The shop was Prink in Oulu, Finland. They probably still have these free refills.)
About six drops of ink and water the rest of the way gives you an entire cartridge of ink. This stuff is super concentrated.
I would use printer ink for the K too, but that’s too much of a crapshoot. Too often, the K is pigment-based, and that is likely to ruin a fountain pen. And it’s easy enough to find a good neutral black fountain pen ink. That is what the Platinum carbon black is for. It’s actually even more concentrated. Just one drop of it divided between two refills makes about a 50:50 grey that I can further modify with the printer ink. For less grey I have to go all the way down to one drop every four refills.
There’s minerals and other things in tap water. These things will cause issues and damage.
Though, the Lamy Safari is a cheap enough pen to not worry about buying a new one after causing damage.
However, there are other considerations for not using printer ink. Printer ink is designed to be used on specific paper, while fountain pen ink is designed to be more versatile.
The colors for fountain pen ink are also more than the base color. There’s the shading which can be a different color from the base The sheen, which can make the ink shine a different color in different lighting. It’s designed to flow properly through the feed with an appropriate level of viscosity. There are a lot of factors and testing that goes into fountain pen ink. You can read more about it here: www.jetpens.com/blog/…/968
Hm. Thanks for the link. This could help me with my ink mixes. Oh, one thing that annoys me: I wish I had pure CMY dyes without surfactant in them, so that I could change the surfactant level and not make the ink so god damned bloody. But I have no fucking clue where I could find CMY dyes without the surfactant.
This is just pure chaos. Why would you use printer ink in a fountain pen? I cannot fathom any valid reason besides just wanting to do something batshit insane.
Printer ink is useful because each of the C, M, and Y inks is a perfect filter of exactly one colour. C filters red, M filters green, and Y filters blue. Commercial fountain pen inks almost never have this kind of absorptive specificity. They’re usually a mix of two or more dyes—a mix that you don’t control. Once a dye is in the mix, you can’t just take it out. The best you could do is dim all of the other colours, but then you lose saturation.
Here’s a specific example. Suppose you have a commercial ink of 5C:1M and you want pure C. You’re stuck with that 1M. The best you can do is add 1Y to make 5C:1M:1Y = 4C:1K. You’ve got a balanced C, but that extra 1K is going to make everything look a little grey. Ew. And that is assuming you can even get pure Y in the first place. No ink manufacturer in their right mind would try to sell a pure Y on purpose. It is very difficult to read. (Except under a pure blue light. It’s super awesome actually. This has been an underhanded privacy-invading tactic of the government for some time now. Yellow microdots are printed on all commercial inkjet printouts.)
These inks have also been designed to be mutually equally absorptive of their respective light wavelengths, so an equal ratio of 1C:1Y makes a perfectly balanced green. These inks has also been designed to stay in solution even when mixed. There are no chemical reactions that could cause precipitate to form, thus totally fucking the pen. Achieving this with commercial fountain pen inks would be difficult, and potentially dangerous.
However.
That’s actually not the reason why I started using printer ink. I was in Oulu, I had just run out of fountain pen ink, and all I could find was a print shop. Here is the whole story of my Oulu trip.I did a little research online before actually doing it. Other people have done it before. You just have to make sure to use dye-based ink and not pigment-based ink. I was able to confirm from Timi that it was dye-based. And prepare for the possibility of having accidentally turned your pen into an ink firehose because printer ink bleeds like three motherfuckers. It needs at least three parts water to calm it down.
I get the theory of wanting to use CMY inks. I just think it’s weird and a lot of extra work for such a narrow goal. There’s not really any wrong way to use your pens however you want, provided you’re aware of the risks and know that you may be spending more time than it’s really worth.
Don’t overuse dodges, a lot of attacks will miss if you’re just boost-moving around the boss, so save the dodges for stuff that you actually need it for, so you always have EN to spare.
Don’t be afraid to burn your EN on flight when warranted, the spinny thing that the Spider does in its final phase is really easy to avoid if you just fly over it.
Don’t stop doing damage, consider having something that you can use to at least poke at the enemy just enough to keep the stun bar from decaying, so you can build it up to get a stagger. Or switch to weapons that have a high impact stat to build stagger faster.
Don’t sleep on melee weapons. They do MASSIVE damage if you can land the hit.
It’s weird to me how no one is talking about how it has a strong and blatant anti-capitalist message. Without getting into spoilers, the ending really drives it home. I’m surprised right-wing dickheads aren’t screeching about it.
Ok, I gotta ask, I know almost nothing about the lore of Fallout, is this show for me? Does it have enough content for newcomers that makes it worth it?
I did enjoy the Twisted Metal TV show, if that brings any context about what stuff I like, although at least I did play some of their old games and enjoyed them, but I remember next to nothing about the game’s “plot”, if there was any to begin with.
EDIT: Thank you so much for your replies guys, it seems definitely like a fun show and I’m craving for one lol (I just finished Titans S03… and… it was not good), I’m gonna give it a try!
I remember next to nothing about the game’s “plot”, if there was any to begin with.
I only remember the first 2 TM games and the plot was some rich fuck made a death match competition and the winner gets a single wish granted as their prize; but the wish every character makes in their ending (by beating the game as that character) is always corrupted Monkey’s Paw style.
the reason why the fallout story is very flexible on a any place no context story is because each individual vault has its own story, and stories are hyper regionalistic. so while all regions may share the same start (nuclear fallout of course) and prewar tech, what happens after is up to the writers imagination, as long as a writer doesnt pick an already existing vault number that already has a rule.
minor lore spoilers ahead: each vault was not built the same, all were a major experiment and had different conditions to see how humanity would adapt to different conditions presented to them.
this is why fallout is super flexible on where a story can start, game, or show wise. for example of something that won’t be in a game or show, Vault 68 was an experiment where what would happen if you put 1 woman, and 999 men in a bunker. Vault 69 was what would happen if you had 1 man, and 999 women in a bunker.
If you enjoyed Twisted Metal, you will enjoy Fallout. Both are excellent TV adaptations of their respective games, and have a thick layer of dark humour underpinning the action. Twisted Metal was particularly surprising, I want to shake the hand of whoever was looking at that crusty old PS2 game and saw dollar signs for TV!
Can you explain your use of each item? I don’t mean the obvious ones, such as the pen and Leatherman. I mean the other edc items. They look interesting, but I don’t understand them.
So I’m a very texture based person (diagnosed adhd / generalised anxiety disorder and I suspect a little on the spectrum, but never formally diagnosed) and the three other things besides the leatherman and pen are heavily based around that
The dice (or die, I didn’t actually check before hand) is a nice weight and I like the feeling of rolling it between my thumb and index finger, and the two beads on each side are a phenomenal feeling bead to roll similarly. I like the contrast between the smooth SS beads and the sharper edges of the dice. Plus there’s something comforting in knowing I always have at least one die on me at all times (even though I keep a set of 6 mini dice on me in my pouch)
The bracelet looking thing, which is in fact a bracelet as well, is an mkultra from aroundsquare. Similarly as before, the texture and feeling of the beads is fantastic, with the added bonus of being able to wrap around my thumb a few times. That combined with them being good for bead counting / breath work, it’s very calming for me. It can also be used as a fidget / skill toy: see this video for a good intro
The beads on the paracord is a skill toy called begleri, and it’s just that: a skill toy. Video here. It’s a hobby, it’s something to constantly work at improving on and learn new tricks, it’s a way to keep busy, it’s a good way to pass the time instead of looking at my phone - there’s a lot of reasons why I refuse to go anywhere without a set with me. The begleri community is so wholesome and supportive too, which just makes it better
Neat! Ok! A different kind of EDC. That video on the begleri, I kept waiting for him to smack his face with it, since that’s exactly what I would end up doing hahaha! He didn’t though, which was good.
Is the dice bead also a sort of begleri or just tactile? Also can you recommend begleri communities? I tried to learn awhile ago and not much traction on my own. Not much on YouTube from what I saw.
The dice bead is just tactile. It could be used as a begleri if I had another one and set them up as one, but it would probably be too heavy - at least for my play preference
On Lemmy, sadly there’s not too many yet. I’m personally working on getting !idlehands (general skill toy and fidget community) and !begleri going, and there’s also !begleri
I mainly participate on Instagram, since that seems to have the most contributors begleri community wise. I can link awesome people to follow, if you’re on instagram
There’s a few Discord servers that are active too, a begleri one and an Aroundaquare one. I can get you links later on if you like
In terms of resources for learning:
begleritricks.com has a lot of tutorials, trick database, and trick index, plus a good intro on vernacular
TGP posts a lot of good begleri videos, though he doesn’t go super into them as a tutorial, but it’s good for quickly seeing a lot of different tricks for inspiration
And as much as I hate to link it, the begleri subreddit does have some good info too
I got my first set in 2018, and stopped for a bit because I wasn’t really getting anywhere with it. For me what made a difference when I picked it back up again in 2021 was trying different physical combinations: bead shapes and weights, cord diameters, joiner lengths, etc. as well as finding a few clips online and downloading it to my phone so I could put it in slow motion and try to replicate it. It’s also a lot easier to learn if you’re just sat on a bed or carpeted floor or something similar. With dropping it, you’re just right there it’s a lot less frustrating when you don’t have to crouch down every two seconds to try again and it’s a lot easier to adjust the timing and whatnot when the attempts are closer together - I think I learnt at least half of the tricks I know being sat outside on the grass during a nice day. I would also recommend just having a set with you and doing rebounds when you have a chance, because getting a feel for how the momentum is carried will really help with getting the timing for other tricks
Thanks for the detailed reply! I’m familiar with Musclebones and Aroundsquare, but the others I’ll have to dig into. I made my own set awhile back with some hex nuts, I wanted to level it up with some nicer beads but didn’t find anything locally. I’ll probably wind up ordering some kind of bead online. I have trouble consciensing buying something that seems like it could be made so easily haha. I’ll check out those communities too. Thanks again!
Yeah a lot of people love their homemade ones, and I’ve made a few myself, but at least for me the beads specifically designed for begleri are worlds better. I feel like it’s easier to make a really nice set when you already know what your bead shape, size, and weight preference is - if that makes sense
Aha yeah I know AO2 can be a little pricy, though they do have some great ones in the cheaper range: the Mini Hydras in SS/Delrin being one of them, which are $20. Great starter set, but it’s also impossible to outgrow them, pros. use them still. The weight (18g) is basically the goldilocks weight for most people, the bead shape is excellent
You probably could get a pair from amazon or ebay for like $15 that would serve you well, but I’ve found those to be either way too light or way too heavy and the beads just kinda feel… shitty, and they might even be unbalanced because quality control is nonexistent.
I don’t mean to sound like an aroundsquare shill, I just do genuinely love their products and the owner, Matt, is one of the coolest guys ever
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