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The Knight's absurd head-to-body ratio makes it looks ridiculous while Crystal Dashing. I think it's limbs aren't even visible during it so you end up with the equivalent of an angry jellyfish hurtling through the air at 40 mph. Or a shuttlecock, or one of those tissue paper ghosts everyone learned to make in school in grade 3.
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May 1, 2021 06:41
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Super impressed with Nat's sequence break on the Crystal Peak. With regard to enemy respawns, I don't know if this is a spoiler, but it works by Dark Souls rules. Mostly. There are some critters that always respawn when you leave a room, but for the majority of enemies, they won't respawn until you rest at a bench. Definite spoiler: This can be exploited for one particular side-quest. It takes a long time, but can save you from many re-do attempts.
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May 1, 2021 15:42
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I did not know that the initial burst of the super dash damages enemies, probably because it's hard to get a practical use out of it.Tylana posted:Counter point : There totally can be especially with the DLC. I mean, Sly's shop with the key Nat20 found is probably over 8k of geo to buy out. Salubria is also not cheap. Worth buying becomes an argument. But buyable for sure. I've been dying much less in my second playthrough, and so Fragile Greed is a new mainstay for me until it comes time to fight a boss.
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May 1, 2021 21:07
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I needed to have the Quickslash charm equipped before I could do that Greenpath pogo challenge and even then it took me about 20 tries. (trying to be super careful w/spoilers from now on since I don't recall if that has been seen yet.) Also, he's totally going to one-shot the Path of Pain and make us all quit gaming en masse isn't he. (DON'T hover over this one lol) If I were going to offer any advice at all on something I know has definitely been seen but may possibly have been forgotten: it would be wise to spend ALL the geo you have on charms whenever you can, even if you think you're never going to use them. Firstly, because you need to possess certain numbers of them to be able to buy the slots from the shop at the bottom of the forgotten crossroads, and secondly, though I'll admit this is a much lesser concern in this playthrough, geo can be lost forever but possessions cannot. Oh and thirdly, you could well find yourself trying out some of the useless-sounding charms for fun or for niche use in some of the unique challenges out there. There are more to charms than at first meets the eye... that is all I'll say. <-- this is not really a spoiler at all, I don't think, but to be on the ultra-safe side have Tea hover over it first to make that judgement.
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May 1, 2021 22:51
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After the modding discussion I looked into Hollow Knight mods. Previously I got pretty far into it (about 3/4ths of the way) before hitting one boss and just getting completely stuck. There aren't many mods. There's one difficulty mod that can uncap your power by lowering charm costs, so you can equip more of them at once, but that's it, and you need to start a new game to use it. I had 20 hours in the old save file, so I'm not too keen on restarting, but I'll try it and see how it goes. The difficulty discussion really made me think about the biggest annoyance with gaming difficulty and bosses, because it's really a metaphor for life. Technically a skilled play can beat any boss with any equipment, but in practice you need to basically know the future.. and the game only really works because you have infinite lives and can keep retrying after you die. Meanwhile the bosses are always stronger than you and while you do get stronger, there's a hard cap on how strong you can get, how good equipment you can use and so on. With old games you could just outgrind the boss, but that's not an option in many recent ones. It's depressing to scrape out a win only to realize the next boss fight is going to be even more obnoxiously one sided. As a metaphor for the powerlessness and difficulty of climbing the social ladder in a capitalist country, it works great; but as a game the first question I end up asking is... could someone beat this game without knowledge that they have no way to acquire at the point where they need it? That is, is this winnable as it is or do you literally need to be precognitive to beat it without dying once. Basically, difficulty that comes from repeated cheap shots just isn't fun to fight, especially if your abilities are being limited on purpose. The biggest one that comes to mind is the corrupted mantis' multiple screen covering AOE hits that do double damage and come out in rapid succession , but even getting to that fight is a horrible slog with disappearing platforms above damage floors and multiple arena battles . At a certain point the designers are just messing with you. Which made me wonder... how much would gamers be willing to accept as "difficulty". For example, if I made a platformer that secretly yanked the controls just before one in every 5 jumps were about to land, would people figure it out or would they just chalk it down to "difficulty"? Invisible, faster-than-the-player enemies that spawn in directly behind you and get a first hit with paralyzing attacks are probably out, but.. if you took out the invisibility people might accept it. I think the problem with the idea of the "difficulty curve" is that past some point the devs are just wasting your time with cheap deaths.
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May 2, 2021 06:10
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I cannot think of a single boss fight in the entire game that I'd consider a cheap shot tbh.
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May 2, 2021 07:08
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SirSamVimes posted:I cannot think of a single boss fight in the entire game that I'd consider a cheap shot tbh. Zote!
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May 2, 2021 07:21
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SirSamVimes posted:I cannot think of a single boss fight in the entire game that I'd consider a cheap shot tbh. Nosk.
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May 2, 2021 08:17
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There's... a lot to unpack here. I realize you're not calling Hollow Knight a metaphor for capitalist struggle, but game difficulty as capitalist struggle is... a discourse, certainly. That aside, because I really don't want to get mired in that before addressing other aspects of your post, this kind of difficulty has always been endemic to video games. The player is expected to fail repeatedly to accumulate the knowledge they need to succeed. Asking if someone could beat this game blind without dying is like asking if someone who's never done carpentry before can build a house without driving a nail wrong. Slightly bad analogy, though, because I do believe that someone could beat at least the critical path without dying. Someone with a substantial amount of transferred skills like Nat, but slightly quicker on the uptake. If Nat had figured out the Mantis Lords' high-low changeup, we'd have only seen our first death now, and possibly not even then. The amount of difficulty a player will accept is always going to be subjective. I enjoy Hollow Knight's level of difficulty, but think every other Soulslike I've seen is full of cheap and stupid deaths from enemies that hit way harder than you ever can. On the opposite end, there are people who play Kaizo Mario hacks ostensibly for fun. Whether developers are obligated to cater to all skill levels is a discussion we've had repeatedly on this forum, I've been a part of at least two. Both your examples are pretty solidly blatantly cheating, you would have a significant amount of players who'd go "gently caress this, I'm not sitting around while a developer plays out his abusive relationship fantasies on me." and a much smaller, but possibly more insufferable number who'd accept it as difficulty and you'd see speedrunners making fifth-hops so their inputs were clear for the next jump or mashing roll during the load screens so they'd dodge the paralyzing monster. In conclusion,  SirSamVimes posted:I cannot think of a single boss fight in the entire game that I'd consider a cheap shot tbh. Nosk and Grey Prince Zote are immense dick moves at the time of their introduction, and Zote's fakeouts and change-ups make for a tough fight even when you know what to expect. But otherwise nothing on the order of some of the dick moves I've seen pulled by RPG optional superbosses.
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May 2, 2021 08:37
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There are different types of difficulty though. There's difficulty rooted in a lack of knowledge, and there's difficulty rooted in how hard executing the actions needed to get through a section is. I'd amend that question to "could a player who is allowed access to any walkthrough or youtube video detailing how to get past a boss or platforming section complete the game without dying on their first go?" This would eliminate the need to be able to know the future and test them purely on skill of execution.
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May 2, 2021 08:53
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rastilin posted:After the modding discussion I looked into Hollow Knight mods. Previously I got pretty far into it (about 3/4ths of the way) before hitting one boss and just getting completely stuck. There aren't many mods. There's one difficulty mod that can uncap your power by lowering charm costs, so you can equip more of them at once, but that's it, and you need to start a new game to use it. I had 20 hours in the old save file, so I'm not too keen on restarting, but I'll try it and see how it goes. I get what you're saying, but you've got two completely separate arguments here. Not knowing in advance how to beat bosses has nothing to do with difficulty, it's just how games work - I can't think of any game where you're told before you get to them exactly what attacks and patterns you're going to face. The normal experience going in is either finding out that you're able to beat them right away, or learning that you need a different strategy or equipment (or higher stats in another genre) and figuring that out. Likewise the things you spoilered are difficult but not cheap shots. No, you can't predict them in advance, so you get hit by that attack or tripped up by that obstacle, and then you know and can watch for it next time. This game is balanced around letting you do that without a significant penalty - you can heal infinitely for free at any time as long as you have a random enemy to smack for soul, it takes quite a few hits even in the earlygame to actually kill you, and if you are unlucky enough to die somewhere you can't get your shade back easily there's a way to work around that. The bench checkpoints are only for true deaths, dropping onto spikes doesn't instakill you unless you had no health to start with, you just get put right before the jump that you messed up. It only costs you a few seconds of your time and a gentle reminder to pay more attention. Your example of a platformer where you deliberately gently caress up the controls isn't a cheap shot either, that's just lovely cheating and eventually people would figure it out and then hate you and boycott your game. I think the only true cheap shot I think we've seen so far is the grub mimics, not in terms of difficulty but just being a nasty surprise that contradicts a game mechanic we already knew. For me that's what a cheap shot is - something you've learned in earlier gameplay suddenly being flipped out of nowhere, especially if it's not clear what happened and you need to try it a few more times to figure it out. If you tried to heal in a particular fight and it damaged you instead with no warning, that would be cheap. A new attack from a new enemy that you weren't prepared for isn't, that's just harder. Or maybe something like a badly designed boss that has multiple possible attacks, one of which is unblockable and instakills you or does far more damage than you can cope with at the current level, which I think is closer to what you're talking about. There certainly are badly made games like this which a lot of gamers claim is just about difficulty and skill, but the fact that Nat has already first-try-blind-beaten a lot of bosses to get to this point, including really hard ones we were all surprised by, shows that this game isn't cheap in that sense. You have more than enough of a health buffer to take a few hits while you figure out the pattern, as long as you're skilled enough. (I'm not. There's a reason I don't personally play these kinds of games.) Yeah, there's a couple of later spoilered bosses that do have some nasty moments, but they're the exception rather than the rule.
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May 2, 2021 08:59
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Dareon posted:There's... a lot to unpack here. I'm glad my post was able to spark discussion.  Dareon posted:Both your examples are pretty solidly blatantly cheating, you would have a significant amount of players who'd go "gently caress this, I'm not sitting around while a developer plays out his abusive relationship fantasies on me." and a much smaller, but possibly more insufferable number who'd accept it as difficulty and you'd see speedrunners making fifth-hops so their inputs were clear for the next jump or mashing roll during the load screens so they'd dodge the paralyzing monster. My second example is from one of the Painkiller (a FPS) expansions, but with blind instead of paralyze, and it's even more obnoxious than you might expect since it happens several times in the middle of a level and there's no warning (aside from possibly a missable chime) that a spawn has happened. It's even worse because it also happens with some enemies on a level where the bonus objective is a zero damage run. My point being that it's a very fuzzy line that some developers are quite happy to cross, and as you've rightly pointed out, eventually they're just playing out their abusive relationship fantasies on you.
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May 2, 2021 09:10
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Black Robe posted:
The first part of Hollow Knight is great. I had loads of fun with it. The problem is that you need to beat those spoilered bosses in order to actually win the game and their nasty moments can be really bad. Which in some ways is worse, because you've now sunk in loads of time before the hammer drops on you.
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May 2, 2021 09:18
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Black Robe posted:I get what you're saying, but you've got two completely separate arguments here. Not knowing in advance how to beat bosses has nothing to do with difficulty, it's just how games work - I can't think of any game where you're told before you get to them exactly what attacks and patterns you're going to face. Into the Breach has this exact thing as one of its main mechanics. e: Although that's a completely different genre so coming back to more twitch-based games, stuff like Hades will give you ample warning in the form of a circle on the ground before an enemy is about to do an attack so that you can avoid it. There are ways to make attacks feel less like cheap shots but only some games use them. Cactus fucked around with this message at 09:30 on May 2, 2021 |
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May 2, 2021 09:24
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rastilin posted:The first part of Hollow Knight is great. I had loads of fun with it. The problem is that you need to beat those spoilered bosses in order to actually win the game and their nasty moments can be really bad. Which in some ways is worse, because you've now sunk in loads of time before the hammer drops on you. pumpinglemma fucked around with this message at 09:38 on May 2, 2021 |
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May 2, 2021 09:29
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Black Robe posted:I can't think of any game where you're told before you get to them exactly what attacks and patterns you're going to face. World of Warcraft actually does this, although there's a difference between knowing the boss's attacks ahead of time and knowing how to solve the boss.
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May 2, 2021 15:14
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Ooof. Difficulty discussion. As Black Robe said, you are kind of conflating two complaints. Most of this is just old ground being retread but I will say this. You are expected to die. This is why your deaths are not erased by reloading a checkpoint. You are a strange small masked creature with a almost broken weapon, who breaks and returns again and again for some unknown reason and purpose. And yet, if you know the language of the mechanical genre it is very possible to recover and win without dying in most situations. I know *I* can't, but Nat20 has demonstrated even some early frustrations can be dealt with. It took me an embarrassing amount of time to realise a mid-air dash keeps me in the air for longer vs say... Crystal Guardian's laser. And a lot of the core bosses can approached with a Shaman Stone to try and just nuke them down. There are some optional bosses, even before the Yellow DLC stuff that are quite rough. And probably will need me to run them again and again like a Bloodborne chalice dungeon boss. And I really wish I could turn on Health Bars for bosses so I knew if I was getting better or worse. But I can't think of any that are unfair. Whenever I've had to look up on a wiki what the counter to an attack is, my response has been "Oh right. That makes sense." That all said, I do wish there was a way to tone down the difficulty. Though that raises the awkward question of 'How?'. Reduce damage? Slow enemies down? Adjust attack patterns and pauses?
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May 2, 2021 15:30
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Depending on when you last played, they changed Nosk with one of the updates. I'd say it's one of the easier bosses now.
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May 2, 2021 15:36
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For me, the part of the game that I got stuck on was White Palace, because the challenge was of a much different nature than the rest of the game, combined with the scarcity of save spots. It's the kind of challenge where if I solved an early part but was having difficulty on a later segment, I'd start to get worn down and start screwing up the early segments again. I eventually had to use the wiki page, which gave a charm loadout that basically removed the possibility of having to restart from a bench SirPhoebos fucked around with this message at 16:31 on May 2, 2021 |
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May 2, 2021 16:00
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Yeah, there are some charm set ups for going "This is a platform challenge. I have to do something after every death but never have to go back to the bench." Which I feel is not a spoiler in that those challenges or those tools eventually exist. The RL time cost though is real.
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May 2, 2021 16:05
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I’m now near the end of the game stuck at the traitor lord so i can get the piece of the kingsoul charm piece. I’m looking forward to seeing if Nat tries it and makes me look like a chump.
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May 2, 2021 20:09
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Dareon posted:Nosk and Grey Prince Zote are immense dick moves at the time of their introduction, and Zote's fakeouts and change-ups make for a tough fight even when you know what to expect. But otherwise nothing on the order of some of the dick moves I've seen pulled by RPG optional superbosses. Zote is easily my least favourite and it being a dream fight is the only saving grace it has. Until you get into the boss rush DLC, then it's just awful all over again. I'd say every boss fight in this game is more or less "fair", beside the spoiled one I commented on.
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May 3, 2021 19:17
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May 3, 2021 23:02
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That mystery room is I think an entrance to another area that can only be opened from the other side. Am I right, better memory people?
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May 3, 2021 23:47
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Alxprit posted:That mystery room is I think an entrance to another area that can only be opened from the other side. Am I right, better memory people? Feels right to me. If the wall shook from being hit, then I'd say bait the bats to blow it up, which might work as a semi-bug as explosions can ignore walls.. It's definitely a route to/from KE but maybe not an Entrance. A replay of the game is definitely interesting just in how little bits of knowledge affect your journey, as well as being able to learn what is say 'I need Crystal Dash for this'. The coloured markers (which were part of one of the free updates) are helpful here, so if you know what the end of area reward is you can use one colour for "I should look here after I get the next thing." Keep at it Nat! Interesting to see a blind explore just because I am totally someone who goes through an area once, then ends up poking a wiki for like "What secret thing did I blank on?" Which may cost me some Aha! moments, but also lets me see a bunch of content I just wouldn't. So fair trade to me.
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May 3, 2021 23:57
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Tylana posted:It's definitely a route to/from KE but maybe not an Entrance. I think the entrance is through the wall at the bottom of King's Station Nat keeps ignoring, the route through the top of the elevator shaft is a shortcut to the Colosseum
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May 4, 2021 00:07
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Love that you went out of your way to go to the bank, had the menu open, decided to go buy something first, and then just forgot about going to the bank.
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May 4, 2021 00:18
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C-Euro posted:Love that you went out of your way to go to the bank, had the menu open, decided to go buy something first, and then just forgot about going to the bank. To be fair once you're under 500 geo in hand it doesn't feel quite as urgent to squirrel it away. Passing through the Fog Canyon again, I admit I don't understand the decision not to let you get a map for it on the Greenpath->Queen's route. Is it just to get you paying attention to the shadowy black barrier? I'm not sure what benefit that provides that's worth making you deal with a hole in your map until you can get to the other side.
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May 4, 2021 00:41
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Alxprit posted:That mystery room is I think an entrance to another area that can only be opened from the other side. Am I right, better memory people? yeah it leads to Kingdom's Edge, specifically the Coliseum, but the entrance is one way. Don't know whether bats can be used to explode it, though it is worth a try. Tenebrais posted:Passing through the Fog Canyon again, I admit I don't understand the decision not to let you get a map for it on the Greenpath->Queen's route. Is it just to get you paying attention to the shadowy black barrier? I'm not sure what benefit that provides that's worth making you deal with a hole in your map until you can get to the other side. Best I can guess is to offer some encouragement to memorize room layout? Fog Canyon is probably the smallest area in the game, aside from the Abyss and Howling Cliffs, and it doesn't take long to get back to mapped territory so it's not too harrowing to be without the map. SirPhoebos fucked around with this message at 00:53 on May 4, 2021 |
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May 4, 2021 00:48
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Edit: double post
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May 4, 2021 00:52
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I'm still catching up, but the Dung Defender was a hoot. And I have this to say about parrying: When the knight swings his nail hits another's, without fail, that's-a parry!
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May 4, 2021 06:35
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Nanite bugs, colloquially known as Grey Goo, are what repair the broken signs.
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May 4, 2021 13:59
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Legend tells of a mysterious beetle, lurking in every shadow. His only goal to ensure every sign and lamp post in Hallownest is as pristine as the days the great king walked its paths. Most will never catch sight of this reclusive artisan, or ever know he was there, but when they turn their backs for even a moment they will find every broken sign silently replaced without a hint of damage. This lone legend has a name spoken only in whispers. It does not translate cleanly out of buglish, but the best efforts have translated it to "We're Not Dedicating Memory To Every Destructible You Break, gently caress Off".
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May 4, 2021 14:16
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Tenebrais posted:Legend tells of a mysterious beetle, lurking in every shadow. His only goal to ensure every sign and lamp post in Hallownest is as pristine as the days the great king walked its paths. Most will never catch sight of this reclusive artisan, or ever know he was there, but when they turn their backs for even a moment they will find every broken sign silently replaced without a hint of damage. I'm pretty sure the truth is that the game is coded to remember everything you break, but the signs don't stay broken properly, due to a bug.  Regarding Fog Canyon, this is just me guessing, but I suspect The big hole in your map is intended in part to prompt you to go looking for an alternative entrance, in part to make it feel a bit more "endgame", what with it having one of the dreamers, but mostly to push you out of the zone because you need an upgrade from outside Fog Canyon to explore it fully. In most other zones, you find cornifer first, then if the zone needs a particular movement upgrade, later in the zone, you find that powerup that lets you pass barriers in the zone. In Fog Canyon, there is no upgrade, so perhaps if playtesters were getting a map early on, people spent too much time trying to find whatever it was in Fog Canyon that would let them get through the black energy.
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May 4, 2021 15:10
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Captain_Person posted:I think the entrance is through the wall at the bottom of King's Station Nat keeps ignoring, the route through the top of the elevator shaft is a shortcut to the Colosseum I mean to be fair, it's actually not visible both on the map and while you're playing. Nat nearly went into it the first time, and that entrance is really only obvious on the other side, but once you know it's there, you can go in anytime. But lmao that it got missed AGAIN in this episode just because the crystal dash was just a bit too high Marluxia fucked around with this message at 16:33 on May 4, 2021 |
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May 4, 2021 16:31
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Tenebrais posted:Legend tells of a mysterious beetle, lurking in every shadow. His only goal to ensure every sign and lamp post in Hallownest is as pristine as the days the great king walked its paths. Most will never catch sight of this reclusive artisan, or ever know he was there, but when they turn their backs for even a moment they will find every broken sign silently replaced without a hint of damage. https://hollowknight.fandom.com/wiki/Menderbug
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May 5, 2021 05:07
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poo poo, I've beaten the game twice and had no idea this was A Thing.
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May 5, 2021 15:51
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Going back to the difficulty/accessibility discourse for a moment, here's an actually very interesting Twitter discussion about that topic (doesn't mention Hollow Knight, so no spoiler risk): https://twitter.com/badgercommander/status/1389914046074400774
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May 5, 2021 21:24
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May 5, 2021 23:01
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Medusa heads. Medusa heads never change.
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May 5, 2021 23:45
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