#481
Dont Mess With Sucess
Post rating: ~
a lot of people don't like roulette because they don't enjoy the disappointment of losing. even though the odds might be less favorable on a modern video slot machine, the slot machine is constantly comforting you with wins. you can play 30 lines at a time and get victory animations even when you lose money. but yeah hardcore gamblers are more motivated by the rare adrenaline of winning on a long shot.
#482
Post rating: +
i've only played Demon's but i don't really know what fun you'd be talking about in those games if it isn't the moment-to-moment experience of the gameplay loop. which is entirely about that high-risk high-reward feeling of accomplishment that relies on it being difficult (yet tractable, in the sense that your failures are predictable rather than random). obviously it's a time commitment but without real consequence to failure then you wouldn't get that feeling from succeeding.
#483
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that goes precisely to my point, doesn't it? in spite of the fact that a souls game comprises many design elements, it is only entertaining for those who enjoy the feeling of succeeding in combat after a big investment of time and energy overcoming enormous difficulty. ergo, adding a range of difficulty settings would defeat the purpose of the game, because it has nothing entertaining to offer but its difficulty. now if that isn't a design limitation i don't know what is.
#484
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i think very intentionally committing to a specific design principle and succeeding in it is about as far away from a design limitation as you can get, unless you think there's some property all games should inherently be working towards
#485
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not at all. but in all seriousness it IS a limitation by its very nature to focus on doing only one thing well to please one audience. and i'm not saying jedi fallen order is better than dark souls, but it is a wonderful proof of concept that you can take a lot of the design elements of souls, combine them with other elements, and offer balanced and fair combat at varying difficulties ranging from 'story mode' easy to souls-esque hard, and do all this in a satisfying way. and i think over the course of this decade we're going to see other games make the most of these possibilities in ways that eventually overshadow the souls games for all but a core of devoted players, because they offer so little, relatively speaking.
#486
Post rating: +

Petrol posted:

but in all seriousness it IS a limitation by its very nature to focus on doing only one thing well to please one audience.


i don't think that's really true, as long as it manages to fulfil this enough to justify its existence. in many ways i think unity of purpose is the opposite of a limitation in that it actually allows creative intention to be meaningfully fulfilled in some way, as opposed to what i think is the far more limiting design philosophy of most triple-A games which try to do a million different things for a million different audiences in the shallowest and least engaging ways possible.

#487
UNUSUALY COOL
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blinkandwheeze posted:

most triple-A games which try to do a million different things for a million different audiences in the shallowest and least engaging ways possible.



yeah... been thinking about the business where one big-money open-world FPS puts in a roller rink, and roller rinks become a feature of the genre for the next two years until some AAA series replaces theirs with a slightly smaller roller rink where you shoot people and gets A+ reviews for getting back to basics

#488
UNUSUALY COOL
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lo posted:

it just sounds like it's not a game made for you. like i don't really enjoy bullet hell shump games but im not going to say that devs that make them should put in a difficulty where there aren't actually that many bullets on the screen.



the next big thing in those though is infinite lives modes, the konami code approach but it's just a flag in the menu

#489
UNUSUALY COOL
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played monster hunter in the flex days so dark souls was just goth MH to me... look into it!!
#490
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a 'limitation' isn't inherently wrong or bad. limiting the scope of a piece of media (or indeed art) opens up its own possibilities. this is, shall we say, the dialectic of focus? it is a limitation nonetheless. and when i suggest the souls games will eventually be overshadowed by games that take cues from them but broaden the scope, i am not talking about the lowest common denominator AAA games - the assassin's creeds of the world are obviously much more limited, in their own way. incidentally, not that it has a hard and fast meaning, but if AAA means anything, surely games like DS3, bloodborne and sekiro are AAA, so you really are setting up a false dichotomy I think.
#491
Post rating: +
but a limitation of scope and a limitation of design are different things, design is necessarily going to be orthogonal to vision in at least some sense

i think if a design limitation means anything, it's a constraint of some aspect of the design presenting an obstacle to the realisation of its intentions. which can be valuable creatively as well, but i don't think it applies to something like the soulsborne games where design is extremely considered and intentional in coherence with their scope

i did say most triple-A games, obviously there are exceptions, i'm sure my fellow posters know what i'm talking about. but in particular fromsoft's current scale is basically a fluke owing to the chance international success of ds1, they're not a typical example at that level of industry

i don't know what "overshadowed" would mean in this context. it becomes more significant as a touchstone the more developers draw their cues from it, not the opposite

In any case i don't know anything about it but i am sure a Star Wars licensed game by EA is really bad actually and i'm not going to do anything to change this instinctual judgement. Thank you
#492
Post rating: +
personally i feel that the game "dark souls" is far too easy, it should be much much harder, as should all other computer games, they should also have a lot more bugs and mandatory ctds, no save system and they should all cost a trillion dollars
#493
Post rating: ~

blinkandwheeze posted:

In any case i don't know anything about it but i am sure a Star Wars licensed game by EA is really bad actually and i'm not going to do anything to change this instinctual judgement. Thank you


it's funny and cool that video games is the one subject that makes even the smartest among you develop a terminal case of gbs

#494
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I’ve been playing Imperator, a game where you can make your slaves “happy”.
#495
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I’m mostly just zooming in and out of the amazing map and learning Greek geography the easy way, so that the next time I read the Catalogue of Ships in the Iliad I can nod sagely
#496
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Petrol posted:

not at all. but in all seriousness it IS a limitation by its very nature to focus on doing only one thing well to please one audience. and i'm not saying jedi fallen order is better than dark souls, but it is a wonderful proof of concept that you can take a lot of the design elements of souls, combine them with other elements, and offer balanced and fair combat at varying difficulties ranging from 'story mode' easy to souls-esque hard, and do all this in a satisfying way. and i think over the course of this decade we're going to see other games make the most of these possibilities in ways that eventually overshadow the souls games for all but a core of devoted players, because they offer so little, relatively speaking.



i wont play one minute of the garbage star wars game to find out, but i guarantee you hard mode sucks if anything like an easy mode exists

#497
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like it or not we live a world which is subject to natural law, and one of those laws is that if you have scalable difficulty settings, your game sucks
#498
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i like STALKER's system where difficulty settings are basically just a question of whether or not you want everything including yourself to be a bullet sponge or a 1 shot kill
#499
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kamelred posted:

like it or not we live a world which is subject to natural law, and one of those laws is that if you have scalable difficulty settings, your game sucks


Ah yes well balanced scalable difficulty is impossible just as G-d intended, the Natural Law,

#500
lies half the time
Post rating: +
there are scalable difficulty levels in tetris. case closed
#501
Post rating: +

kamelred posted:

like it or not we live a world which is subject to natural law, and one of those laws is that if you have scalable difficulty settings, your game sucks


the thomas aquinas of video games

#502
Dont Mess With Sucess
Post rating: ~

ialdabaoth posted:

there are scalable difficulty levels in tetris. case closed


not exactly. the levels become more difficult as you progress, and you have the option to skip ahead to later in the story line. but the rules of the game stay the same for everyone, and all players eventually face the hardest difficulties if they want the good ending.

#503
lies half the time
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i fondly remember the first time i watched the buran shuttle launch, blitzed on cough syrup and weed in high school, maybe yall ought to adjust your own difficulty levels instead of expecting the game to to it for you
#504
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tears posted:

kamelred posted:


like it or not we live a world which is subject to natural law, and one of those laws is that if you have scalable difficulty settings, your game sucks


the thomas aquinas of video games


he spoke of the mythical difficulty on a scale, and soon we will be its players

#505
Post rating: +
Rhizzone is back up, resume dark souls argument
#506
Post rating: +
sometimes i find i play a lot of the video game. and then for a while, i don't play much video game. then the pendulum swings back

is this a useful datum, are we close to solving this puzzle
#507
chickeon
Post rating: +

lo posted:

it just sounds like it's not a game made for you. like i don't really enjoy bullet hell shump games but im not going to say that devs that make them should put in a difficulty where there aren't actually that many bullets on the screen.

im of the mind that dark souls is basically perfect but tihs example isn't taht great since virtually all of those shmups do contain an easy difficulty with less bullets on the screen as well as other adjustments. for cowards of course

#508
lies half the time
Post rating: +
do you prefer brick hell first person stackers or rotate tile strategy games
#509
lies half the time
Post rating: +
massively multi-storied organize rotating pentomino games
#510
Post rating: ~
I like to play sudoku, picross, peggle, etc
#511
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Picross is like doing a puzzle but with the added bonus of doing arithmetic at the same time
#512
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I might play "xcom 2", or "disco elysium" or "something else" sometime soon though
#513
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csgo is my favorite game coz i can just dive in and die like 30 seconds in and then get 90 seconds of time until the next round which i then use to try to follow news on twitter frantically. any game that would require a longer focus from me gets deleted instantly
#514
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chickeon posted:

lo posted:


it just sounds like it's not a game made for you. like i don't really enjoy bullet hell shump games but im not going to say that devs that make them should put in a difficulty where there aren't actually that many bullets on the screen.

im of the mind that dark souls is basically perfect but tihs example isn't taht great since virtually all of those shmups do contain an easy difficulty with less bullets on the screen as well as other adjustments. for cowards of course


i actually didn't know that about a lot of them but as i said, im not a shump guy. i think you get what i meant though

#515
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here are the games i hope to get and play some time this calendar year:

  • control
  • metal wolf chaos xd
  • wattam
  • cyberpunk 2077
  • fight crab
  • a mario game to be determined at a later date (nsmb wii u dx, or 3d world dx if they do that this year)
#516
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bought blackwake on steam sales, it s fun so far
#517
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kinda want to see how good i still am at subspace/continuum but not yet really

#518
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finished pillars of eternity 2: deadfire a while back. an RPG focusing on indigenous islanders instead of the typical white settlers was a nice change
#519
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no one told me the site was back up but i also wanted to point out that the argument form "i dont live in my moms basement, so i need a different kind of game" is a proud tradition in videogame advertising. im sure that its appearance petrols post is just a coincidence but one must beware the alien, mutant, heretic, etc.
#520
Post rating: +

kamelred posted:

no one told me the site was back up but i also wanted to point out that the argument form "i dont live in my moms basement, so i need a different kind of game" is a proud tradition in videogame advertising. im sure that its appearance petrols post is just a coincidence but one must beware the alien, mutant, heretic, etc.


indeed i was unaware of that. i am not across the history of videogame advertising, because i do not live in the basement