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4 seconds after Nat gets control: {Walljump tests} Oh here we goooooo
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Mar 18, 2021 04:55
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EggsAisle posted:I have complicated opinions about this game. There's a lot about it I really like, and it's mostly the things that have been praised already- visuals, sound design, controls, mood, etc. It's all really, really good. Actually it's excellent, most games aren't half as inspired. And I love the Metroidvania genre, so Hollow Knight was definitely in my wheelhouse. Steam says I've put 40.3 hours into it, which sounds about right, and for the most part I had fun. But I never finished it, and I probably won't pick it up again. Games are the only form of entertainment that has a skill check in order to continue enjoying them. They don't hand out a test at the end of the first hill on a roller coaster and kick you off if you can't solve the math problem for why it works.. No one goes to a movie expecting to be handed a button that needs to be pressed in an exact sequence or the scene repeats until everyone in the theater gets it right. Bands don't stop a concert because someone in the back is singing out of tune. Games do this. Can't beat the Capra Demon? Don't have time to grind for 20 levels just to handle the end game bosses? Didn't buy the guide for Final Fantasy 9 and want to find secrets on your own? Sorry, your ride ends here. More games need a shame free "busy adult" mode. My reflexes were never fast and the years haven't helped. Put in a tourist/story mode that has no penalty. If your game is intentionally hard, put in some sort of optional safety net. I paid for the entire game, it's your job as a good designer/developer to figure out how you're going to help get your customer through it. Don't give me poo poo because I'm playing on easy. That's the professor saying "only x number of people will pass this class". If there's less than 50% of your players who have gotten the game cleared achievement, you haven't created a masterpiece. You've screwed people out of money and enjoyment and failed as a designer. I wanted to love this game for all the same reasons as above, but my skills as a player crapped out before my refund timer was up on Steam.
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Mar 23, 2021 02:50
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Natural 20 posted:I wanted to save this discussion until after Episode 6 aired so sorry for the long time on getting to this! I understand the desire for developers to say "This is my vision. This should be difficult for the player to overcome." I can respect that as an art form. As an artist, it's your choice to make something direct or as obtuse as you'd like. Write a poem in 6th century Latin if that's what you're moved to do. That's your call as the creator, and maybe that's how you are best able to express your vision to the world. Now it's time to sell the poem. The critics who read poems professionally praise it for really stretching their skills. It gets highly rated reviews. Streamers read the poem and make it seem reasonable to digest, so it becomes a wide market hit. Now there's a large portion of people who've bought the poem who are unable to read it. Sure, they might make it through a few lines, and some might really get dedicated to the idea of reading it and manage to force their way through after hours and hours of struggling. The artist could easily include a translation, but a bit of the nuance would be lost. A pun here, an entendre there, but a translation would make it accessible to large amounts of people who bought the poem. Not handing out that translation is the poet saying to everyone who bought the poem (and were unable to return it because it'd been over two hours that they'd tried to read it or it could only be returned for another copy since the shrink wrap was removed), to "Ut banum". The most frustrating part about games going for the "Hard Games" ideal for difficulty is that the developers have almost 0 issue including challenge items that allow the player to handicap themselves. An item that sets you to 1 heart or makes you take double damage? Perfectly fine. An item that can be used to let you take half damage? "THAT'S NOT OUR VISION."
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Mar 31, 2021 04:01
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Shitenshi posted:I'm reminded a Bioware dev said a decade ago that there should be an option for people to simply skip the gameplay and see the story alone if they want to without playing the game. She got poo poo on hard for it because gamers will be gamers, but you know what? She's right. People should have that freedom, no matter the reason, as a matter of decency from the developers. And if that extreme is allowed, then poo poo, developers should go a lot harder for allowing accessibility options. In today's day and age where they can add patches as much as they want to, no excuse for not giving one that allows a god mode or failing that, just difficulty toggle options. It should be normalized, the same way that good controls and other basics are normalized. There's been some trending toward doing "story mode" difficulties, and I've found it to be fantastic. Horizon: Zero Dawn has an amazing story and some of the most interesting world building I've seen in a game, all with gameplay that I absolutely *hated*. Story mode turned it from something I would have quit playing a couple hours in and wrote off as a negative experience into a game where I've completed nearly every sidequest and the DLC just to get more of that world. EggsAisle posted:
Well said.
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Apr 1, 2021 00:39
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I'm in on the dead pool. I'm going with a static room hazard after managing to beat yet another boss we all expect him to die on.
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Apr 10, 2021 05:28
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Grub mimics are rude as hell 
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May 1, 2021 05:07
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Since there's a delay on these videos, how's the cat and why haven't we seen pictures of it?
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May 20, 2021 03:55
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"Hmm. That seems ominous. Anyway, WHERE'S MY MONEY?" Nat's avoidance of the actual story in favor of vengeance for minor in game slights will always be fantastic.
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Jun 5, 2021 05:44
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Cactus posted:Ok, unpopular opinion incoming... There's two layers of story. The overall story is told through the environments, the enemies, npc designs, signposting, and the player character themselves. On this layer, Hollow Knight is an absolute masterpiece: Something really bad happened a long time ago and nearly wiped out this bug kingdom. Some bugs tried to stop it and mostly succeeded at sealing that something away. All that now remains is a nearly empty world with hints that the seal is leaking. At the point we are now, the player's actions have made things much worse. Thanks to Metroid Prime's Scan Visor, we now have a secondary story telling method that can build a massive, lore filled world that can be completely ignored, obsessively collected, or somewhere in between, all powered by the player's willingness to hunt. This is the Dream Nail layer. RPG storytelling in an exploration platformer, doled out in frustratingly tiny amounts with huge amounts of unrelated worldbuilding fluff. This type of storytelling needs to force the player into activating mandatory plot reveals via the Dream Nail / Scan Visor / Telepathy somehow, and to be honest, Hollow Knight isn't great at it. This last episode, Nat got to one of the major map marked McGuffins and got virtually no story reveals. Because everyone raves about the environmental story telling of games like Dark Souls and Hollow Knight without addressing the elephant in the room of people who don't obsessively push the "Check to see if this copy and pasted doodad is plot relevant this time" button, other game devs see that as the new popular way to tell a story and bury 90% of the plot behind optional scan visor points, 4 vague words at a time.
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Jun 5, 2021 13:37
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Bifauxnen posted:As someone still following along blind here, I gotta say I found the lack of any fanfare or plot dumps or even a boss fight with Lurien was awesome at setting a mood to make the whole thing feel extremely eerie. Don't get me wrong. Hollow Knight taps into the lonely isolationist feelings of Super Metroid extremely well, but even when chasing down all the plot threads, there's very little indication of important info vs fluff. It's a frustrating take on show, don't tell. It's ok to tell a little bit!
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Jun 5, 2021 15:23
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