Ori and the Will of the Wisps

[Morenatsu.]

female ori is the worst ori

 

[lightbane]

I assume you didn't play (much) games in the DOS era?

While some games allowed you to change configuration settings inside the game, most had a separate Setup program for this purpose.
But there were a few games, where you had to edit a separate Config file (and/or use command line parameters) and even the game manual explained the options.

So: no cheating and yes, it is part of the game.

Oh, I did that indeed... Decades ago. I would prefer to not go back, if only for commodity. However, what "modern" games do nowadays, which sometimes only let you adjust the volume (or not even that) is the complete opposite.

 

[DraQ]

Editing config files is cheating, since it's not part of the game itself.

I assume you didn't play (much) games in the DOS era?

While some games allowed you to change configuration settings inside the game, most had a separate Setup program for this purpose.
But there were a few games, where you had to edit a separate Config file (and/or use command line parameters) and even the game manual explained the options.

Yeah, you were lucky if you merely had to run setup.exe/setsound.exe, if you were not, you might also have had to edit config.sys and autoexec.bat to load necessary drivers including extended/expanded memory one.

That was actually good as it let no retards game on the PC.
Imagine RPGCodex without most of its users...

If you think systems interacting with each other organically to create unpredictable and exiting scenarios sounds fun, then you should definitely check it out.

You know how all these immersive sim devs were going on about emergent gameplay, systems etc etc? With all due respect their games have nothing on Rain World when it comes to this

This is generally what gives me the largest boner in games.

female ori is the worst ori

There is no female Ori, stop the lies.

Actually I would peg Ori

Y-yeah I would too

Because Ori is shota

ftfy

Could both of you paedo degenerates just cease your babbling and face the wall in silence? I wanted to add "and dignity", but... yeah.

 

[Morenatsu.]

Could both of you paedo degenerates just cease your babbling and face the wall in silence? I wanted to add "and dignity", but... yeah.

I have the ideal male intellect. You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.

Well, compared to you, at least.

 

[Jinn]

DraQ on the topic of playing Rain World with keyboard and mouse, the game was specifically designed for keyboard and mouse gameplay. Gamepad support was only patched in later after sufficient bitching from players. I've played it with both and think it works great for both. Don't let it turn you away from the game.

Rain World is indeed excellent. Having some sort of ability or item progression would have put the game on another level for me, but paradoxically, those things really don't fit well in the perfect package it is. People who complain about the difficulty after trying only an hour or two need to stow their opinions on it, honestly. Games with learning curves are GOOD, especially when all the tools for survival are presented to you right from the very beginning of the game.

 

[Neuromancer]

I assume you didn't play (much) games in the DOS era?

While some games allowed you to change configuration settings inside the game, most had a separate Setup program for this purpose.
But there were a few games, where you had to edit a separate Config file (and/or use command line parameters) and even the game manual explained the options.

So: no cheating and yes, it is part of the game.

Oh, I did that indeed... Decades ago. I would prefer to not go back, if only for commodity. However, what "modern" games do nowadays, which sometimes only let you adjust the volume (or not even that) is the complete opposite.

Yes, you are absolutely right.
In a modern game, it shouldn't be necessary to to this any more. That is the result of a slightly lazy console port.
But at least it got ported to PC, for which I am grateful, and you can change the configuration somehow.

What is really nerving, that some modern games don't even allow that, especially changing the language.
These game just use the system language without the possibility to choose another one.

Unfortunately, the Shantae games are culpable of that. Since their translation is terrible and full of errors, playing was kind of annoying for me.
I could finally solve this problem by using the Locale Emulator, that simulates a different system language :
https://github.com/xupefei/Locale-Emulator/releases

 

[Neuromancer]

Yeah, you were lucky if you merely had to run setup.exe/setsound.exe, if you were not, you might also have had to edit config.sys and autoexec.bat to load necessary drivers including extended/expanded memory one.

Yes, I remember these times - kind of good, but sometimes also a little bit annoying.


Tinkering with the startup files to load the necessary drivers but still leave enough system memory for the game to run, was sometimes taxing. (I think, Ultima 7 took some time to run with mouse, music and sound effects enabled.)

At the end of the DOS cycle I had three different sets of Autoexec.bat and Config.sys prepared depending on different kind of games requirements. Concordantly, I had set up three small Batch files that just copied the necessary set to the root directory before rebooting the computer to make the process a little bit faster.


So I think, it is a little bit funny when nowadays some people complain about Dosbox, that it would be so difficult to set up.
Compared to the real thing, Dosbox is very easy to handle.

 

[Momock]

Thankfully high school doesn't often kill you via trap dialogue or build choice.

High school is the worst character creation sequence ever. Hopefully a mod will fix it.

 

[lightbane]

Finally bought this. I'll play it once I have time, or an enhanced edition shows up, whatever happens first.

 

[DraQ]

Thankfully high school doesn't often kill you via trap dialogue or build choice.

High school is the worst character creation sequence ever. Hopefully a mod will fix it.

Might be the reason why disproportionally many teens uninstall.exe.

 

[lightbane]

Thankfully high school doesn't often kill you via trap dialogue or build choice.

High school is the worst character creation sequence ever. Hopefully a mod will fix it.

Might be the reason why disproportionally many teens uninstall.exe.

Would that make mandatory military academies/learning discipline a bug-fixing patch then?

 

[MapMan]

Finished the game with 95% completion yesterday. Didn't bother collecting the last few energy cells or whatever. Great game, just like the first Ori. I don't know if it's false memory syndrome but I thought platforming in the first Ori was more difficult (good). I'm somewhat disappointed by Shriek character arc. A reluctant villian forced to be one only by circumstance. I feel like he should've been given a proper chance to redeem himself, especially since his motivation was only to protect himself. Restoration of light would lead to destruction of his home and creation of a new world where Shriek would be again unwelcome. SAD!

Overall, I highly recommend this game, especially since it's covered under xbox game pass which you can now snatch for 3 months for $1.

 

[MapMan]

Aaaaand finished. Great game, I cry evry tim.
That said, I mentioned before that I haven't seen anything as spectacular as the flooding tree escape sequence, and I stand by it.

So it's not just me, after all. The flooding tree escape sequence was one of the best moments in any platforming game I played. Period.

 

[Norfleet]

Editing config files is cheating, since it's not part of the game itself. I guess that's a "no" regarding modifying controls.
2020 and letting you edit your controls is still too complex for indie console devs.

What crazy talk is this? Config files are supposed to be edited. Otherwise they would be hardcoded and not files for you to edit!

I bet you're one of those weirdos who installs things in the default directory with the default settings, too.

 

[DraQ]

Finished the game with 95% completion yesterday. Didn't bother collecting the last few energy cells or whatever. Great game, just like the first Ori. I don't know if it's false memory syndrome but I thought platforming in the first Ori was more difficult (good). I'm somewhat disappointed by Shriek character arc. A reluctant villian forced to be one only by circumstance. I feel like he should've been given a proper chance to redeem himself, especially since his motivation was only to protect himself. Restoration of light would lead to destruction of his home and creation of a new world where Shriek would be again unwelcome. SAD!

Overall, I highly recommend this game, especially since it's covered under xbox game pass which you can now snatch for 3 months for $1.

I think the idea was that, fair or not, not everything always ends well and you have to move on.

Overall I think higher of the first game as it's better constructed, also narratively, but WoTW is almost as good and 3x bigger, so yeah.
Narratively speaking there seems to be a lot of scrapped/unused material in the story and background, which might explain the storytelling being less tight (but not why it was scrapped given that it seems like it would have made things more interesting).

Aaaaand finished. Great game, I cry evry tim.
That said, I mentioned before that I haven't seen anything as spectacular as the flooding tree escape sequence, and I stand by it.

So it's not just me, after all. The flooding tree escape sequence was one of the best moments in any platforming game I played. Period.

I liked all escape sequences in both games, also how they intermeshed with boss fights in WoTW, but yeah, Ginso escape was probably the pinnacle of them.

 

[Tigranes]

Finished the game with 95% completion yesterday. Didn't bother collecting the last few energy cells or whatever. Great game, just like the first Ori. I don't know if it's false memory syndrome but I thought platforming in the first Ori was more difficult (good). I'm somewhat disappointed by Shriek character arc. A reluctant villian forced to be one only by circumstance. I feel like he should've been given a proper chance to redeem himself, especially since his motivation was only to protect himself. Restoration of light would lead to destruction of his home and creation of a new world where Shriek would be again unwelcome. SAD!

Overall, I highly recommend this game, especially since it's covered under xbox game pass which you can now snatch for 3 months for $1.

I liked it in a way, because too many stories have this nonsensical idea that there's a solution that works for everybody with no costs and everyone can be happy ever after. Restoring the forest does mean that a lot of creatures like Shriek would not be welcome and could not coexist. Things happen to people that they do not deserve, and not all wrongs are righted. It meant more to see

Spoiler

the big toad dude croak it or Ori 'disappear', and less so to see owlboy magically restored

(even though he is very cute).

As a game, I did enjoy it a lot, though it felt more like an easier, more relaxing Hollow Knight in some ways because of where they took the design. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Escape sequences remained quite good and remain a signature for the game.

 

[Sordid MCA/Prosper Hybryd]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/wh...d-even-forgive-the-snake-oil-salesmen.372420/

This is something that's been bothering me for a while and I get kinda riled up about it every time I see it unfold. And every time it keeps happening, people keep falling for it...

It all started with Molyneux. He was the master of 'Instead of telling you what my product is, let me just go wild with what I think it could be and get you all excited!" - And that was fine, until you actually put your money down and then the game was nothing like what Peter was hyping it up to be. He pulled this shit for a good decade or more with journalists and gamers loving listening to Uncle Peter and the amazing things he's doing for the industry. It took him to release some pretty damn shoddy games for press and gamers to finally not listen to the lies anymore.

Then came Sean Murray, who apparently had learned straight from the Peter Molyneux handbook. This guy apparently just loooooved the spotlight. Even days before No Man's Sky released, he hyped up the Multiplayer that didn't even exist and was all too happy to let people think that No Man's Sky was 'Minecraft in Space', where you could literally do everything (you being able to do everything is generally a common theme behind the gaming snake oil salesmen, cause hey, that sorta attracts everybody!). Obviously there was massive backlash when No Man's Sky finally released and the product being nothing like what Murray hyped it up to be. But what happened then? They released a bunch of updates, so let's forget about the initial lies and deception and hey, let's actually shower him with awards again, cause he finally kinda sorta delivered on what he said the game would be years earlier. Thanks, Geoff Keighley. Rewarding that kinda behavior will surely help the industry grow stronger.

And then came Cyberpunk. Made by the guys that made Witcher 3, so this shit had to be good. Here's our Cyberpunk universe and - trust us - you can do fucking everything! Here the entire CDPR PR department took all the cues from what worked for Molyneux and Murray and just went completely apeshit with it. Gamers were to believe that this is "Sci-Fi GTA in First Person". What's not to love? Every video released by CDPR was carefully crafted to create a picture in players minds that was just insanely compelling. They stopped just short of outright saying that this thing would cure cancer. This strategy resulted in a sensational 8 million pre-orders. What happened then was this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CymqHdNYkg&ab_channel=BeatEmUps. The product was a fraction of what the developer hyped it up to be and on top of that it barely even ran on consoles that it was supposed to 'run surprisingly well on!'.

I'd argue that all 3 of those are clear examples of you folks all being made fools of. And even the 'journalists' in this industry happily played along, each and every single time.

And let me also say, from the perspective of a developer, all of this just sucks. Back in 2014, I remember some journalist from some big publication telling us that Ori almost got the cover article of some magazine I read frequently, but ultimately they had to pick No Man's Sky cause it was the 'bigger game'. I kinda agreed back then, thinking to myself: "Ok, I get it, they have to promote the bigger game, they obviously have to go for the clicks. Sucks, but that's how the game is played." But then I really felt bamboozled once No Man's Sky came out and it became clear that all this hype was really just built on lies and the honest guy who just showed his actual product really got kicked in the balls because the lying guy was able to make up some tall tales that held absolutely no substance.

I know this whole thread might come off as me sounding bitter and I'm sure there'll be some people that see this as me shitting on other devs. No, I'm not. I'm shitting on liars and people that are okay with openly deceiving others. I'd argue that we should all agree that this shit is not okay. If I go and buy a car and the car salesman sells me a car that supposedly has 300 horse power, but on the drive home after the purchase I notice that he switched out the motor when I wasn't looking, I'd be rightfully pissed off, cause I was deceived.

And yet, gamers and journalists don't really seem to mind all that much. Yeah, the backlash is coming, but usually you see a ton of people then arguing that they like the game that came out of it anyway. That is so not the point. It doesn't matter if the snake oil actually tastes fine. Don't sell me on features that don't exist. Don't paint a picture that you'll not be able to deliver. Just don't fucking lie to me. You're fucking over gamers, you're fucking over journalists (that should know better, so shame on you!) and you're fucking over other developers.

There, I said my piece, felt like a chip I needed to get off my shoulder and I think this is a wrong that we should set right so that this won't happen anymore.

Totally agree with him.

 

[Morenatsu.]

bruh nomansky good THREAD LOCKED xddddd

Retards. Retards never change.

 

[Morgoth]

Ah yes, lying. The latest and yet oldest trick to make an honest profit.

Spoiler

 

[MRY]

I'm somewhat disappointed by Shriek character arc. A reluctant villian forced to be one only by circumstance. I feel like he should've been given a proper chance to redeem himself, especially since his motivation was only to protect himself.

I confess that since I was only intermittently watching over my kid's shoulder, I didn't see all of the plot beats -- but wouldn't redeeming Shriek have been doubly bad since (1) it would have made the villain in Ori 2 even more duplicative of the villain in Ori 1, and (2) I took Shriek to be a kind of anti-Ku -- both were owlets orphaned by magic related to the big trees, one of them was accepted and one of them wasn't, and they took different paths. Ku becomes a mascot of the Bad News Bears outsiders banding together, Shriek becomes the paragon of reciprocal rejection. Shriek kills Ku when Ku is protecting a different being (Ori); Ori kills Shriek while Ori is trying to save a bunch of alien beings that aren't his "clan" (and those same aliens are tending Ku's corpse). Ku ends the game sheltered by the living Ori-Tree, Naru, and Gumo; Shriek ends the game sheltered by its own dead clan. Maybe you could have the same message by having Shriek adopted by the same Bad News Bears crew, but the Ori series is never about the redemption of the strong, it is about the meek inheriting the forest. That's why Kuro dies at the end of Ori 1, rather than joining the heroes and why Ori's mom and Ku come back to life but not the super toad or the Gorlek civilization.

That said, this is probably more analysis than the game's story needs. I took it more as a beautiful piece of somewhat melancholy whimsy, rather than a carefully constructed moral arc of some kind.

 

[DraQ]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/wh...d-even-forgive-the-snake-oil-salesmen.372420/

This is something that's been bothering me for a while and I get kinda riled up about it every time I see it unfold. And every time it keeps happening, people keep falling for it...

It all started with Molyneux. He was the master of 'Instead of telling you what my product is, let me just go wild with what I think it could be and get you all excited!" - And that was fine, until you actually put your money down and then the game was nothing like what Peter was hyping it up to be. He pulled this shit for a good decade or more with journalists and gamers loving listening to Uncle Peter and the amazing things he's doing for the industry. It took him to release some pretty damn shoddy games for press and gamers to finally not listen to the lies anymore.

Then came Sean Murray, who apparently had learned straight from the Peter Molyneux handbook. This guy apparently just loooooved the spotlight. Even days before No Man's Sky released, he hyped up the Multiplayer that didn't even exist and was all too happy to let people think that No Man's Sky was 'Minecraft in Space', where you could literally do everything (you being able to do everything is generally a common theme behind the gaming snake oil salesmen, cause hey, that sorta attracts everybody!). Obviously there was massive backlash when No Man's Sky finally released and the product being nothing like what Murray hyped it up to be. But what happened then? They released a bunch of updates, so let's forget about the initial lies and deception and hey, let's actually shower him with awards again, cause he finally kinda sorta delivered on what he said the game would be years earlier. Thanks, Geoff Keighley. Rewarding that kinda behavior will surely help the industry grow stronger.

And then came Cyberpunk. Made by the guys that made Witcher 3, so this shit had to be good. Here's our Cyberpunk universe and - trust us - you can do fucking everything! Here the entire CDPR PR department took all the cues from what worked for Molyneux and Murray and just went completely apeshit with it. Gamers were to believe that this is "Sci-Fi GTA in First Person". What's not to love? Every video released by CDPR was carefully crafted to create a picture in players minds that was just insanely compelling. They stopped just short of outright saying that this thing would cure cancer. This strategy resulted in a sensational 8 million pre-orders. What happened then was this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CymqHdNYkg&ab_channel=BeatEmUps. The product was a fraction of what the developer hyped it up to be and on top of that it barely even ran on consoles that it was supposed to 'run surprisingly well on!'.

I'd argue that all 3 of those are clear examples of you folks all being made fools of. And even the 'journalists' in this industry happily played along, each and every single time.

And let me also say, from the perspective of a developer, all of this just sucks. Back in 2014, I remember some journalist from some big publication telling us that Ori almost got the cover article of some magazine I read frequently, but ultimately they had to pick No Man's Sky cause it was the 'bigger game'. I kinda agreed back then, thinking to myself: "Ok, I get it, they have to promote the bigger game, they obviously have to go for the clicks. Sucks, but that's how the game is played." But then I really felt bamboozled once No Man's Sky came out and it became clear that all this hype was really just built on lies and the honest guy who just showed his actual product really got kicked in the balls because the lying guy was able to make up some tall tales that held absolutely no substance.

I know this whole thread might come off as me sounding bitter and I'm sure there'll be some people that see this as me shitting on other devs. No, I'm not. I'm shitting on liars and people that are okay with openly deceiving others. I'd argue that we should all agree that this shit is not okay. If I go and buy a car and the car salesman sells me a car that supposedly has 300 horse power, but on the drive home after the purchase I notice that he switched out the motor when I wasn't looking, I'd be rightfully pissed off, cause I was deceived.

And yet, gamers and journalists don't really seem to mind all that much. Yeah, the backlash is coming, but usually you see a ton of people then arguing that they like the game that came out of it anyway. That is so not the point. It doesn't matter if the snake oil actually tastes fine. Don't sell me on features that don't exist. Don't paint a picture that you'll not be able to deliver. Just don't fucking lie to me. You're fucking over gamers, you're fucking over journalists (that should know better, so shame on you!) and you're fucking over other developers.

There, I said my piece, felt like a chip I needed to get off my shoulder and I think this is a wrong that we should set right so that this won't happen anymore.

Totally agree with him.

I have nothing but respect for the guy.

Not only is he the guy behind Ori, but he also seems to be the one man in the entire industry who genuinely knows what he's doing.

 

[lightbane]

It's crazy to see such a brilliant writing piece in REEsetera, but it is totally right.

 

[Zibniyat]

I don't know if it's false memory syndrome but I thought platforming in the first Ori was more difficult (good).

The sequel, which I am playing right now, is easier. Not just because there is the subjective element of being familiar with the movement and combat mechanics, but due to some objective elements as well. I played Ori and the Blind Forest on Hard difficulty two times in succession, the last time to 100% completion, for which it took me less than 10 hours, and now I am playing this game on Hard difficulty as well, and some things which do make this game objectively easier (in the first 11 hours at least, how much I have played so far) are:

1. Obtaining special movements relatively sooner. Things like Dash and Bash etc. were obtained relatively later in the first game. But especially abilities like Double jump and Glide, which in the first game were obtained near the end (perhaps in the last third), while here (if I am to take into account the amount of Life and Energy that I currently have on my disposal) I feel like I still have at least half a game to go through.

2. Forgiving environmental hazards. Most environmental dangers like spikes, thorns, fire and similar deal MUCH less damage to Ori here than in the first game. In the first game there were always dangers present which meant instant death, but here - whether due to less damage dealt as such, or due to obtaining Life cells (" health points") sooner and in greater quantity, or due to both - Ori never dies, sometimes even when making contact with said dangers repeatedly in succession. In the first game the most challenging thing I remember was trying to obtain the 4 pieces that open the door in that sandy & windy area, with what appeared to be metal-coated spikes all over the place, using Glide for the purpose. Just touching said spikes once meant instant death, and my Ori died a lot there. Meanwhile, in this game no such challenging and dangerous areas and hazards exist whatsoever. Drowning means instant death here as well (same as in the first game), and the only truly dangerous thing I have seen thus far, which too causes instant death, is falling into boiling mud in that one area of a single map. Not even falling into "corrupted water" is instant death, since often times I was able to jump out of it before losing all Life cells.

3. Abundance of restorative drops. Enemies frequently drop life- and energy-replenishing "cells" or whatever they are called, much more than I remember was the case in the first game. Complete with environmental drops this makes sure to never run out of Energy for example.

4. Myriad of auto-save points all over the maps. From what I have seen thus far, there are auto-save points every few steps, and as such there is no incentive to be as careful as in the first game. This makes the game much easier than the original. This ties strongly with the point 5.

5. There is no requirement to spend Energy cells to save progress. In the first game, on Hard, there were two ways to save the game: either find a Spirit Well, of which there was always just 1 on each map, or spend Energy cell(s) (whether one, several, or even less than one I can't remember). This meant that the player sometimes had to economise with Energy cells, since they were less abundant than in the sequel and some special attacks required them as well. In the first game, this meant that there were fewer opportunities for saving the game, and complete with more dangerous environmental hazards the game was objectively more challenging because of this. I remember also sometimes saving that 1 last Energy cell to save the game after passing an obstacle, rather than using it for a special attack against enemies. Of course, one could say that there was always the ability to back-track and find more cells that way, but that is still fraught with dangers and also - needless tedium.

6. Certain differences in movement mechanics. Sticking to walls in the first game was an "active skill", meaning the player had to press the specific key for the ability to activate and had to keep pressing said key for as long as he wanted to be stick to the wall. In the sequel, it is a "passive skill" and Ori will automatically stick to any (vertical) surface. This makes the game a lot easier in certain areas, but I have always felt in the first game that it was tedious to have to use a specific key for this Ori's ability to activate, and so I cannot say if the sequel is "worse off" for having it passive, but it definitely makes the game easier.

7. Enemies deal less damage. Even a mob of enemies, something rarely occuring in the first game (if at all), is manageable here simply because they deal less damage to Ori. In the first game merely touching certain enemies meant instant death, such as those stationary projectile-spitting ones.

So yes, all things considering and if we are playing both games the same way (minimum backtracking to replenish Life and Energy cells), the first game is SIGNIFICANTLY more difficult and challenging.

This means that this game is at least 1 point less good than the first game, and considering that I rated Ori and the Blind Forest as being 10/10, this one cannot get more than 9/10 regardless of how it will play out further since I am yet to play through the latter half of it.

 

[v1rus]

Decided its time to play the sequel. All is well, as expected, but - Im not sure about the difficulty. I think I beat the original Ori on normal, and i decided to go with hard with this one - I prefer the hardest, most challenging setting, as long as the game is not a complete pile of bullshit (HP bloat I'm looking at you), which this surely isnt. But, I've been playing on hard for an half an hour - hour, and I cant shake the feeling the game wasnt meant to be played on hard, and it sorta feels out of place.

Opinions bros? Keep playing on hard, or play on normal?

 

[Zibniyat]

What? But Hard is easy!