There was alcohol involved. Alliances were made, alliances were broken, butts got hurt. It’s a hell of a game. TBF the friendship was already rocky. This was the coffin nail. Him spilling red wine on my new white cloth couch and blaming me for having a white couch didn’t help.
I love playing big, involved boardgames and their designs are fantastic but trying to teach it to someone and do all of the admin of resolving moves can make it feel like a chore.
For example, I’ve played Nemesis precisely once. It took HOURS to get through because of learning all the rules etc. Loved it, love the design, would be freakin’ perfect if there was a digital version which automates the faff.
I want to like to play complex games these days but everyone is distracted as it is and spending hours to learn the game only to forget it by the next time you play is exhausting
Nintendo to the Patent Office: “We invented farming games with the introduction of berries in Pokémon. Please ignore all other prior art that wasn’t ours.”
Thats a great video. I looked to see if the creator was on Nebula instead of youtube, but it doesn’t appear he is. That’s a shame too, he’d be right at home with the style of his content.
It took Silksong coming out for me to identify why I wasn’t a fan of Hollow Knight, and it’s touched on in this video.
It’s the runback.
The Dark Souls series of games have the same “problem”, and it’s why I don’t enjoy them either.
I’m a huge fan of Celeste, Super Meat Boy, the Ori series. When I fail at these games, I’m right back in the action.
I’m not against having to learn boss patterns, I really enjoyed Cuphead because after I’ve failed I’m right back in the action.
And while it’s an easier game by comparison, Shovel Knight was a fun game. The checkpoints were plentifully and I could increase the difficulty by destroying them.
But when I played Hollow Knight I reached a point where I was just running to the boss and dying. Then again. And again. And again. I wasn’t getting better. And the time it took to get back just took too long and wasn’t fun. It wasn’t a rage quit. I was having fun at one point… But then the game wore me down and eventually it wasn’t.
I don’t think the game needs to change. Although I think adding difficultly modifiers would be a good idea. I played through Metroid Dread on normal difficulty and after beating it was having so much fun I immediately played it again on Hard difficulty. If there were a mode with more checkpoints in Hollow Knight and Silksong I might give them a shot.
I think the runback is important. When you instantly spawn back in the fight you’re basically banging your head on the boss with zero pressure until you beat it. But with the runback in darksouls you’re forced to reset after each failed attempt and fight your way back. It makes boss fights feel more like boss fights in my opinion because there is that pressure of being sent back to the bonfire if you make a mistake against this powerful enemy.
I think the run back is fun for some people and I think the game should deliver the best version they can for those people. For me, it’s just not fun. The reward is smaller than the frustration it causes.
I dont think fun is the right word because I dont think the run back is fun. Its annoying and everytime I die on the runback I am annoyed. But it helps me to slow down and stops me from tilting hard and dying 50x to the first boss attack. Instead I tilt and die 50x to the first skeleton near the bonfire :p
For some people ‘fun’ is the primary reason they play games. If they aren’t fun, they better have a whole lot else going for them. Personally I play games to unwind, so any type of ‘frustrating’ is a hard no from me. I get plenty of that in my day job. But not all games need to be for me and that’s fine. I just wish people could understand that not all of us are looking for a ‘sense of accomplishment’ from playing a video game. I get that some people value that, great, stop acting like everyone needs to be the same
I just wish people could understand that not all of us are looking for a ‘sense of accomplishment’ from playing a video game. I get that some people value that, great, stop acting like everyone needs to be the same
Yeah this is why I think the ‘easy mode’ debate is so pointless. Majority of games cater to a frictionless generalized experience with a low barrier to entry (which I find very boring). The few games that try to challenge the players that like to be challenged arent designed to be for everyone. If every game was darksouls i’d understand the ‘easy mode’ side of the argument a lot more.
I think the runback is important to give you time to think. You can repeatedly attempt a difficult section of a game with a ton of checkpoints and get through it without actually learning it properly. You essentially get lucky that your hands do the right thing just enough to get by.
Imagine going to a piano recital where the person keeps messing up and repeating a difficult passage of the music, never actually being able to play the entire thing without making a mistake! That’s just not very impressive!
The goal of playing a difficult game should be to improve your skills and get better, figure out new strategies and use them in battle, not merely reach the end.
It is, but different people enjoy different things. Hard games like this focus on long term goals and achieving mastery as the source of fun. Other games aim to be more relaxing.
I like all types of games. I just think it’s a bit silly when people argue “why isn’t this orange more like a banana?”
most runbacks are nothing but time wasters, some are platforming challenges and others are avoid the enemies in the way which you’ve avoided plenty of times before if you are having actual problems with the boss.
Of course. But that’s often a sign of bad game design. Difficulty should follow a smooth curve. Enormous difficulty spikes are what you expect from old games in the 80s.
But there’s also an element to mastery that gamers seem to completely neglect: downtime. I finished my math degree a couple of years ago and throughout that entire process I got stuck on math assignments thousands of times. Bashing my head against a wall trying to solve the problem right now rarely worked. I had much better success putting the pencil down and coming back to the problem later, after a period of downtime.
Since graduating I’ve been revisiting a lot of old NES games that I never finished growing up because they were too difficult. Since I’m busy with work I don’t have a ton of time to play every day. This forced downtime actually has the benefit of getting me to think and reflect on my approach, just as I would expect it to!
Very well stated, and echoes my sentiment exactly.
My game time is precious to me and sitting with that feeling of failure while I waste time just getting back to zero feels bad to me. I’d rather be, you know, making some sort of progress.
It’s a gorgeous game, very lovingly crafted. But I would cheer for some built in accessibility options akin to the most recent Ninja Gaiden that let me dial in the experience I want.
The Souls games really depend on which game in the series you’re playing. They actually learned what was good and what wasn’t. The boss runs are extremely short in most of them. Hell, a lot of Elden Ring respawn points are at the boss door. 2 is really the worst here, and mostly just the DLC bosses (fuck both runs to either smelter demon, tho).
Hollow Knight’s are so, so bad. I get from what I see about Silk Song, it’s more or less the same if not worse. :(
Exactly, as an adult with a job I have very little time to game as is, the last thing I need is losing progress and then having to grind through a part of the game I’ve been through already many times till I reach a difficult boss battle, just auto save the game at critical check points so people can continue from where they last failed quickly
For me it wasn't so much the runback, as it was fighting your spirit every time. I hated that. Especially if you died in a difficult platforming section. It only made it more difficult.
Same, this is why I like Hyper Light Drifter. Boss fights are hard, but when die you are instantly back at the fight.
I tried playing the Titan Souls but it was really annoying game. It is a boss rush game where both you are boss die in one hit. So some times you can die instantly when boss fight starts. Issue is that there is really long load times and you have to walk back to boss (and there isn’t even combat). Some times walking back to the boss takes longer than the time you fought the boss.
It’s not that bad if you keep it to 3-4 people and you plan for it. I’ve had groups with new players like that which start at 10am and go to around 5pm, including around 45min for lunch. Not a bad way to spend a Saturday.
Going the full 6 players takes a much longer time, though.
If everyone in the group already knows how to play, and at least one person in the group is the “Cool, so it’s Harriet’s turn now” kind of person that keeps the game moving, then games can go fairly quickly in my experience
I’ll never forget when one of my roommates in college spent like $500 on the board game and his friends came over to play and it took them 4 hours to set the game up and process the instructions, then they played for a couple hours.
Very good video that lines up with a lot of my own thoughts (yay).
That said? I think I fundamentally disagree with the idea that everyone should be able to beat every game for narrative reasons. My preference is for something similar to what Nine Sols did (AMAZING boss fights. Dogshit metroidvania and traversal), but I don’t fundamentally believe that everyone needs to be able to experience every game. Like, you can make an “easy mode” for DCS but… the point of that game is the fidelity and turning all of that off just feels “wrong”? At the end of the day, it is up to the devs and what they want people to consider “accomplishment” to be.
And we live in the internet age. I remember beating Arkham Knight, having fun, and then deciding there was zero chance I would ever want to get all the riddler keys or fight deathstroke a dozen times and just went to youtube.
But I 100% agree with the back half of the video. The game is very much designed to just take a break and wander off when you get frustrated. Which is where I DO wish there were more QOL features to make it clear what areas might still have a mask (preferably one you can reach) rather than needing to find a guide or try to guess. Especially when you don’t even get map markers for a decent chunk early on.
Yes. If you know ahead of time you’ll prioritize those.
If you are new to the game/genre and are struggling and even wiping occasionally? It isn’t a priority.
But there is also a big difference between having a few different pin types and just having “Well, SOMETHING was there?”. Hell, I still need to get around to figuring out which of my oranges are NPCs because I wasn’t sure if quest NPCs would be auto-tagged (they are, once you have a reason to talk to them again).
Which is another factor to all of these discussions. I fairly regularly push back on Dark Souls (and its successors) being a “difficult game”. It really isn’t. What it is is an incredibly well designed (first half of a…) challenging game. Everything up until Amazing Chest Ahead is designed to teach you how to play the game and how to approach encounters. And once you know that? You are in really good shape for the entire genre even if it is a game that emphasizes parrying (Lies of P), blocking (Sekiro), or beautiful beautiful loot (Nioh! Aka “Best Souls”). You don’t learn character builds (mostly “pick a single stat and work with it”) but that comes later.
And… some of that applies here. I know I made it WAY farther than I should have with no meaningful upgrades because I am a sicko/idiot. But for people who don’t know the idea that “Hey, this crypt full of skeletons is a mofo. Maybe go somewhere else”, they might be slamming their head against a wall trying to fight Last Judge for far longer than they should (although, questionable balancing decisions means that upgrading your health doesn’t matter all that much but that is a different rant).
But it is still the idea of a first game versus a fifth game as it were. And we all start somewhere.
youtube.com
Aktywne