|
Gio posted:i agree SM is designed to be very linear and that its critical path (KPDR) is hard gated for casual playthroughs, but it’s actually remarkable how easy it is to sequence break using the tech the game gives you. yup i think this is the secret sauce that other games don't do well. they take too many cues from vania instead of metroid - the castlevania side of the genre is all about combat and the map design tends toward overgating. if you need a big jump item to progress, the jump that is supposed to gate you is a big jump with no walls that you could jump off of to break the sequence or ways to use your magic/souls/etc. unconventionally. there is absolutely no mechanical room to avoid the critical path although the path might branch a bit along the way with multiple areas open at any given time. indie titles tend to show this same concern for guiding the player on the "intended" experience by making the gates simply impassible. meanwhile super metroid is over here like "hey want to get the spazer before hi jump? if you can walljump at all, go for it. power bombs and wrecked ship before touching norfair? well, fine, but you'll have to do a tricky walljump for that one. spring ball with no space jump? we'll design the room so that the physics let you do a regular jump up through a tiny hole but you'll have to figure out the precise timing for it. fight ridley without the varia suit? well...okay, but only if you're fuckin' amazing" like there's nothing you can't do in a weird order, the only hard locks are on luxury items. it's hard to figure out how much of this looseness was intentional but that's the kind of feeling you need to replicate to make a modern super metroid Jazerus fucked around with this message at 05:44 on Aug 29, 2021 |
#
¿
Aug 29, 2021 05:41
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 20:18 |
|
|
clips are dumb and i don't really accept them as part of the design. they certainly have their place in speedrunning but that kind of tech isn't part of why SM is good for a casual player, while the permissive physics that let you get spring ball by just jumping correctly are metroid 2 is a really interesting game for a lot of reasons but the one that stands out to me is the boss arena design. anyone designing any kind of game should play metroid 2 to understand how enemies and their environment can interact to create a wide variety of challenges using a small set of tools
|
|
#
¿
Sep 14, 2021 06:21
|
|
|
SidneyIsTheKiller posted:I kind of hate that people use "metroidvania" to describe a Metroid-type game. It really should be a term consigned to particular Castlevania games. You know, the ones that are like Metroid. Other games that are like Metroid can be described as being, you know, like Metroid. agreed but that ship has sailed and honestly most indie metroidvanias lean toward the vania style of exploration-action-rpg with big impassable gates to ensure the proper sequence rather than being like super metroid so the term still works
|
|
#
¿
Sep 25, 2021 18:36
|
|
|
Doctor Dogballs posted:is Metroid's gun attached to his arm or does he hold it both
|
|
#
¿
Feb 4, 2022 00:13
|
|
|
the easiest tricks to learn after walljumping and shinespark are gravity jumps and spring ball jumps. not a ton of applications for either in vanilla SM aside from skipping the awful grapple section in maridia or doing reverse boss order, but they're hugely useful in randomizer and romhacks. a one-tap short charge is pretty easy too and makes shinesparks in tight areas much less difficult. i find machball to be pretty tricky unless i'm jumping through a door but fortunately the two places you use it for sequence breaking (early supers in brinstar and early ice in norfair) are both door-jump machballs
|
|
#
¿
Feb 4, 2022 22:38
|
|
|
they ignored it because within nintendo's design restrictions (as a corporation) they really can't make the magic happen again, and they know it. all nintendo games since the wii era have to be friendly enough for "casual" gamers - and this isn't me slamming casual gamers, nintendo themselves draw a distinction between "casual" and "core" gamers and consciously try to appeal to both at once in their flagship games - with straightforward designs and as little sequence-breaking as possible, because accidental sequence breaks could be confusing. the GBA games also started the trend where they just keep trying to tell stories that rely on events happening in a linear order so they can't allow you to do things out of order without loving up the story flags. it's almost the opposite of the problem that the paper mario games have where miyamoto vetoes "complicated" stories. i've been playing zero mission recently and it's really clear to me how much the designers of that game both understand the magic of super metroid, and also cannot implement it within whatever rules are governing their development. the game is literally only a few deleted blocks away from being more or less wide open to sequence breaks for a sufficiently devious player, but QA reported those sequence breaks during development so they were "fixed". there's a particularly frustrating one where you could get power bombs quite early if only there weren't two power bomb blocks sitting on the floor breaking up a floor area so that you can't use speed booster. there isn't even any good reason to keep you from having power bombs, they're practically useless except for getting other minor items, but, well, no fun allowed. i like to think that QA conspired to not report some of the really obvious ones like early varia and early screw attack because those sequence breaks were in the original metroid; or maybe they were simply allowed to stay because they were in the original game, but sequence breaking the new content wasn't allowed. anyway nintendo isn't alone in ignoring super metroid. i don't think it's really correct to say that SM spawned a whole genre...very few games actually try to be super metroid, even when they think that's what they're trying to do. i would go so far as to say that most of the uniquely wonderful things about super metroid are considered "bad game design" when considered in isolation; the "stiff" controls that are actually very fluid but hard to master quickly, permissive physics leading to a lack of hard gates, absolutely no story beyond the intro and ending, these are all things that the genre tends to avoid, with some exceptions of course. to me metroidvanias are, in general, really, truly metroidvanias - that is, they mostly draw on the design of the post-symphony castlevanias. and those are all great games, worthy of being studied and copied, but at a certain point you have to wonder - when is someone who isn't a super metroid romhacker going to sit down and really try to make super metroid again?
|
|
#
¿
Feb 5, 2022 08:03
|
|
|
Rockman Reserve posted:gotta be honest it’s super weird seeing someone go all “nintendo is for CASUALS” in the Metroid thread a few months after Dread dropped but you do you I guess i explicitly didn't do that, please actually read before you slam a hot take down like this lmao if you really need further context here, i was basically referring to an interview with kensuke tanabe, one of the producers of metroid prime trilogy, where he talks about a hypothetical metroid prime 4, and talks about how he wants it to remain accessible to "casual" players but have puzzle content that appeals to "core" gamers. this is a sentiment i have seen expressed in a lot of other interviews with nintendo folks over the years. it is a distinction that nintendo draws between parts of their audience as part of whatever byzantine corporation-wide rules determine what can and can't go into a video game. i think they're doing their audience a disservice by implying that a game like super metroid cannot be enjoyed casually when it obviously, uh, can; and i think that if they are going to draw a "BABY VS HARDCORE GAM4R" distinction anyway, despite the dumb implications of it, then they shouldn't compromise between the two to create a product that nobody can fully enjoy. dread is great but it does still round off a lot of sharp edges to prevent you from breaking the story like the GBA metroids do
|
|
#
¿
Feb 6, 2022 18:27
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 20:18 |
|
|
i mean...yeah? you're not teaching me anything or even disagreeing with me, really. my posts were specifically addressing the question of "why is super metroid ignored as a design model?" and the limitations of corporate game design are the answer, yes. ideally if you were making a game and wanted it to be like super metroid, you would in fact sit down for every issue detected and go "is this fun, y/n?"; moreover, you would simply design the game such that there is very little that can be broken by doing things out of order. in general, the devs of super metroid accounted for you going back to areas with a fuller loadout to look for stuff you missed, so it's very hard for you possessing a thing you shouldn't have to put you in a bad situation; and, aside from power bomb softlocks if you don't have the bombs, you can't put yourself into many situations where you can't get back out of somewhere because you're missing something you're supposed to have. these things came together by accident in SM but it could be done deliberately; it simply can't within the specific circumstances that the metroid series is in (owned by a large corporation, designed by people who want a linear story progression, etc.). i'm not sure why folks have fixated on the "casual gamer" stuff because it's not the core of my argument here.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 7, 2022 18:08
|
|