Duraframe300
Arcane
- Joined
- Dec 21, 2010
- Messages
- 6,395
in this thread. Git gud.
My biggest complaints about one-shots in Dark Souls are mostly environmental hazards. Mimics, Seath's ambush, Kalameet before Gough, the Hellkite Drake, and, while not really a "one-shot" (in some cases more painful, Reah getting ganked. Things that just bone the player once and then are never an issue, completely solved by meta-knowledge and offering no substantive gameplay afterwards, or on subsequent replays. A crappy way to do instant death attacks compared to Nocturne, which took a much-maligned mechanic and made interesting enough gameplay out of it.
"Decently protected" is pretty nebulous. Even a tanky, well-armored character is probably going to take a lot of damage from Vendrick's swings; guy hits like a truck. Ancient Dragon will pretty much one-shot any character with sub-80% fire resistance if it scores a double hit on its flying firebreath attack (not too uncommon an occurrence). And Manus' dark magic can deal serious damage. An SL120 with ~30VIT and 40 END and wearing Artorias' armor (fully upgraded) lost about 70% of their health through block with a high-tier medium shield (Silver/Black Knight) against one of his magic attacks. That a lot of damage to a decidedly tanky build.
Point is, the Souls games have a habit of making some (optional) endbosses into damage-bloated freaks because, I dunno, scrubs need to gitguder?
Then again, this is a point I'd be mostly willing to concede or drop. Bosses with one-shotting attacks aren't really my biggest bugbear.
I agree that not every boss needs to be challenging on the Nth replay. I do expect them, however, to at least be fun on the first one, which most of the bosses I listed as examples weren't, mostly due to how linear they are. There's one right way to fight them and, maybe, some terribly boring wrong ways to go against them.
Beating Ceaseless Discharge with the hilariously obscure one-shot trick is mostly painless. Looping its tentacle slam as you slowly chip away the demon's health is a goddamn chore.
Or what about the Hydras? Try fighting it at a distance; it's not going to be easy and it certainly won't be fun. But fight it the "right" way, by running up close to bait its ineffectual head slam attack, and tons of opportunities for safe. easy punishment crop up.
Woe betide anyone who enters the Moonlight Butterfly's fog gate without a ranged attack. Those unfortunate enough to do so will be subjected to one of the most stupefying battles ever in which they dodge for ~4 minutes before the Butterfly deigns to land and be beat upon. This is doubly painful if the player hasn't significantly upgraded their weapons, making the battle into even more of a dull, repetitive slog.
And then there's Dragon God and Bed of Chaos, two-entirely linear shitbosses. I think enough virtual ink has been spilled on these marvels...
In all of these bosses the player's still penalized heavily for a lack of metaknowledge. Even if the player is skilled/savvy, and can avoid death through strong core skills, they're still punished with an awful play experience. And in some ways, this a lot worse than cheap deaths are.
Oh, for sure. Metaknowledge tends to overpower any challenge that isn't sufficiently randomized or rooted in player reflexive skill. That said, Nocturne's bosses (mostly) have numerous solutions, and can be taken apart in different ways. While they can easily be thrashed by the power of GameFAQs, there's still a lot more fun that can be gleaned from them than a lot of shitty bosses that infest the (Muhzaki) Souls games.
Make me die to it, but also make it abundantly clear what happened
How are those different things ?Bad trial and error is the kind of thing where you get hit by a random trap out of nowhere and the only way to avoid it is knowing it's coming ahead of time
How are those different things ?
This.A trial and error system can only be effectively used if the player can actually learn from their mistakes, and apply that knowledge to future situations.
However, the player should be able to figure out a challenge on their first try without having died. If you need to pass a minefield, there's usually a sign of a skull, bits and pieces of human remains, or the mines make some beeping noise and are very visible. This should tell you that the area you are about to pass through is fairly dangerous, and thus you'll be on your guard. If you walk through a minefield without there being any signs that say so, you'll probably die a painful death and be forced to reload your previous save. You now know that place is a minefield, but there would be absolutely no way to know that the first time you went there. If you died despite the obvious signs, then you should learn to pay attention to your surroundings for hints.
While not every challenge needs a tutorial, an explanation how to best it, or some really obvious hint, you should be able to look back when you died, and realize the signs were there to prevent such a death. Ultimately you will learn to look for these signs in the future, and prevent deaths in future different challenges.
How is it not? You learn the pattern and the timing, when you don't know those things you get brutalized. Some of the attacks have huge wind-up times but the dodge window in terms of timing and location is extremely precise and you can only learn it by trying, and likely failing.
Question: Did you play online with those warning hints from players plastered everywhere?I was able to beat Dark Souls, on my first playthrough, having not played Demon Souls, with about ~15 deaths, most of which came from the Capra Demon. The Souls games are only "trial and error" if you rush forward carelessly — exactly the sort of modern play style they were designed to punish.
Bad trial and error is the kind of thing where you get hit by a random trap out of nowhere and the only way to avoid it is knowing it's coming ahead of time. The very worst are the sections that were popular in old arcade games where you're racing someplace or whatever and you have to select the right brances to take in the level. Those usually see you die on a wrong turn with no indication ahead of time which one you should take.
The most recent section that sticks out for me was this part of Ori and the blind forest. I think it took me 60ish tries to time all the jumps correctly and I was quite fustrated by the end.
But the BEST kind is when turning left is actually survivable and gets you a better time if you can pull off some crazy Dukes of Hazzard type shit.Or you're racing down a road. turning left sends you over a cliff, turning right sends you to safety and no way to know which is which ahead of time.
The thing is, with the exception of the mimics (and even those do technically have a tell, it's just way too subtle) souls games pretty much never outright cheapshot you. An enemy will drop from the ceiling, but you could have looked up. Something will gank you as you walk through a door, but you could have looked to the side before entering, etc. Your reaction to such things shouldn't be 'the game is cheap, it should give me a do-over' it should be 'I'm shit for not having seen that coming, I'll try to do better.' And honestly, if you were playing online, you'd have to be blind to not see all the bloodstains and warning signs around every fucking hidden thing in the game.
Bad trial and error is the kind of thing where you get hit by a random trap out of nowhere and the only way to avoid it is knowing it's coming ahead of time. The very worst are the sections that were popular in old arcade games where you're racing someplace or whatever and you have to select the right brances to take in the level. Those usually see you die on a wrong turn with no indication ahead of time which one you should take.
The most recent section that sticks out for me was this part of Ori and the blind forest. I think it took me 60ish tries to time all the jumps correctly and I was quite fustrated by the end.
That's a necro on my part, but I just needed to stress that Ori really goes out of its way to avoid trial and error by telegraphing stuff, it's just that it's rather unforgiving.
Bad trial and error is the kind of thing where you get hit by a random trap out of nowhere and the only way to avoid it is knowing it's coming ahead of time. The very worst are the sections that were popular in old arcade games where you're racing someplace or whatever and you have to select the right brances to take in the level. Those usually see you die on a wrong turn with no indication ahead of time which one you should take.
The most recent section that sticks out for me was this part of Ori and the blind forest. I think it took me 60ish tries to time all the jumps correctly and I was quite fustrated by the end.
That's a necro on my part, but I just needed to stress that Ori really goes out of its way to avoid trial and error by telegraphing stuff, it's just that it's rather unforgiving.
I actually liked this level (Ginsoo Tree) a lot. It took me 20+ tries to finish, but I never felt stuck in any particular place, and usually after passing some tricky jump I rarely failed at it in the following tries. So despite dying a lot, I always felt like I was progressing, even if by a small step. Very cool design, it was the best moment of Ori for me
On the other hand the later escape levels were much worse in that department, especially the last one where the owl kills you when you slow down in the open. The owl's attacks were badly telegraphed and dying to them over and over was frustrating
There were a few things during ruins escape that verged on meta but they were still avoidable without no prior information.