What Are You Playing, Part 3: The Assassination of my Wallet by the Cowardly Sale

[DaedalusMkV]

Sorry, didn't think that counted as a spoiler since they also did it in CS1 and CS3, but I'll edit it.

Oh, no worries. I never really care about spoilers for the first hour of a game anyways. Was more of a comment on not being able to open spoiler posts for a long time. And, in general, just needing to avoid discussions about it on my end.

Seriously, though, I'll probably dip out of this thread while I'm playing through the game... Whenever I get it. *Mumble grumble*. Just in case. I've actually managed to avoid spoilers for this one completely, so I'll be happy to go in blind.

[Anteros]

I have beaten the main Monster Hunter World story!

I'll give my 0.02$ worth on the game pre-post game and without the Iceborn DLC.

First: the game is both hard and easy... it just depends on your mindset.

Do you have the D&D 3.5 paranoid wizard player mindset? Do you like doing research on a monster before engaging, preparing proper countermeasures like resistant armour, weapons that target it's weaknesses, preparing a slew of consumeables to buff yourself/remove status ailments/hinder the boss, etc... Then bravo, you've done about 60% of the work needed to take out an angry, flying, firebreathing minivan. The other 40% is execution of the fight and learning the monster's attack patterns and tells.

If you just go in half-cocked and try to brute force without any prep you will make things harder for yourself and get your face pushed in.

Honestly I haven't had this much gameplay fun in a long time. Swinging the big "F YOU" hammers have a nice weight to them and when you clock a dragon in the face with said hammer and send it tumbling or manage to slice off it's tail with a cleaver the size of your front door and see it jump away and roar at you in surprise and pain feels nice. Myself, I loved the aerial dance of the Insect Glaive, which basically turns you into a ballet dancer with Darth Maul's lightsaber and a pet moth the size of a bulldog... at least at the times I wasn't just hammering or swording their faces in. Dodging and diving from monster attacks, hiding behind a pillar to escape a fire breath, rolling under a monster's swipe so you can start attacking it's underbelly is so much fun. I can see why this game sold gangbusters for Capcom, the formula of "have monster, will fight" is sold gold.

I mentioned earlier Nergigante being my "wall"... and I kinda wished the Nergigante came earlier. Not the monster itself but the wall I hit. After you beat Nergigante, you have to beat 3 bosses in no particular order, then it's final boss time. Nergigante was harder for me then those last 4. I learned a lot fighting that monster and it forced me to up my game and how I prepped beforehand. Heck, the final boss was literally one hammer bonk away from dying when it gave me my first down... and even then I died because I was in a slightly weakened state and didn't think I was in the AoE radius as I tried to heal. I know exactly what i did wrong that fight. This i would like to thank Nergigante for. I really wish there was a wall earlier in the game to hit to force me to "git gud" and up my game. It was fun smacking around the Jagrases... Jagrii... however you pluralize Jagras... and while Anjanath was the first real difficult one, followed by an uptick via Rathalos and it's flight, fire and poison, it's Nergigante's oppressive aggression and wonky dive attack hitboxes that really forced me to get better and learn how to prep for a fight.

As such the next three elder dragons weren't hard, since I came into the fight properly equipped and with a gameplan on how I was going to fight. I'm not saying they were easy fights, they could have killed me had I taken them lightly, but it wasn't hard. The tight controls meant that once I got over that initial phase of learning a monster's tells, it was all about reacting and felling the beast.

But I really wish that Nergigante "learn 2 MonHunt" moment came earlier. Anjanath and Rathalos were almost that wall, and it's the sheer fun of the combat mechanics that make you want to get better. make you want to look up tutorials on how to better use your favourite weapons or try another.

I'll probably end up getting the Iceborn DLC on my next paycheck and go hunt new beasties. And I can't wait to get my hands on Monster Hunter Rise when it releases, as it looks like from the videos they have quality of life updates and even more mobility.

Plus, new armours to dress up my Palico in, and that's always a good thing.

Oh don't worry. There's a brand new wall waiting for you in Iceborne. I personally think every monster in Iceborne was harder than anything in the base game. Maybe I was just really out of practice though.

[Lord Raziere]

Oh don't worry. There's a brand new wall waiting for you in Iceborne. I personally think every monster in Iceborne was harder than anything in the base game. Maybe I was just really out of practice though.

Man, I beat Nergigante only to run into the three boss wall after him and I just couldn't do it so I never got past them. if the other stuff is even harder, I wonder if Monster Hunter is really the game for me, because all I'm about is swinging my katana, I can't wrap my mind around the inventory and preparation aspect... it just seems so complicated.

[Anteros]

Man, I beat Nergigante only to run into the three boss wall after him and I just couldn't do it so I never got past them. if the other stuff is even harder, I wonder if Monster Hunter is really the game for me, because all I'm about is swinging my katana, I can't wrap my mind around the inventory and preparation aspect... it just seems so complicated.

I never did a lot with inventory and prep aside from making sure I had heals. The big thing is learning the visual and audio cues that proceed every attack and how to avoid them.

[Aotrs Commander]

Whelp, that's to for BTA 3062 again for a bit, since they no have an issue where the game CTDs after the salvage screen, meaning you have a significant chance to lose the progress of the entire mission since the most recent patch.



So the question becomes, which of the aforementioned list of games to have a stab at while I wait...

[oxybe]

Oh don't worry. There's a brand new wall waiting for you in Iceborne. I personally think every monster in Iceborne was harder than anything in the base game. Maybe I was just really out of practice though.

So I got a blip that Iceborne was 25% off on steam and got it early.

Yeash!

Introductory first boss, the snow fish, definitely felt more damage sponge-y then normal, but it might also have been the stamina debuff from the cold making the fight feel longer. I'll probably have to play around with weaknesses until I can get a decent Master rank weapon or three.

Man, I beat Nergigante only to run into the three boss wall after him and I just couldn't do it so I never got past them. if the other stuff is even harder, I wonder if Monster Hunter is really the game for me, because all I'm about is swinging my katana, I can't wrap my mind around the inventory and preparation aspect... it just seems so complicated.

I think i came to a realization about why I was having such a problem with Nergigante VS the last 4 bosses. Nergigante is oppressively aggresive. It does not let up.

I noticed that I was a few items off from making a new Insect Glaive and it required 1 Ner claw and 2 Xeno horns. Xenojiva has big damage, but it's enormous. you can kill it by staying under it's hind legs and smacking it's ankles until it drops. learn it's breath tells and GTFO when it rears up, as it'll crush the ground in front of it and AOE around itself. It's a really simple fight. I still bring my vitality mantle as precaution, but the boss isn't nearly as aggressive as Ner.

Ner is just hyper aggressive. It's like a nimble semi truck that is out for blood. while staying under his hind legs is one of the safer areas, his smaller frame means his lower hitboxes have a higher chance of smacking you when he starts jumping around. While his dive has huge damage, the rest of his attacks' damage would be more manageable if he wasn't always on your ass, looking to make Skewered Hunter for lunch.

for items it's usually just making sure i have Healing items like Potions and Mega Potions, Buff items like demondrug/armourskin, max pots and well done steak for hp and stam boosts and some antidotes/jerky/nulberries for ailments on hand, as well as mega explosives for when the monster goes to sleep. Nothing too fancy, just covering my bases. Bows and Bowguns need specific ammo loadouts, but i tend to have one general catch-all that i load up before a hunt and modify if i really need something in particular.

Beyond that it's "dragon uses [element]" so "equip [element] resistant armour" and accessory, and match their weakness with my weapon.

Then stop by the Chef for their stat buffs and we're golden.

Speaking of the Chefs... while Meowscular Chef is top tier bro material and one of my fav NPCs, Grammeowster Chef the single most precious character I think I've ever seen in a videogame. Grandma, Cat and Chef who just wants to feed her behemoth slaying grandbabies good food before a hunt...

I never did a lot with inventory and prep aside from making sure I had heals. The big thing is learning the visual and audio cues that proceed every attack and how to avoid them.

Definitely agree with the learn the patterns. it can take a few tries but you'll only waste items if you try to mindlessly power through a fight. it feels good to dance around the dragons as they flail, failing to hit you.

[Zevox]

Took GGXXAC+R online for a little while last night and today (eventually having settled on Testament as the character I'd at least try to play). And while it's quite frustrating, that's because it's an old game where very clearly even the players with low win rates know what's going on and how to handle things massively better than I do and can beat me into the ground with relatively little effort. The important part, the netcode, is pretty impressive. I don't know if it's quite as excellent as Them's Fightin' Herds', but most matches feel smooth as silk, practically indistinguishable from offline. I had one that got pretty bad with crazy rollbacks causing the characters to go jittery-teleporting all over the screen, but just that single one, with an opponent whose ping was fluctuating wildly. (Oh yeah, the game is actually giving a ping number too, which is quite nice - the only fighting games I've seen do that are Them's Fightin' Herds and Skullgirls.) Otherwise, seems to run fantastic.

So, while I doubt I'll be playing it, I have no regrets about spending $3 on it, and it's encouraging to see the results of putting rollback netcode into it. If Guilty Gear Strive's netcode is this good, and ArcSys starts using it in all of their future games, then online in their titles will be so much better going forward than it ever has been.

[Lord Raziere]

Well I think I got bit far on Teostra last time I fought him, but Vaal Hazak just kills me in like two seconds. I know to dodge, its just.... Vaal Hazaak. I dunno I've haven't played MHW in a while so if I get back into it, its probably gonna be a bit uphill even though I do want to katana big monsters into being my new cool duds. so perhaps focus on Teostra if I haven't killed that one already? I don't remember, its been about a year, I don't remember by exact progress just that Nergigante was really tough but the others after them are full of like tricks that mess you up that Nergigante doesn't have.

[Rodin]

Man, I beat Nergigante only to run into the three boss wall after him and I just couldn't do it so I never got past them. if the other stuff is even harder, I wonder if Monster Hunter is really the game for me, because all I'm about is swinging my katana, I can't wrap my mind around the inventory and preparation aspect... it just seems so complicated.

I wouldn't worry too much about the initial difficulty of Iceborne. You don't run into stuff that's as hard as the elder dragon trio until you're about halfway through the expansion. There is some particularly nasty stuff in the endgame, but by that point you should be enough better that it's not a problem.

When it comes to preparation, there's really only a few things that are super important.

1) Have a weapon that either attacks the weakness of the monster you're fighting or is at least neutral.

2) Get 20 elemental resist in whatever element the monster you're fighting specializes in. This makes you immune to its status debuffs. If in doubt, take the large elemental resist meal from the canteen. That gives +15 to all. Don't underestimate the power of elemental resist charms either.

3) Similarly, get immunity to any status debuffs you think will be a problem. Poison and Paralysis immunity are the most important in my experience. If a monster does multiple (like Rathalos dealing fire and poison), pick whichever you think will most likely give you problems.

4) Health Boost skill is a must. As far as I can tell the difficulty is designed around players going into a fight with 150-200 HP. This means 3 ranks of Health boost and as good a meal as you can manage. If in doubt, bring a Max Potion and pop it at the beginning of the mission.

There's lots you can do beyond that, but that's the only essential prep you need to do once things heat up.

Introductory first boss, the snow fish, definitely felt more damage sponge-y then normal, but it might also have been the stamina debuff from the cold making the fight feel longer. I'll probably have to play around with weaknesses until I can get a decent Master rank weapon or three.

There's two reasons for this.

The first is that Beotodus is like his fishy cousins in that he is VERY armored. Unless you're getting in at his vitals he's going to take longer than other monsters.

The second is that Master Rank suffers from health inflation for all monsters. Capcom decided that the vanilla monsters were dropping too fast and gave all Master Rank monsters a big health boost so they can stay in the fight longer.

This turned out to be a double-edged sword. My second play of the base game demonstrated to me why they felt the need - an experienced player can mow through most of the vanilla monsters like so much chaff, and the Master Rank stuff feels correct in comparison. However, a new player to Master Rank is going to have problems. Without experience at maximizing your DPS the MR monsters feel dreadfully spongey, especially at first when you're still getting the initial Iceborne weapons.

[Yora]

I made my third attempt to play fully through Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun, and once again I realize that C&C is not that fun to play and the story and characters actually pretty boring. (They got James Earl Jones and Michael Biehn, and do nothing with them!)
Based on what's actually in the first two games, even Kane is super bland and has no impact during the actual levels. The characters are only part of the framing device (which has zero meaningful plot), but there is no story during the actual levels that you play.

Like last time, it had me go back and replay StarCraft. Which does have much more interesting characters and they actually show up in the levels that you play.
Even Mengsk is a more interesting character than Kane. (Unlike the "protagonist" of the series Jim Raynor, who is bland as cardboard.)

[Aotrs Commander]

After two hours of decision paralysis, I attempted to play Longest Journey,

Attempted.

Approximately two hours later, after a completely baffling series of failures and talking directly to the folks on ScummVM (whose system is (and has for apparently other version, and previously for the gog version) supposed to allow you to run old games such as this, I kind of got it working but I don't know why (and it won't interface with the aforementioned ScummVM, meaning that I can't use the HD mod, so it look stretched).

And I have to activate it through the exe directly (and had to faff-up my own shortcut manually), since clicking the play button on gog and the normal shortcut simply didn't work.

No-one seems to have any idea why this is.

It is, of course, now too late to attempt to play.



(The only positive is that the BTA 3062 team have release a fix for th crashing bork.)

[Lord Raziere]

Okay logged on to MHW to fight Teostra again, tried some of what people recommended. it helped, but what really allowed me to beat Teostra was someone joining up to help me fight him during my second try and helping me out. So. Okay.

Now to figure out the proper equipment to fight Vaal Hazaak......yaaaayy......

[Rynjin]

Wanted to get back into MHW myself not long back, but found the game doesn't run properly on my computer any more. Near as I can tell something about Iceborne borked the visuals of the game something fierce; everything is extremely blurry now.

[factotum]

Just finished Act 1 in Trails of Cold Steel 4. The game definitely started out feeling harder than ToCS3 did, but I think that's because my characters all had rubbish quartz in their Arcus units and thus weren't as powerful as they should have been, given their level (started game at level 50-odd). Since I've got better quartz then I'm doing much better.

I do wish they'd stop doing the thing where you fight a boss and defeat him without any great difficulty, but he then says "Ah, but I was holding back the whole time!" and beats you in a cutscene, and then a bunch of your friends show up and have to save you...I mean, once or twice wouldn't be so bad, but it seems to happen at least once in every chapter in ToCS3 and ToCS4! If you're going to make a boss fight a "meant to lose" one then make it so I actually lose during the fight, not in the subsequent non-interactive section.

[Resileaf]

Finished Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth 1 yesterday, so that's another game off the backlog. Next on the random list will be Grim Dawn, an action RPG in a Warhammer Fantasy-esque setting.

[sihnfahl]

Remnant From The Ashes...

"Observe! We have found a way to 'look' into other worlds through 'windows'!"

"Wait ... they're not windows... they're DOORS."

[Cozzer]

Still playing through Wasteland 3 at a slow pace. I totally advise this game to everyone who wanted to like Wasteland 2 but couldn't do it! They streamlined what had to be streamlined, and improved quests/dialogue enough to give it a bit more meat under the "quirky post-apocaliptic scenarios" style.

Meanwhile, now and then I'm still doing a few playthrough of Hades. I've seen the ending after the tenth run, but apparently

Spoiler

Show

getting my relationships high enough should unlock the "plan" to solve things that Persephone talked about?

.

[warty goblin]

Remnant From The Ashes...

"Observe! We have found a way to 'look' into other worlds through 'windows'!"

"Wait ... they're not windows... they're DOORS."

I really wanted to like Remnant. The art style was cool, the shooting good, movement crisp and all that. Turns out I just really, really dislike the Dark Souls structure, pretty much no matter the window dressing. I for one am greatly looking forward to the industry rediscovering that we invented things like decent checkpointing for a reason.

[Man_Over_Game]

Eh, "steamlined" isn't the word that I'd use. The game is quite bloated in a number of ways, honestly. It's just that it's improved in a few key ways since Black Flag that make it significantly more enjoyable to me personally, most notably the combat and story.

On a totally different note, in a rare moment for me I just picked up Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus R - an 8-year-old revision of an 18-year-old fighting game - on Steam. Two reasons for this:
1) It's currently (this weekend) holding an open beta for its upcoming addition of rollback netcode to the Steam version, which is something I very much want to support.
2) During that beta it's discounted to a mere $3.

Fiddled around in training mode... and hit the same problem I did with its more recent successor, Guilty Gear Xrd. I cannot find a character to play in this series to save my life. I mean, I could play Sol or Ky, since they're fairly straightforward characters, but I don't find that I want to play either of them - nothing about them really interests me. Meanwhile, most everyone else has something about them that's really weird that makes them either someone I'm not very interested in playing, or someone that seems hard for me to learn. I like how goofy May is, but she's a charge character; I think Johnny and I-No seem cool, but both seem to have tricky play styles I can't quite wrap my head around; Slayer seems cool, but his inability to chain his normals is a huge turn-off to me. And nobody just feels like they gel with me when I mess around with them, the way that I usually find at least one character that does (often more) in other fighting games. It's quite frustrating, since the series otherwise has all the hallmarks of fighting games I should love, and every other fighting game ArcSys makes has tons of characters that I like playing. I just don't get why Guilty Gear specifically is such a problem for me there.

I actually found that Slayer starts to feel more and more fluid the more I play him. He does take a little bit of practice, but eventually everything just clicks. The point of him is to mostly just pressure your opponent into anxiety, until he's too stressed to do anything logical, and so his combo pressure is clunky to compensate. He has probably the best high attacks from the ground in the game, and his down attacks have some insane reach and either combo into other moves or knockdown the opponent so you can keep up the pressure and get some free damage in.

But if you're looking for characters that are easy to learn and transition into, Chipp and Jam are both solid speedsters. Chipp is a bit harder, as he is the most fragile character in the game, but he's also one of the most fluid and definitely the fastest. Jam is pretty hard to play incorrectly, probably even easier than Sol.

Not sure how you feel about grapplers, but Potemkin is actually one of the easiest I've ever played. He has some insane damage and has a lot of attacks that help counter the natural weakness of grapplers in fighting games. Slayer and Potemkin have been my favorites so far.

[Rodin]

I really wanted to like Remnant. The art style was cool, the shooting good, movement crisp and all that. Turns out I just really, really dislike the Dark Souls structure, pretty much no matter the window dressing. I for one am greatly looking forward to the industry rediscovering that we invented things like decent checkpointing for a reason.

Meh, Remnant had a lot of problems unrelated to the Souls structure. The biggest is that Souls games have very carefully crafted levels to provide the right level of difficulty. Remnant had randomized levels. Even more damning, it had randomized bosses. This led to an extremely uneven difficulty curve where you were either coasting or getting murdered.

It doesn't help that nobody has figured out how to do "Dark Souls with guns" yet. Remnant is probably the closest, but the structure of the game still falls a bit flat when you're allowed to bring a sniper rifle.

For checkpoints I actually have the reverse complaint for the later Souls games. You can often see the next bonfire from the one you're sitting at. The original game did a great job with the tension of trying to make it to the next bonfire before your potions ran out. By the third game that was almost never a problem. If it had been up to me I probably would have cut the number of bonfires in DS3 in half.

[warty goblin]

Meh, Remnant had a lot of problems unrelated to the Souls structure. The biggest is that Souls games have very carefully crafted levels to provide the right level of difficulty. Remnant had randomized levels. Even more damning, it had randomized bosses. This led to an extremely uneven difficulty curve where you were either coasting or getting murdered.

It doesn't help that nobody has figured out how to do "Dark Souls with guns" yet. Remnant is probably the closest, but the structure of the game still falls a bit flat when you're allowed to bring a sniper rifle.

For checkpoints I actually have the reverse complaint for the later Souls games. You can often see the next bonfire from the one you're sitting at. The original game did a great job with the tension of trying to make it to the next bonfire before your potions ran out. By the third game that was almost never a problem. If it had been up to me I probably would have cut the number of bonfires in DS3 in half.

See, I just hate bonfires. I hate not being able to save when I want. I hate having the universe's metaphysics tied to my nap time. I hate the drudgery of fighting the same damn enemies all the time because I wanted to heal back up. I hate that the best way the game can come with for balancing healing is irritating me by making me redo crap I already did. It feels like playing a game with the technology limitations of 20 years ago when persisting the level state in a save game wasn't a thing consoles could necessarily handle, and I miss that crap not in the slightest.

While we're on the subject, I also usually hate the controls. Remnant worked well as a shooter at least, but the slow-as-mud melee combat of most of the genre is not enjoyable to me in the slightest. I don't really like dodge-roll centric systems in general, since it looks stupid, and the mega-telegraphed attacks just make everybody look and feel completely incompetent. When somebody spends a week winding up an attack, the correct thing to do is stab them in the face, but I can't do that since it takes me a week to wind up as well. I was a better swordsman than this at age 10, and feeling less competent than I did as a kid isn't really why I play games.

[GloatingSwine]

See, I just hate bonfires. I hate not being able to save when I want. I hate having the universe's metaphysics tied to my nap time.

You can save whenever you want in Dark Souls.

It saves when you quit.

[Zevox]

I actually found that Slayer starts to feel more and more fluid the more I play him. He does take a little bit of practice, but eventually everything just clicks. The point of him is to mostly just pressure your opponent into anxiety, until he's too stressed to do anything logical, and so his combo pressure is clunky to compensate. He has probably the best high attacks from the ground in the game, and his down attacks have some insane reach and either combo into other moves or knockdown the opponent so you can keep up the pressure and get some free damage in.

But if you're looking for characters that are easy to learn and transition into, Chipp and Jam are both solid speedsters. Chipp is a bit harder, as he is the most fragile character in the game, but he's also one of the most fluid and definitely the fastest. Jam is pretty hard to play incorrectly, probably even easier than Sol.

Not sure how you feel about grapplers, but Potemkin is actually one of the easiest I've ever played. He has some insane damage and has a lot of attacks that help counter the natural weakness of grapplers in fighting games. Slayer and Potemkin have been my favorites so far.

Grapplers are definitely not my thing. At least not the typical ones - the big, slow types in the Zangief/Tager tradition. I have played some rushdown/brawler types that also use a command grab or two and enjoyed them, such as Laura in SF5, Yang in BBTag, or Android 18 in DBFZ, but that's as close to a grappler as I get. And the only big-body type I've ever enjoyed is Cooler in DBFZ, because in that game being big doesn't make you slow, as everyone seems to have the same dash and airdash speeds. So Potempkin is definitely a no-go. And as far as Chipp and Jam, I just skimmed over them in AC+R, since I know I didn't like them in Xrd.

As I mentioned in a later post, I wound up playing Testament when I took the game online, since I liked his normals and the trap-specials play style is at least not entirely unknown to me, since I've played some Naoto in Persona 4 Arena and BBTag (and a lot of Trish in MvC3 back in the day, but that was a while ago now and I didn't use her traps as much as I probably should have back then). Still, he wasn't really gelling with me much either. Plus there's the fact that everyone playing that game has a massively better understanding of it than me since it's such an old title and not exactly attracting a ton of complete newcomers, and part of it probably has to do with the game's age and the odd differences in feel and pacing that creates compared to fighting games I'm used to (I've come across this when I've tried other fighting games older than SF4 before).

Oh well, game was $3 and my main reason to grab it was to get a preview of what ArcSys games with rollback will feel like online, and the verdict there is a giant thumbs-up, so that's encouraging. I'll be giving Guilty Gear Strive a shot when that comes around - hopefully that'll have someone I can main, whether it's an old character that feels different in a way that works for me in the new game, or one of the complete newcomers.

[Rynjin]

Meh, Remnant had a lot of problems unrelated to the Souls structure. The biggest is that Souls games have very carefully crafted levels to provide the right level of difficulty. Remnant had randomized levels. Even more damning, it had randomized bosses. This led to an extremely uneven difficulty curve where you were either coasting or getting murdered.

I don't think this is the main issue with Remnant. The randomized levels and bosses are fine (especially since there's only two options on each stage anyway). The issue is the bosses themselves aren't well designed enough to be a threat, so each boss has hordes of adds.

For checkpoints I actually have the reverse complaint for the later Souls games. You can often see the next bonfire from the one you're sitting at. The original game did a great job with the tension of trying to make it to the next bonfire before your potions ran out. By the third game that was almost never a problem. If it had been up to me I probably would have cut the number of bonfires in DS3 in half.

You'd probably like Cinders quite a bit.

See, I just hate bonfires. I hate not being able to save when I want. I hate having the universe's metaphysics tied to my nap time. I hate the drudgery of fighting the same damn enemies all the time because I wanted to heal back up. I hate that the best way the game can come with for balancing healing is irritating me by making me redo crap I already did. It feels like playing a game with the technology limitations of 20 years ago when persisting the level state in a save game wasn't a thing consoles could necessarily handle, and I miss that crap not in the slightest.

Dark Souls games are resource management games, first and foremost. If you need to return to a bonfire to heal, you did not allocate your Estus resource properly. If you lose to an enemy, typically it is because you allocated your stamina resource improperly as well.

Resource management games have never been forgiving when it comes to checkpointing. By that metric, Dark Souls is far more forgiving than most, since when you run out of resources and lose those games, you typically need to start from the beginning.

While we're on the subject, I also usually hate the controls. Remnant worked well as a shooter at least, but the slow-as-mud melee combat of most of the genre is not enjoyable to me in the slightest. I don't really like dodge-roll centric systems in general, since it looks stupid, and the mega-telegraphed attacks just make everybody look and feel completely incompetent. When somebody spends a week winding up an attack, the correct thing to do is stab them in the face, but I can't do that since it takes me a week to wind up as well. I was a better swordsman than this at age 10, and feeling less competent than I did as a kid isn't really why I play games.

1.) Did you regularly fight creatures 30 feet tall as a 10 year old?

2.) This is a complaint that can largely only be leveled at the first game in any case. 2, Bloodborne (particularly), and 3 are all significantly faster than the original (and I assume Demon's Souls, though I never played it), though yes you do still need to be methodical because, again, it is a resource management game.

3.) You always have the option of using a shield instead of dodging.

[warty goblin]

Dark Souls games are resource management games, first and foremost. If you need to return to a bonfire to heal, you did not allocate your Estus resource properly. If you lose to an enemy, typically it is because you allocated your stamina resource improperly as well.

Resource management games have never been forgiving when it comes to checkpointing. By that metric, Dark Souls is far more forgiving than most, since when you run out of resources and lose those games, you typically need to start from the beginning.



1.) Did you regularly fight creatures 30 feet tall as a 10 year old?

2.) This is a complaint that can largely only be leveled at the first game in any case. 2, Bloodborne (particularly), and 3 are all significantly faster than the original (and I assume Demon's Souls, though I never played it), though yes you do still need to be methodical because, again, it is a resource management game.

3.) You always have the option of using a shield instead of dodging.

I'm glad lots of people enjoy these games, I really am. And while I haven't actually played a Dark Souls proper, I've played a fair number of things that people tell me are very much like Dark Souls, and I've ended up really not enjoying them. There might be sound game design reasons for bonfire mechanics to create a particular aesthetic of play, and maybe they do a great job of that; I apparently don't like that particular aesthetic. I don't enjoy games where my character feels enormously less able to competently use a sword than my own unskilled and unfit self, but that's how the animations of most Soulsalikes make me feel. Like I'm not so much winning and losing fights as I am attempting to mitigate against my character's uncoordinated flagellations.

[Rynjin]

Most Souls-likes, to be fair, are complete garbage.

[Clertar]

Still playing KC:D, and will be for a while. Videogame(s) come after work, reading, music, and whatever social life I can pull off in this decade. I re-started it this time on hardcore mode, and I will echo what people generally say: this is how the game is meant to be played for the real experience. It no doubt helps that I'm a medieval history nerd and that I practice HEMA, especially German longsword, and that I'm generally quite interested in the Hussite period. I really hope that the sequel will throw us right in the midst of the conflict.

[Cespenar]

I'm glad lots of people enjoy these games, I really am. And while I haven't actually played a Dark Souls proper, I've played a fair number of things that people tell me are very much like Dark Souls, and I've ended up really not enjoying them. There might be sound game design reasons for bonfire mechanics to create a particular aesthetic of play, and maybe they do a great job of that; I apparently don't like that particular aesthetic. I don't enjoy games where my character feels enormously less able to competently use a sword than my own unskilled and unfit self, but that's how the animations of most Soulsalikes make me feel. Like I'm not so much winning and losing fights as I am attempting to mitigate against my character's uncoordinated flagellations.

Coming from someone who somewhat echoes those preferences, you might like Sekiro more than the other "Soulses" if you haven't tried it already. Sure, the bonfires are still there, and it's not a complete departure from the boss wind-up mechanic, but the wind-ups are probably only 20% of the fight, while the rest is fast paced trades of parry-slash-parry-slash.

Still playing KC:D, and will be for a while. Videogame(s) come after work, reading, music, and whatever social life I can pull off in this decade. I re-started it this time on hardcore mode, and I will echo what people generally say: this is how the game is meant to be played for the real experience. It no doubt helps that I'm a medieval history nerd and that I practice HEMA, especially German longsword, and that I'm generally quite interested in the Hussite period. I really hope that the sequel will throw us right in the midst of the conflict.

KC:D is pretty alright, and fairly underrated in my opinion (at least around here). I only slightly coincide with those personal preferences myself, and it was still pretty enjoyable as a game probably simply due to the fact that it's at least somewhat realistic.

[Rynjin]

I found KC:D to play extremely clunkily, though that may be bias; it is exactly the type of game I typically like to play with a controller (so I did), and half the options you have don't seem to FUNCTION with a controller, despite them logically being able to work if a half-competent developer worked on it. It is almost literally impossible to lockpick without using keyboard and mouse, for example.

[Lord Raziere]

Okay so I beat Vaal Hazak, then I went and did a bunch of quests to get money and materials for things like more armor and to get Wyvern Blade Holly so I can deal poison damage to Xeno'jiiva. Of course then I lost to Xeno'jiiva but the way it moves, Xeno doesn't seem that bad, they're actually a bit slow compared to some of the rathians I've been fighting to get my Holly, the only real problem is not knowing Xeno' patterns. sure its bigger and has laser beams and fire trails, but the lasers are honestly the easiest part to avoid, its figuring out how to avoid that big tail sweep thats the problem because that is what caused me being carted more than once. its similar to how the Teostra explosion move just seems to occur a little too fast for me to get away consistently: its so wide ranging and so damaging that its hard NOT to get hit by it.