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And it's time for part 4! I love all the discussion that's coming from this series. Watch, the next game we play is going to be totally mindless or something.
pedrovay2003 fucked around with this message at 00:17 on Feb 20, 2016 |
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Feb 20, 2016 00:14
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| # ? Apr 26, 2024 18:52 |
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Shaded Spriter posted:Edit: also thinking about the actual video - The "people who have the knowledge" now is basically educators/entertainers on The Internet. The Scientists and the Technologists don't have the knowledge - the Science Communicators - the Technologists who create ways for people to connect to. I'd say the knowledge is still in the sciences, but the communicators have a VITAL role in translation. Just because you know a bunch of stuff doesn't mean you can communicate it well, and people are valued who can translate Science into Normal, or even Science into Science; fields get so specialized and have certain assumptions that it can be difficult to talk cross-field.
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Feb 20, 2016 00:43
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My masters is in Science Communication, although I'm never entirely sure if I'm using it right. If nothing else, it broadened my view of how science connects in to everything else.
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Feb 20, 2016 00:49
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You're now at a puzzle (that grid in the water room) which took me a LONG time to figure out. These ones are clever but some of the angles are very finicky. If you're interested in going completionist, note that all the small switches also count as "puzzles" and each way they can be solved counts for one. Open a door? That's a puzzle. Move that third hex up top to the left? The switch for that is a puzzle, and moving it back to the right is also a puzzle. Paul.Power posted:My masters is in Science Communication, although I'm never entirely sure if I'm using it right. If nothing else, it broadened my view of how science connects in to everything else. My favorite personal story is from eight or so years ago, when I was catching up with my old college roommate and fellow physics major. He was doing oceanography stuff in a program where a lot of the coworkers were from a biology background, and the relief was palpable that he could describe his work to me without needing to fill in gaps like "and we know these values are equal because it's not moving so the forces balance." Balancing the forces is drilled into any freshman physics major, by the time he'd finished describing what he was looking at I had already equalized everything in my head just by reflex. It was a neat conversation and really illuminated the idea for me of different base assumptions and communication difficulties not meaning people are smarter or dumber.
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Feb 20, 2016 01:28
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Y'all have way more endurance than I do, I would've ollied out soon as I saw the second room and figured out the mirror trick. Puzzle fatigue would've hit me haaaard right then.
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Feb 20, 2016 02:53
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Is me or was there a second exit in the gated area you opened with the tree puzzles?
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Feb 20, 2016 03:22
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A stupid angle, as opposed to acute angle. 
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Feb 20, 2016 03:59
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Echophonic posted:A stupid angle, as opposed to acute angle. I believe you are referring to the "Baka" and "Moe" angles. Gaijin.
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Feb 20, 2016 04:17
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I remember that specific water reflection giving me more trouble than any of the other ones in this area. Unfortunately, I don't remember where you're supposed to stand so I can't even drop a hint. 
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Feb 20, 2016 04:20
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RickVoid posted:I believe you are referring to the "Baka" and "Moe" angles. 
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Feb 20, 2016 04:46
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Oh man, I hated doing the water level puzzle. It's so slow and frustrating that it made me want to rip my hair out
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Feb 20, 2016 12:27
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It's probably harder than it sounds, but maybe if you worked out where the lights are in the room you could work out where you'd need to stand to get the light source reflected on the puzzle screen.
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Feb 20, 2016 16:53
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At least you can't crouch, that'd make the reflection puzzles even more finicky. 
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Feb 20, 2016 19:11
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Man, that has to be my third least favourite area in the game. After some time these light puzzles outstay their wellcome and just feel kinda tedious. Especially if you have to wait for the water to change height. That desert area was one of the last places I did and at some point I just bit the bullet and looked at a guide, because it wasn't fun at all. My advice would be to just go away and do something else for a while.
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Feb 20, 2016 19:47
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This water level reflection crap is a remarkable feat of introducing trial and error into "see a pattern, repeat a pattern" puzzles.
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Feb 20, 2016 19:58
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I don't know how I feel about the reflection puzzles. I don't think they're very different from some of the other puzzles in this game that rely on environmental stuff. Like, let's take the pink trees. They introduce you to a way to "read" a piece of the environment and abstract it into puzzle logic; in this case you're looking at a tree and representing it as... well, a tree (the data structure). Graphics to graph, basically. Future puzzles complicate the mechanic - first you can do a straight visual map to the diagram, but later trees start crossing over themselves so you have to get increasingly more abstract in how you judge how to position the apple on the graph - for example, by using the nonsymmetry of the broken branches to establish which side of the graph is which side of the tree. Etc etc. The reflection puzzles ostensibly do this as well, but I don't think the progression - nor the lesson - is as clear. You begin by just finding the glare. This is actually pretty hard at first! It's not instantly intuitive and you could wander around for ages before noticing it. But whatever. The progression is supposed to be this; you start by trying to see a light source reflected on the panel, and later learn to plot the progression of light rays for yourself (and in the meantime use some basic pathing logic to figure out puzzles where not all of the path is visible). Like with the trees, you start off doing this visually and gradually progress into thinking about it more abstractly. The way you're supposed to do them is; you find the light source, trace a line to the panel, bounce it off the panel, and then find somewhere you can stand that intersects with this path. The water complicates this by adding a second reflective surface - now you can bounce the light off the water before or after hitting the panel. And the moving water just  The Witness toes a very dangerous line between difficult and too difficult. Quantifying difficulty is never going to work (even when quantifying complexity does), but this series of puzzles tests a very particular skill (abstract spatial reasoning (and some geometry)) that different people possess in wildly differing levels, and I wonder if this wasn't just... a bit much to ask. Of course, that's kind of the neat thing about this game too; it tests a lot of very different abilities, and there's quite a bit of variance between people in terms of who finds what too hard, and for every mechanic that's your own personal hell there'll be another that you get really easily and wonder why you're surrounded by morons who can't piece it together themselves.
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Feb 20, 2016 20:34
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I thought the underground (dark room) water puzzles were the most unintuitive in the game.
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Feb 21, 2016 02:03
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Dominoes posted:I thought the underground (dark room) water puzzles were the most unintuitive in the game. Agreed. "Tracing the light to the screen and working the angles" is fine in theory, but there are a lot of light sources in there and some which feel like they *should* work don't.
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Feb 21, 2016 02:20
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Yeah, I eventually used a guide for those because I already knew how to solve them & just couldn't get the stupid angles.
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Feb 21, 2016 03:23
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Yeah, it's about this point where doing the puzzle is less about exploring mechanics and more about trying to luck into the right spot to stand.
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Feb 21, 2016 23:39
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The desert temple was my first laser (I think I couldn't work out where to go in the symmetry section after opening the first gate, so I ended up finishing that later), and for the most part I was okay with it. The ones that tripped me up most were the two that were angled to the sides outside the temple that you guys got stuck on, and the rectangular puzzle in the changing-water-levels room. I was pretty much okay with the rest of it though, so it's not an evil area or anything. But it's not a great one for epiphanies, either.
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Feb 22, 2016 00:27
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Okay, it's time for part 5! A quick note about this episode: I sniff a LOT. I apologize for this; Amy and I have had really bad colds for the past few days, and it kind of shows in the video at certain points. Also, we cut out a pretty massive part of the video toward the beginning, because we made NO progress at all. This game is starting to get obscenely hard in certain places.
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Feb 24, 2016 03:08
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The town is definitely an overwhelming place to stumble into early. It's one of the endgame areas, and each puzzle there involves one (or multiple) of the tools you learn from around. Neat to explore, but you can't do much there yet except by accident. Good job on the maze, though.
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Feb 24, 2016 04:01
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I don't think it's a spoiler to give you this general information. As you've probably noticed, the puzzles in the town area are generally harder than the ones you've encountered so far. That's because the town is considered a final summary of everything you've learned throughout the rest of the game. It doesn't contain any tutorials because it expects you to already understand the puzzle mechanics before solving its puzzles. At this point, exploring the island like you started doing with the castle is the way to go. Every symbol has a meaning that will be conveyed to you at some point.
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Feb 24, 2016 04:06
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The Desert Temple was my second laser, so I might be a little biased... and I watched TieTuesday get the glare/reflection idea so I admit that's a little cheaty, but I notice details like that pretty fast anyway, so I don't think it was that big a leg up... That said? That water level puzzle was utterly tedious, rather than frustrating or difficult. I'd agree, despite getting it early, that most other generalized puzzle mechanics are more intuitive.
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Feb 24, 2016 09:35
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Oh, so that's how they get audio into these puzzles. Footstep noises are a pretty good element to base one around. But jeez, what was with those statues at the end there? That looked murderous, like they got Pompeii'd right in the middle of a serious domestic dispute.
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Feb 24, 2016 13:33
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Glazius posted:Oh, so that's how they get audio into these puzzles. Footstep noises are a pretty good element to base one around.
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Feb 24, 2016 21:03
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Okay, part 6 is up! In this episode, we do some interesting puzzles involving the fencers that definitely went too far. You know, by using broadswords.
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Feb 27, 2016 04:10
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Is it just me, or was there a starting circle on the edge of the hedge maze? I think that purple puzzle is totally solvable in it's current condition, although I'm not sure if I've got the rules for the black and white dots right.
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Feb 27, 2016 05:26
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I'm going to put some details on the black and white dots mechanics that I'm not sure you've fully grasped in spoilers because you might not want to read them but unfortunately the tutorial doesn't illustrate it very clearly. Read it only if you feel like you're still missing something with the dots mechanic. Colored dots like the black and white ones you've found have a very simple puzzle mechanic behind them. All you need to do is separate the colors from one another with your line. There is no fancy "you must pass the line between each black and white dot" like the tutorial appears to suggest. Don't worry, I had similar trouble grasping the mechanic at first too because I was over-complicating things. The purple line puzzle is in fact totally doable right now with your current knowledge. In general, as long as a puzzle panel is turned on, you can solve it provided you understand whatever mechanics are present on the panel. You don't really have to worry about a puzzle being on but not being doable because you need to do something else to it. fractalairduct posted:Is it just me, or was there a starting circle on the edge of the hedge maze? You have a good eye and I'm looking forward to them noticing. They sort of discovered a similar puzzle in the town but that puzzle specifically needed manipulation before it can be solved.
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Feb 27, 2016 06:25
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Specifically the point I think you've missed for black/white puzzles: all a white dot cares about is being separated from black dots and vice-versa. Whether it's connected to the other whites or in a box by itself, it's happy. It's hard to tell from just dialogue (since it sounds like there's a lot of hand gestures, there definitely were when I played) but I think that's what's giving you guys hangups.
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Feb 27, 2016 06:31
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Looking down from the top of the tower at those topiary mazes was really beautiful.
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Feb 29, 2016 03:14
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what was that wonderful music you used for the speed up section in part 6?
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Mar 1, 2016 02:13
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Part 7 is ready! Not as much witty banter in this one, but we made quite a bit of progress. I think we were just dumbfounded.Glazius posted:Looking down from the top of the tower at those topiary mazes was really beautiful. I agree completely. Most of the game really is gorgeous; the design choices are fantastic. metalloid posted:what was that wonderful music you used for the speed up section in part 6? I'll ask Amy about this and get back to you. She really does pick the best songs for the sped-up sections.
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Mar 2, 2016 07:05
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If you really want to know where that circle I saw was (and not figure it out for yourself) try looking from the top of the tower! I really enjoyed those shadow puzzles. They seem like maybe the best designed in the game so far.
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Mar 2, 2016 07:46
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I know some of us who already finished this have been posting nudges in spoilers (and trying to keep even the stuff in spoilers as just a nudge, I know I've agonized over "is this too much info" before hitting post a few times). Now that you solved the one in that walking maze, I can repost a couple as examples:FPzero posted:I'm going to put some details on the black and white dots mechanics that I'm not sure you've fully grasped in spoilers because you might not want to read them but unfortunately the tutorial doesn't illustrate it very clearly. Read it only if you feel like you're still missing something with the dots mechanic. Bruceski posted:Specifically the point I think you've missed for black/white puzzles: all a white dot cares about is being separated from black dots and vice-versa. Whether it's connected to the other whites or in a box by itself, it's happy. As long as we don't get out of hand, would you be fine with that sort of thing continuing or would you rather we hold off entirely? I've been trying to keep it to places where you could wind up stuck (the town being full of "you're supposed to learn about all this stuff from other areas" puzzles when others have been tutorials for example) or where the tutorial can let you walk away with an incomplete conclusion (like the dots there. I can't recall if the tutorial had some that broke the cluster rule but it's definitely easily missed).
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Mar 2, 2016 07:56
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That said, I love the dynamic of you guys solving these things, and it does have a feeling of interaction. In this latest video I caught myself pointing at my monitor as parts of the puzzle passed through your view, it probably looked like I was watching Blue's Clues or something.
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Mar 2, 2016 07:59
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I unironically like how you treat literally every solved puzzle as some grand, lifechanging revelation.
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Mar 2, 2016 08:14
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Regarding the Quarry puzzle area, you should be able STOP LOOKING AT SPOILERS, AMY.
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Mar 2, 2016 08:41
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oh yes oh god yes form the head FORM THE HEAD unghhhh...
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sirtommygunn posted:I unironically like how you treat literally every solved puzzle as some grand, lifechanging revelation. I would suggest that we need a "HOLY CRAP!" counter to go along with the puzzles solved counter, but they are indeed one in the same. In the walking puzzle that stumped them last video and was solved in this one, am I correct in saying that they crossed more of the board than was necessary for the solution? If I understand the colored dots mechanic, they should only have needed to go left one, up two, right one, up two, left two, down two, then straight to the exit instead of all the way to the bottom then back up, unless there are further attributes of this mechanic that I don't get. Wish I could play along with this LP myself, I'm liking the game a lot so far but it's too much for my PC to handle and I don't have a PS4.
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Mar 2, 2016 17:16
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