A lot of comments tying runbacks to difficulty, when they have nothing to do with each other. I haven’t playing silksong but I played about half of the original and uninstalled it, despite the fact it is so many people’s favorite metroidvania and metroidvania is one of my favorite genres.
Not putting checkpoints close to boss fights is not difficulty. It is disrespectful of the player’s time, which is a problem hollow Knight was full of.
I liked Hollow Knight, but yes, it kind of was. Frequent destinations were far away from fast travel, and there was a low level area that they transformed into a high level area later in the game specifically so that crossing the map wouldn’t be a cake walk. I’d argue that earning the power to make an area like that into a cake walk is a core part of the fun.
Not putting checkpoints close to boss fights is not difficulty.
You're pointing a finger at the Soulslike genre here, not only HK. Some games may abandon it, but this is common enough to be called a genre stable.
Just like the "hit hit, dodge/parry, hit hit" combat pattern, losing/recovering currency, enemies respawning on bonfire use… etc.
I think this whole genre is wack, TBH. I don't even find it difficult, I just think what they test is perseverance in the face of misery and tediousness, which's a bizarre thing to test in a video game. It's almost as if it's straight up telling you: this is a serious video game, no room for fun here.
Meanwhile, Ninja Gaiden proved you can simultaneously have extreme difficulty AND fun like one million years ago.
It’s true that I’d prefer it in no games, but it’s also less frustrating in straight soulslikes. The problem with HK is that it is a synthesis of metroidvania and soulslikes in the most time-disrespecting ways possible. Really most of my frustrations are with map design, and then they add not getting maps until you find the map guy (in samey environments I can’t remember well enough without a map).
What made me put it down was playing for an hour going through multiple zones without finding either a map guy or a bench somehow then dying. I’m pretty sure just being able to see the map would have been enough to keep me playing.
For this new fangled soulsvania genre there are numerous better entries that I thoroughly enjoyed. Ender Lilies and Blasphemus are the first 2 that come to mind.
Personally I think we’d all be better off not even calling them Soulslikes, for this very reason. Full-blown Soulslikes have so many more nuances and systems that add to the experience.
Yeah, huh, apparently HK is tagged on Steam as a Souls-like, but I disagree… just brutal difficulty in a melee-heavy game isn’t enough to merit that badge, but oh, well.
Agreed. I’m not sure why I would waste my time with shit like this when it’s just objectively not fun for me to play.
Different strokes for different folks, so if you like it more power to you, but I’d rather play games that are fun to play for me.
I only have a certain amount of time to play video games, and if I can’t make any progress at all in an hour or two, why would I bother continuing when an hour or two is usually all I have in a day to play your game?
I’ve decided not to bother picking up silksong because I found HK tedious, frustrating, and unrewarding.
People who enjoy such games are clearly masochist who don’t know what a good game is if it hit them in the face. Idk why these sorts of “gamers” even exist. I long for the halcyon era where good stuff like Mario, Zelda and Sonic were the staples of hardcore gamers.
You're pointing a finger at the Soulslike genre here, not only HK. Some games may abandon it, but this is common enough to be called a genre stable.
You should try Salt and Sanctuary, Sekiro, Bloodborne, The Surge, Lords of the Fallen, or Lies of P—all had boss runbacks, and that's ignoring HK, Silksong, and the original Souls games.
Apparently I shouldn’t. But if there’s a list of soulslike games that do it, and a list of soulslike games that don’t, then it is not in fact true for the genre and is instead true for specific games.
You can make the case that it’s not a fun use of our time but how is it not tied to difficulty? Being able to get to the boss with enough health or consummables is certainly part of the intended challenge.
I haven’t played silksong, but most games like Dark Souls and the like, getting back to the boss without taking damage is pretty easy. It’s not difficulty, it’s just time.
I never actually liked FromSoft’s themselves, but several Soulslikes I really enjoyed did away with runbacks, or always had checkpoints right before bosses.
I really just want people to start evaluating each design decision Dark Souls made on its own - stop worshipping the whole as being perfect, because it most definitely is not. So many of the knowledge checks (poise, anyone?) are just there for experienced players to lord over confused shrubs.
I’m not really used to metroidvanias having runbacks honestly. Most I’ve played either have save points close to the bosses or just drop you outside the boss room if you die.
Have you considered that the run back is trying to tell you something? The game doesn’t want you to bash your face against the same enemy the same way. It may not even want you to fight that boss yet at all.
The run back is meant to be an incentive to think about your options. Do I have other areas to explore? What do I keep dying to? Am I overlooking an obvious weakness during a particular boss mechanic, or am I not using an ability as effectively as I could be to stay alive?
If you let the player immediately run back into a boss, they will veg out and do just that until they eventually get lucky and barely down a boss by the skin of their teeth. But that’s not how you should be approaching these fights.
Sometimes the most productive run back even involves a good night’s rest.
The other day, I fought the boss of the abyss in the dark souls 1 dlc. It took me 5ish attempts, and I changed my gear to have more magic resist after I got further in the fight and got merked by magic attacks. All spending 2 minutes between each attempt running back to the fog gate did was make me zone out and wish I could just get right back to it.
Btw, the original runback was mega man, where you get to try the boss until you run out of lives then you have to do the entire level again. Still way more interesting than running past everything in souls games.
Do you believe DS and Megaman could have been even more iconic if they had listened to players and made their runs back shorter?
My point is, it’s not like the designers didn’t know what they were doing, this is a very obvious aspect of their gameplay. And regardless of how minor inconveniences like this make us feel as players, we don’t know that it’s not precisely those lows that contrast with the highs to create the intended experiences which made those games cult hits to begin with. You wouldn’t look at a Rembrandt and say, “look how much of the painting is just black! You’re wasting all this space! You could add so much detail and context in there!”
I’m a firm believer that “given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game”. If players weren’t complaining about the run back, then they would be complaining about the empty flask drinking animation. Inconvenience is not a convincing argument to me. Just like any art, games are free to evoke any and all emotions. It only becomes a problem if the emotion they keep evoking is boredom lol. But even then, boredom is a valid tool on the artist’s palette; sometimes the only ones who are getting bored are the boring people.
I loved Ender’s Lilies and it had save points outside the boss rooms. I do not believe the game would have been more iconic if I had to run through several rooms of enemies before fighting a boss again.
The joy of victory came from overcoming a difficult fight, not from avoiding a tedious repeat.
Have you considered that the run back is trying to tell you something? The game doesn’t want you to bash your face against the same enemy the same way. It may not even want you to fight that boss yet at all.
The run back is meant to be an incentive to think about your options. Do I have other areas to explore?
Would be a lot more effective if I didn’t have to go pick up my shade. Which often can’t be accessed without locking yourself into the fight again.
I disagree, runbacks are as much difficulty as having to recover your currency after death, or even having to recover your items after dying in Minecraft. It’s a punishment for dying, and a way to make you treat it seriously.
It can incentivise the wrong things, punish experimentation and make players stick with what they know, even if better options exist. You’re free to dislike it, and it has downsides, but dismissing it as “not difficulty” is just dishonest.
He wasn’t the only founder and Embracer bought them in 2021. Later TakeTwo acquired the studio when Embracer had to restructure. They operate under 2k now so he can most surely be fired.
Also probably why he is even more of a cocky cunt nowadays. He already cashed out.
I haven’t played 4, but I played 1, 2, and a bit of the presequel or whatever it was called. They were essentially all the same game. Run, shoot, run, shoot, hear vaguely off-color joke, run, shoot. Is there any particular reason to bother with an overpriced remake of the same old game? Is there a reason for worrying about 4KUHD textures on a game where the aesthetic is cartoony? If you’re a 9 year old who’s never played, and it’s all on mom’s dime, I could see being tricked into buying it by the advertisers, but why is anyone else excited about it?
I played the hell out of the first Borderlands (including New Game+ across all expansions), but promptly bounced off 2 & Pre-Sequel because it literally just felt like more of the same and I was already sated.
BL3 and now BL4 are literally just more of the same, but with ever increasingly more egregious monetisation.
I think that was the one that started in an ice zone, if I remember correctly? I literally couldn’t get past it because I find that aesthetic quite boring…
The ice zone (Southern Shelf) is only the very beginning of the game, you reach more interesting areas after defeating the first major boss, Captain Flynt.
Started with 2, liked it, hated 3, now playing 4 since yesterday with a friend and gameplay wise it has a bunch of changes/improvements. So if someone enjoys the gameplay its good. I mean cod and battlefield and fifa are also nearly the same game every time ;)
First game was just Diablo 2 but FPS with guns. But I can totally respect anyone that didn’t jive with that. The humor was very hit and miss and definitely made but a group of people who insisted they were hilarious.
Pre-Sequel, 3 and Wonderlands have all been great games that I had lots of fun with. I also know I’m going to have upwards of 100 hours of fun with 4. That’s what makes this whole story even more frustrating…
But I’m a patient gamer. I played the previous BL games years after they came out. I’ll do the same for this one - not because I can’t afford a 60€ price tag but because articles like this. Sad.
BL4 is awesome so far. Works fantastic on PS5. I hope next time they just skip releasing a PC version at all and use the extra resources for the other versions like GTA.
Apparently the graphics are basically the same as 3, but performance is dog shit on even the best hardware and crashes are unavoidable.
When people complained, he said they need to use AI fake frame and upscale from 720. Which still wasn’t good performance.
It might get fixed later in updates. But this guy is handling so badly he might legitimately be mentally unwell. It’s at the point it’s weird he still has a job
That’s probably not the cause of the issues here though. Denuvo impacts game performance but not as badly as Borderlands 4 is seeing. The engine they chose has issues even on non denuvo games. It’s an unoptimized mess and then gearbox didn’t optimize any further themselves.
BL4 is running horribly, even on higher end PCs. I have a 4090 and a decent processor, but only getting 80FPS max with a good few settings on low or off and AI frame gen on (I would rather not, but performance is just that bad).
According to hardware unboxed 4090 at 1440 natively on the badass preset gets an average of 67 FPS. I'm not defending the poor performance of Borderlands 4, it's definitely ass, I just don't think we should take insane statements from randos at face value. Always verify performance with reputable sources instead of someone saying something on the web without giving the full picture. Who knows what they've done with their computer to get such poor performance.
That doesn’t really seem to contradict the other person’s claim that much? In fact like your said if just a few other things are running on that person’s pc and eating some resources, their claim seems super believable in the context of what you just said so I’m not sure what your point is.
A reviewer/tester is going to be benchmarking in a best case scenario environment. Real people using their real computers will be experiencing a huge variety of other environments. Different temps, hardware settings, programs running, etc. None of that context excuses the performance, and makes that person’s performance claim believable.
And Silksong will also run like shit if I run an AI model in the background that's hogging all resources, but if I said Silksong ran like shit on a 4090 you'd say I'm full of shit. But with Borderlands 4 it would be okay to say that because it fits your biases?
My point is you can't take such statements at face value. They need to be looked at critically because who knows what the person is doing with their machine or what kind of information they're omitting. Maybe the other person has a CPU bottleneck because they threw a 4090 together with a Ryzen 7 2700X? If you take them at face value you're just reflecting your own biases which means you call it bullshit if it doesn't fit your bias or you agree with it when it does fit your bias.
What’s crazy is how inconsistent the problems seem to be. I’ve got a 4080 Super and a decent processor, and I’m getting 120-140fps with most settings as high as they can go with frame gen on at 1440p. Only crashed once in about 40 hours of gameplay.
Oh, you have identical specs and built at the exact same time? Yeah, half of you are going to randomly have issues and half won’t. Enjoy head casing about that.
I’ve got a 6800xt and it runs really well on medium settings. Looks pretty good as well. Never had the game crash on me either. It’s 60fps but I’m cool with that. Gameplay feels smooth at that and it’s steady. No upscaling no frame Gen. 3440x1440.
I have heard a lot of people are having issues with Nvidia hardware though.
Bowties are fine for formal (social) occasions like weddings and parties. Wearing them around every day is weird. Wearing them to work is (generally) weird.
Committing to wearing them everywhere and STILL buying pre-tied ones and not learning how to tie them yourself all while being a mega douche is cringe af.
Honestly, I think he might actually fall into the category of cares more about appearing smart than being smart. Not to say he’s dumb, but I do get the sense the reputation is very important to him
The reality is you made a game that few will play for several years. You could have made a game that could be playable on most contemporary machines. You didn’t and will now have to suffer from shitty sales due to your inability to understand that the majority of us don’t have the money to spend like you do you out of touch clueless ballsack.
Anyone that remembers Aliens: Colonial Marines and Duke Nukem Forever knows that Randy Pitchford is garbage. He also ran off most of the talent behind BL1 and BL2, which is why BL3 writing was shitty.
I have come to accept that this is a PR campaign to plaster the name everywhere all over social media and let it worm its way into currently pissed off gamers’ heads for a few months down the line when they’ve calmed down and inevitably buy the fucking thing.
Pitchford is a slimeball. Rarely has a man who is allegedly not an insurance or used-car salesman given off such nakedly scummy vibes.
We need to stop giving free publicity to this little marketing man, and to this poorly optimised, expensive game.
I don’t think there’s anything that well thought out, and it’s just someone who takes things personally and cant resist blurting out their thoughts.
Since after what he said my thinking was even if my friends beg me to get the game on discount I wont because of how personally irritated the comments have made me.
Not casting aspersions towards you personally, but we all know how gamer boycotts go generally. As in, they don’t. People cave and buy the games anyway, once they’re over the initial outrage. This is 100% marketing.
Those people buy games regardless. But this feels like a personal challenge of being called out. Like the face popping out and going “yeah I knew you couldn’t resist bitch”. Usually there isn’t that psychological push back being put out there. It’s not needed.
For a long time he was told by everyone in public and in private that he was awesome and perfect, and the greatest game developer, which made him a ton of money and very famous. Now his latest game is failing and his overinflated ego is panicking.
Seems to me he and Gearbox have been in lots of shit for a while now (the infamous USB drive, serious plagiarism accusations when Borderlands did an artistic 180 during development, Alien : Colonial Marines released broken as hell after funneling its funding to make BL2, Duke Nukem Forever…)
And every time Pitchford’s (mostly unnecesary) public answer has been terrible.
As far as DNF goes, it was probably an easy profit for the company. They bought it from 3D Realms and patched it up into something releasable. I doubt they spent a lot on the deal. It didn’t have to sell many copies for them to hit break even.
Not a bad business decision, and I’m glad that development story had a definitive ending.
It’s the year of the wealthy personalities who dont keep their mouth shut because they believe they are right and everyone will agree with their points and love them.
Happening right now with Mark Cuban on the NBA side.
Edit: it’s a mouthful of a name and that’s bad, basic sense. If you’re a fan and you get the title, good for you but it isn’t gonna attract random gamers
“Clair Obscur” means Light / Dark in French…which most of the creators speak. It relates, generally speaking, to the theme of light versus dark that is throughout the game.
“Expedition 33” relates to the story, and the party that you’re playing is a part of “Expedition 33”.
So, neither thing “means nothing”, you’re just a grumpy person looking for something to whine about.
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Aktywne