I'm so happy you beat up the training dummy
|
|
# ? Aug 28, 2021 01:17 |
|
|
# ? May 16, 2024 18:03 |
|
Mister Mushroom is one of those things I don't feel bad for people looking up a guide for. Not only is the association with Spore Shroom not intuitive, but the hints you get from the plaque are as cryptic as his own words at times. They all make sense, by the end, but bah. I like him though. Him and his big nose. Might be the only character in the game with a big nose. Very nice.
|
# ? Aug 28, 2021 02:02 |
|
Alxprit posted:Mister Mushroom is one of those things I don't feel bad for people looking up a guide for. Not only is the association with Spore Shroom not intuitive, but the hints you get from the plaque are as cryptic as his own words at times. They all make sense, by the end, but bah. I found the plaque with Spore Shroom ok by myself, but that might have been helped along by watching Nat play through a lot of stuff already. I had a sense that this wasn't some plot gated thing like the Abyss with the King's Brand, so maybe it needed some more random experimentation to do something with it. Once I read the poem though, I had NO idea what it was on about and didn't think about Mister Mushroom at all, no.
|
# ? Aug 28, 2021 02:08 |
|
Interesting new avatar, Nat.
|
# ? Aug 28, 2021 07:55 |
|
Black Robe posted:Interesting new avatar, Nat. Don't bet on wrestling.
|
# ? Aug 28, 2021 11:18 |
|
Natural 20 posted:Don't bet on wrestling. Fixed it. Hallownest will be whole again.
|
# ? Aug 29, 2021 08:14 |
|
Quackles posted:Fixed it. Nice!
|
# ? Aug 29, 2021 10:38 |
|
Oh that looks great!
|
# ? Aug 29, 2021 10:52 |
|
Oh my god this is amazing.
|
# ? Aug 29, 2021 12:38 |
|
|
# ? Aug 30, 2021 22:45 |
|
I have a theory about who Mister Mushroom is talking to. The 'tools' line... Doesn't Hornet use tools as a part of her battle strategy in Silksong? Does she even know she's having the conversation?
|
# ? Aug 30, 2021 23:41 |
|
We have no idea because Silksong still hasn't come out, and it's been radio silence on that front for years.
|
# ? Aug 31, 2021 00:24 |
|
I think Mister Mushroom might be talking to different people each time you see him. His first speech is a reference to Hungry Knight, a Flash game the team made before this one, but from then on they all seem to be about different things. Perhaps he's having words with all the great powers left in the kingdom before its time finally ends.
|
# ? Aug 31, 2021 00:27 |
|
Minor correction: you get the achievement for Mr. Mushroom once you beat the game after having talked to him in all those places There's a reason for this!
|
# ? Aug 31, 2021 00:38 |
|
Mr. Mushroom is chatting with the player I think. His last lines are definitely worldbuilding directed at the knight, though.
|
# ? Aug 31, 2021 09:59 |
|
|
# ? Sep 1, 2021 23:14 |
|
Totally agree about boss rushes. People have pointed out to me that once you get to the final boss you can fight them via the statue any time you want, but I still feel a little bit bitter about having to get through all those other bosses perfectly just to unlock that.
|
# ? Sep 2, 2021 02:02 |
|
I would say congratulations on beating the Pure Vessel, but you already beat him off-screen, so it's more, congratulations for not choking at the end of the pantheon. And I wholly agree with the method of Godhome being flawed. It sucks and I wish that boss rushes weren't the go-to for hard content at times. Heck, when I learned there was some lore-based reward for doing all the boss fights on one-hit radiant difficulty, that kind of set me over the line too. Look it up if you haven't already, it's such a weird thing.
|
# ? Sep 2, 2021 04:35 |
|
Alxprit posted:some lore-based reward for doing all the boss fights on one-hit radiant difficulty I love this game to bits but fuuuuuuuuuuuck that
|
# ? Sep 2, 2021 05:20 |
|
You actually get the same reward for beating all the bosses on regular difficulty in the hall of gods, Ascended and Radiant are just for an extra little bonus statue. Also correction to my own thing in the thread since Tea brought it up. He's right, it is the Traitor's Child grave in the Godhome Traitor Lord arena, but the flowers are only there if you did the quest for the Pale Mourner, and Cloth's weapon is only there if she showed up to help in the Traitor Lord fight proper. I do hope you at least try the fifth pantheon though, would love to see Nat just destroy the new boss fights within.
|
# ? Sep 2, 2021 08:06 |
|
Alxprit posted:And I wholly agree with the method of Godhome being flawed. It sucks and I wish that boss rushes weren't the go-to for hard content at times. Heck, when I learned there was some lore-based reward for doing all the boss fights on one-hit radiant difficulty, that kind of set me over the line too. Look it up if you haven't already, it's such a weird thing. Having a small lore reward for doing all radiant bosses is like the best reward they could give. It's so inconsequential for most people but still makes you feel like you've been rewarded for something that most people won't do. I would say it's easier than doing the bindings for the pantheons too, which also gets you a small lore reward. I was a bit let down by Godhome when it first released but it really grew on me quickly. I love it now. The fact that the ascended bosses are more than just double damage like I thought they were at first, and that they added new bosses as rewards for getting to the top of pantheons is excellent. I intentionally didn't spoil myself on the bosses before I fought them myself so it was a pretty neat surprise each time. That being said, it is an AWFUL slog grinding the fifth pantheon, and effectively making you do it twice to complete it (I can't imagine someone beating the boss of pantheon 5 on their first try. Good luck Nat!) feels super lovely. I like the growing stress and anticipation as you get to the top for the first time, but if I hadn't already resigned myself to having to complete the pantheon twice I think it would have really annoyed me. I'm not sure I have a better way of doing it, but at least for Pantheon of Hallownest it'd be nice if you unlocked the boss BEFORE having to slog away for an hour just to look forward to doing it exactly the same way again after practicing the boss. Maybe just for that pantheon, they should unlock it after you beat pure vessel in Pantheon of the Knight. PlasticAutomaton posted:You actually get the same reward for beating all the bosses on regular difficulty in the hall of gods, Ascended and Radiant are just for an extra little bonus statue. Not quite. EXTREMELY minor spoilers that are safe to read but just in case someone REALLY doesn't want to know the tiny change: The hunter's journal entry changes very slightly when you beat all bosses on ascended difficulty in hall of the gods, and then again when you beat all radiant bosses. VERY slightly. Like less than a sentence. Hobojim fucked around with this message at 11:20 on Sep 2, 2021 |
# ? Sep 2, 2021 11:18 |
|
To me the most obvious solution is to have a real save point when you get to the final boss of a pantheon. My achievement of beating pure vessel was pretty badly undercut for me by knowing that it wasn't "real" since I did it during practice in the hall of gods. And the experience of beating the pantheon of the Knight was also pretty badly undercut because it was simply achieving something I already knew I could do. Contrast the experience of getting to pure vessel and then knowing that you need to master this now or go all the way back.
|
# ? Sep 2, 2021 14:02 |
|
Yeah that would be a lot better. Congrats on 112%! Pure Vessel looks like a more cerebral fight than Sly so I'm a little sad I never unlocked him but ah well.
|
# ? Sep 2, 2021 19:03 |
|
I think completely removing the high stakes of the pantheon boss would make them a lot less memorable and interesting, personally. It's interesting that you think beating the pantheon after practicing the boss in the hall of gods cheapens it. I felt the opposite. Putting your practice to the test in a stressful situation and coming out on top is a good chunk of why I like the pantheons. It feels good to make visible progress after putting the work in. Edit because I thought of a solution: maybe giving the player two or three lives for the pantheons would work? Give you time to adjust to the new bosses but still make it feel like a risky and exhilarating fight. I still think most people wouldn't make it past the boss with three lives though. You could have that feature be inactive if you use any bindings for the challenge seekers or something. Hobojim fucked around with this message at 19:24 on Sep 2, 2021 |
# ? Sep 2, 2021 19:17 |
|
Hobojim posted:I think completely removing the high stakes of the pantheon boss would make them a lot less memorable and interesting, personally. I think this is one of the fundamental disconnects in how people view Dark Souls type games. Personally, I don't enjoy doing a bunch of (relatively) easy stuff before a final hard part. Of course Hollow Knight has some of that in the general gameplay but you open up shortcuts, you can just run past enemies, eventually you get a teleport to just skip straight from bench to boss, and dream bosses don't even send you to a bench. Godhome totally changes all of that. On the bright side, it's completely optional content. It clearly wasn't made for me, so I just skipped it and played the rest of the game.
|
# ? Sep 2, 2021 21:10 |
|
Personally, I'm with Nat. I'm on the pantheon of hallownest, and I keep coming back every so often between breaks to try to unlock that very last fight, and just holy poo poo it's so long. I almost always can get to the last five bosses before the new one, and the vast majority of my deaths are to Markoth, GPZ, or PV. Most everything before then is just a time sink that makes me take a break from the game because the gauntlet is so long and I usually only have a couple hours a day for playing games anymore. Hell, I've radianted several of them, they're just not that much of a threat (or in some cases, even very interesting) anymore. The multiple lives idea might do it, though. Mechanically my big problem is Markoth, GPZ isn't great but if I have decent health after Markoth I'm usually fine; PV, though, I've radianted in the Hall and shouldn't have so much trouble with in the pantheon but I get so conscious about flushing 30+ minutes down the drain if I die, and gently caress up. Having an extra chance or two before having to redo the entire thing would go a long way towards helping with that.
|
# ? Sep 2, 2021 21:35 |
|
I will never defend the pantheon of hallownest, it's way too long and tedious. It'd probably be better if they just tossed the boss of that one after pure vessel in pantheon of the knight, and left pantheon of hallownest something like trial of the fool in the colosseum, just completely optional and not locking anything but there for anybody who wants to test themselves in that way.
|
# ? Sep 2, 2021 21:52 |
|
The sane way to do pantheon of hallownest while still making it a boss rush like the rest would've been to just make it have all the new fights + NKG because that one isn't in the earlier pantheons. Then it's just the toughest fights in the game back to back no filler and it lasts about as long as all the others. Like beating flukemarm and gorb again doesn't add anything meaningful to the experience.
|
# ? Sep 2, 2021 23:01 |
|
yeah, PoH would feel way less disrespectful of my time if it just had the good fights. Everyone knows which ones they are, maybe leave Markoth in there since he's the one nobody seems to 'get'.
|
# ? Sep 3, 2021 04:57 |
|
Hobojim posted:I think completely removing the high stakes of the pantheon boss would make them a lot less memorable and interesting, personally. Addressing this backwards. I've just been doing reps on bosses each evening to practice and I have almost everything to a minimum of a 80% confidence on beating them. Additional tension might degrade my performance but you can hopefully hear from the video that I'm just not tense at all because I've done the fight upwards of 30 times. If anything I was bored of fighting pure vessel. Mainly, I don't think anyone thinks that Nightmare King Grimm isn't memorable because you get to fight him again instantly. The tension you feel ratchets up during the fight because "Holy crap I just got past stun 3" is a thing. Tension can exist from just making a boss hard as hell rather than putting a 10-45 min grind in front of them.
|
# ? Sep 3, 2021 12:29 |
|
I normally have no interest in boss rushes, and in HK it took me months to bother diving into Godhome, but once I did I loved it. I ended up finding it shockingly satisfying to do the Radiant versions of every boss fight (except, gently caress Markoth of course), and that made me appreciate the fight design that much more. Once I was comfortable with the idea of treating every single instance of me taking damage as a failure, it made the Pantheon of Hallownest make a kind of perfect sense to me. I think I ended up attempting it (whether failing or succeeding) about 8 times, but that includes running it once with each binding. A lot of the criticisms of the game have to do with the difficulty and punishment presenting too much of a wall to various types of players at various stages of the game, and for me I'm just glad they included this endgame. It's completely optional, and for certain players it just clicks in a way that makes it a celebration of the boss design. I get that it can be disappointing if it doesn't line up with your interests as the very last thing in the game, but for me part of the reason this is easily one of my top 10 games of all time is the way the creators stuck to their vision in seemingly every aspect of it.
|
# ? Sep 3, 2021 12:50 |
|
I think maybe the real conflict at the heart here is that there's ending cutscenes for winning the pantheon. I think the dev team and the playerbase have very different ideas of how important another ending is. Their justification for White Palace as a difficult platforming challenge outside the game's usual play style was that it's an optional challenge for the optional alternate ending, while most players would see it as an important part of the game to reach the True Ending. Similarly, I think they settled on a new alternate ending as a suitable reward for this most optional of optional challenges. Big enough to feel like a reward for the effort, but not anything mechanical that would mean you're missing out on real gameplay by not doing it, and of course you can just watch the ending on Youtube or something if you really want to see it. But again, as a player, we tend not to see it that way, an alternate ending is your reward for doing a defined challenge and you haven't really beaten the game until you've done all of them. This would probably be a lot worse if beating the four pantheons to even reach this point wasn't such an impassable barrier to most players; most people will give up on that ending anyway. Without putting an ending behind it, the Pantheon of Hallownest is just a final challenge to prove your skills against the other four pantheons all together. With an extra new boss at the end as a funny gently caress-you to players going for that level of commitment, kind of like the golden strawberry in the last chapter of Celeste. I don't think it'd be as frustrating if it didn't feel like a gate for more Content, especially since just reaching the top is enough to unlock fighting the boss there (presumably).
|
# ? Sep 3, 2021 13:50 |
|
Natural 20 posted:Addressing this backwards. Yeah I think we just have very different mentalities. I can't even wrap my head around someone thinking that because you had to practice something before doing it "for real" that it cheapens the experience. For difficult tasks, putting your practice to the test is part of the appeal for me, which is why I play things like fighting games. Context is important for this. Practicing NKG outside of the pantheons is a waste of time because, as you said, you can just refight him immediately if you lose with no penalty. The pantheons, and boss rushes in general, are structured in a way that having save points before challenging parts would make it feel like more of a waste of time to me, because then it isn't about demonstrating mastery. It's just smacking your face into a brick wall until you break through. You talk about megaman a lot, and even have him in your YouTube outros. I'm curious if you think those boss rushes are also bad, or if it's just the new boss thing that rubs you the wrong way. Even after practicing pure vessel and the pantheon of hallownest boss a lot before doing more attempts at the pantheons, I was still very tense and invested in the fights because of how punishing losing would be. For clarity, I'm not saying you're wrong, just that I think we're approaching this content in very different ways, and I'm enjoying a discussion of our differing viewpoints.
|
# ? Sep 3, 2021 16:16 |
|
Wait what's the problem everyone's got with Markoth? I didn't think he was unusually hard or frustrating.
|
# ? Sep 3, 2021 21:35 |
Bifauxnen posted:Wait what's the problem everyone's got with Markoth? I didn't think he was unusually hard or frustrating. anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 21:43 on Sep 3, 2021 |
|
# ? Sep 3, 2021 21:40 |
|
Hobojim posted:just smacking your face into a brick wall until you break through But that's exactly how you get "mastery" in these games. How else would you describe learning a fight like NKG other than practicing it until it clicks? And even with mastery you're still going to gently caress up occasionally, especially on difficult and punishing bosses. Hobojim posted:Even after practicing pure vessel and the pantheon of hallownest boss a lot before doing more attempts at the pantheons, I was still very tense and invested in the fights because of how punishing losing would be. Which is why this level of punishment is exactly what makes it not fun for me. Like I didn't struggle much more than Nat with this game, I'm sure I could get to those bosses if, but I haven't because I just wouldn't find it fun. Which leaves me a little aggrieved because I still do want to fight those bosses. So overall I think that's my issue. I don't really care about endings or achievements or small lore tidbits - that's all stuff I can watch on YouTube. But the fact that they've gated new, probably very fun content behind a really not fun slog is annoying. Bifauxnen posted:Wait what's the problem everyone's got with Markoth? I didn't think he was unusually hard or frustrating. theres no floor, you've just got five platforms to jump between voiceless anal fricative fucked around with this message at 22:02 on Sep 3, 2021 |
# ? Sep 3, 2021 21:57 |
|
This discussion around difficulty is really cool. I really want to wait until the Monday episode to get into it more.
|
# ? Sep 3, 2021 23:59 |
|
Mister, you're not done with Hallownest until you've finished Path of Pain
|
# ? Sep 4, 2021 04:13 |
|
Sisters of Battle is the best boss fight in the gaaaaame because Mantis Lords are the best and it's just better Mantis Lords whoooo! I love them all! The other extra boss is much less good. Alxprit fucked around with this message at 04:18 on Sep 4, 2021 |
# ? Sep 4, 2021 04:15 |
|
|
# ? May 16, 2024 18:03 |
|
bike tory posted:But that's exactly how you get "mastery" in these games. How else would you describe learning a fight like NKG other than practicing it until it clicks? There's a difference between practicing to smack your face against a wall and breaking it first try after a long day at the office of face-smacking, and waking up and just going to town with your face with no prior commitment. Context is important. Like I said, putting your previous practice to use in the "real" higher-risk setting is what makes it fun to me. Having it be a "normal" boss where you effectively restart at the beginning of the fight gives it a whole different context, and while that's not a bad thing exactly (and is in fact what makes up the vast majority of the game) if you want a unique challenge like what Godhome is striving for it's not really the same thing. quote:And even with mastery you're still going to gently caress up occasionally, especially on difficult and punishing bosses. Of course! That's what makes it exciting! quote:Which is why this level of punishment is exactly what makes it not fun for me. Like I didn't struggle much more than Nat with this game, I'm sure I could get to those bosses if, but I haven't because I just wouldn't find it fun. Which leaves me a little aggrieved because I still do want to fight those bosses. I get that, but it's very optional for a reason, and you not wanting to do it for any reason is perfectly valid. I have lots of games where I can't be assed to do the hardest challenges, either for lack of interest of lack of time. Not finding it fun is an excellent reason to not do it. quote:So overall I think that's my issue. I don't really care about endings or achievements or small lore tidbits - that's all stuff I can watch on YouTube. But the fact that they've gated new, probably very fun content behind a really not fun slog is annoying. I've tried like ten different ways of answering this without sounding like a dick and failed miserably every time, so I'll just say: There are plenty of ways to experience the fights you want to play without having to play the pantheons. Download a save, use cheat engine, mods, anything. Go nuts, nobody is going to judge you for it. The devs had an experience in mind when they made the DLC pack, but there's no reason you have to engage with them on that level if you really don't want to. Alxprit posted:Sisters of Battle is the best boss fight in the gaaaaame because Mantis Lords are the best and it's just better Mantis Lords whoooo! I love them all! The sisters of battle is my favourite fight in the game. It's excellent.
|
# ? Sep 4, 2021 04:44 |