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The power fantasy aspect of Metroid comes from overcoming the challenges. You are wandering around a hostile world that Does Not like you wandering around through it. That's been part of the series from the start, since the first Metroid was designed around a world that steadily wears you down as you fight through the depths. Metroid 2 was big into jump scares. Metroid Fusion came up with the idea of a horrible threat stalking the player, which I think was pretty obvious as a major feature of Dread from the name. I've seen better stealth sections and I've seen much, much worse. After having finished it, it's a little funny remembering how frustrating it could get, and how there's an incredibly incredibly hard quicktime event that I could do like 5% of the time. It's a shame that the EMMIs aren't really that important to the plot though, they're just some robots.
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Jan 29, 2024 06:34
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SlothfulCobra posted:The power fantasy aspect of Metroid comes from overcoming the challenges. You are wandering around a hostile world that Does Not like you wandering around through it. That's been part of the series from the start, since the first Metroid was designed around a world that steadily wears you down as you fight through the depths. Metroid 2 was big into jump scares. Metroid Fusion came up with the idea of a horrible threat stalking the player, which I think was pretty obvious as a major feature of Dread from the name. But, an enemy contained in a specific area with insta-kill abilities doesn't match the power fantasy that Metroid offers. Each E.M.M.I. should provide a challenge equal to its area, i e., you should be able to tackle each with the powers you gain in its area. Instead, you see things like the purple robo-gorgon, which can hear everything you do. And so you run through the area, trying different routes until you settle on the correct door. Repeat. To add: I think a good example even within the game are the bosses. While hard, they feel way more fair than the E.M.M.I. Like Souls game, you can learn their patterns and overcome them. The E.M.M.I are just cheap. Hollow Gaunt fucked around with this message at 06:54 on Jan 29, 2024 |
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Jan 29, 2024 06:47
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You can deal with it, you're just getting fussy about the tools you have access to.
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Jan 29, 2024 07:12
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SlothfulCobra posted:You can deal with it, you're just getting fussy about the tools you have access to. True, but I'll maintain my fussiness until the end when I declare it a great game. And the E.M.M.I. suck
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Jan 29, 2024 07:15
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Yeah, I can see the frustration but it's a lot better than a lot of of similar ideas in other games. Notably: it's rarely super boring or tedious, the worst case is 'I need to do this part over again a bunch' as opposed to 'I have to spend 15 minutes sneaking around slowly and then die to retry'. This is mostly informed by the fact that I didn't really struggle with it, I suppose. I think one of them (probably the sound one) threw me off but as you mentioned, they're basically just mini-puzzles instead of a real boss fight, just approach them in that way and they're probably a bit less frustrating.
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Jan 29, 2024 08:03
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The stealth emmis are boring and much worse than the lategame chase ones, but those are still worse chase sequences in a MV than either Ori game. But my real issue with the emmis is how they contribute to the absolutely dogshit exploration of Dread. The game already does its best to discourage going off to explore by constantly silently closing off routes based on story progress, but then the map is also filled with giant rooms that are miserable or impossible to backtrack through before the corresponding emmi is dead and still slow to backtrack through after.
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Jan 29, 2024 10:59
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KNR posted:The stealth emmis are boring and much worse than the lategame chase ones, but those are still worse chase sequences in a MV than either Ori game. No way, nothing involving the EMMIs was as bad as the sand worm chase from the endgame of Ori 2. I will say that Metroid Dread was my first experience with the genre and I was surprised how heavily on-rails it was for most of the game, it wasn't until I played Hollow Knight that I found a game that aligned with what I thought these sort of games were (basically free roaming exploration).
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Jan 29, 2024 13:06
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hollow knight is unfortunately quite an outlier in terms of how open it is yeah
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Jan 29, 2024 13:34
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lih posted:hollow knight is unfortunately quite an outlier in terms of how open it is yeah I'd say Afterimage is just as if not more open
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Jan 29, 2024 15:04
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Hollow Gaunt posted:True. But the insta-kills are just cheap, especially with how worthless stealth is. At least give us better AI, or the ability to distract the E.M.M.Is, or camouflage in a meaningful way, etc. You literally can turn invisible.
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Jan 29, 2024 15:38
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i'm still trying to get through Prince of Persia on hard but oh my god this Orod fight might break me i think this dude might actually have the fewest mechanics of any boss fight in this game, but his attacks are so loving hard to dodge and they come out with no tells and he has zero punish time so the fight is just brutally long. I got him below 2/3 health one time out of like ten attempts  what's up with his big stay-off-the-floor attack anyways? I've mostly managed to avoid it using double jump+dash+sometimes warping back up to a ghost I leave in the air, but sometimes it goes wrong and I don't know why (maybe just not holding down the jump buttons long enough for max height?). also oh my god whoever decided there should be a delay on warping to the ghosts should be barred from working on video games ever again, it makes it so much harder to use in these fights and i have no idea why you'd want that abraham linksys fucked around with this message at 15:51 on Jan 29, 2024 |
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Jan 29, 2024 15:47
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FireWorksWell posted:I'd say Afterimage is just as if not more open Afterimage really does have great world design and yeah, sooooo many directions you can go. Death's Gambit thus far is similar, lots of options to tackle, but the overall game world seems relatively smaller, though I haven't opened the gate into Aldwynn yet, so maybe the city is loving huge, I have no idea.
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Jan 29, 2024 15:47
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Interesting that afterimage thread opinion turned towards positive. I thought it was mediocre and others seemed to think the same then. Anyway re: Dread, I didn’t mind the EMMIs, but I didn’t love them enough to defend them, just sort had a decent time in a decent game that, as people are saying, really suffers on exploration.
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Jan 29, 2024 16:07
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My only issue with the Ori sandworm chase was that it wasn't longer. I agree Afterimage was largely very mediocre, but it was also very open. There's often like 5 different levels you can explore, each with their own aesthetic, bosses and enemies. They're just usually not very good levels, though the game has its highlights. The gameplay doesn't change nearly as much as the aesthetic and the individual levels are too large for their own good.
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Jan 29, 2024 17:33
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lih posted:hollow knight is unfortunately quite an outlier in terms of how open it is yeah Metroid II is essentially linear, but except in one specific instance you can backtrack your way all the way to the start of the map at any time if you want. Super Metroid is pretty open, fairly linear, but feels non-linear since there's little overt signposting. You can generally backtrack to previous areas, but there's a few one-way hallways and there's one famous instance where you're locked onto a portion of the map as a means to limit potential routes until you figure out how to escape that portion. I think this is the first example in the Metroid series of the game locking you into a specific area for progression purposes. The specific way it's done in Super Metroid is memorable and smart, but it's also easy to take the wrong lessons from it and abuse the concept. Metroid Fusion is very much on-rails, but has the excuse that the environment morphs around you due to the scripted events system. The lack of openness is a turn-off for many, but taken on it's own terms I think it's a compelling experience. So, in all this, Dread fits into a weird spot. It's trying to be more open than Fusion, but more guided than Super. Like Fusion, the environment does morph around you in interesting ways, but it also does feel a bit lost in itself. And then you have the EMMI sequences on top of this, which are very-much their own thing and disconnected from the rest of the experience, regardless of the quality of the EMMI sections themselves.
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Jan 29, 2024 17:37
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abraham linksys posted:what's up with his big stay-off-the-floor attack anyways? I've mostly managed to avoid it using double jump+dash+sometimes warping back up to a ghost I leave in the air, but sometimes it goes wrong and I don't know why (maybe just not holding down the jump buttons long enough for max height?). also oh my god whoever decided there should be a delay on warping to the ghosts should be barred from working on video games ever again, it makes it so much harder to use in these fights and i have no idea why you'd want that You should always be using clones for these attacks. Jump once, leave a clone, use all your mobility when the attack starts to stay in the air (jump, dash, double jump) then, before you drop, tp to your clone. If you did it correctly, your clone will then have access to a second double jump and dash. Doing it in this order gives you a ton of hang-time.
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Jan 29, 2024 17:48
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The EMMIs lost a lot of the effect by being restricted to clearly delineated zones unlike the SA-X which felt like it could come after you anywhere (its appearances were all scripted but when you were exploring a new area, every room you entered felt like it could be there). also the fact that you do get to destroy them individually while the SA-X is a single unkillable monster hunting you throughout the whole game, which makes the final showdown with it feel more impactful.
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Jan 29, 2024 18:18
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EMMIs are an absolute an interesting failure but still a failure imo. They warp large parts of the levels around then and their extreme lethality/extreme lack of consequences just makes their encounters frustrating trial and error For the next 2D metroid I'd really just like to see a back to basics Super Metroid 2 style world, it's what everyone likes and where the genre is at its best. Stop trying to be clever with gimmicks and scripted events,!
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Jan 29, 2024 18:26
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The trick with EMMIs, and something the game absolutely teaches to you, is that they're not really stealth. They're chase sequences and pretty thrilling ones that test your ability to improvise and react under pressure. There's no real trial and error as most areas are designed with loops or tricks you can use to escape them.
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Jan 29, 2024 18:30
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I found the EMMIs pretty fun and easy, I liked them. They're definitely not trial and error, you can salvage pretty much anything that happens as long as you keep moving. The thing that seems to trip people up in videos is when they try to cloak and sit still until they leave - it's not that kind of stealth sequence, and since the EMMIs track where you are while you're not cloaked they'll just walk over and find you anyway. The trick is to look for spots where you can cloak and keep moving to slip past them. Clearly the developer's mistake was in giving the player generous checkpoints that allowed players to brute force their way past an EMMI without actually understanding how the encounter works 
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Jan 29, 2024 18:49
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ExcessBLarg! posted:Metroid Fusion is very much on-rails, but has the excuse that the environment morphs around you due to the scripted events system. The lack of openness is a turn-off for many, but taken on it's own terms I think it's a compelling experience. Dread is just Fusion 2. I wouldn't even say that it's more open; that's a consequence of it being a larger game with a bigger map. The EMMIs are a more structured version of the SA-X segments... which is a problem because such clear structure blunts the suspense and make everything repetitive. The SA-X segments felt like an interruption of the normal gameplay, but the EMMIs quickly become just a switch to a different type of gameplay. Schwarzwald fucked around with this message at 19:16 on Jan 29, 2024 |
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Jan 29, 2024 19:13
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The developer of Islets has released a demo for his upcoming game Crypt Custodian: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2394650/Crypt_Custodian/ It looks to be a top-down take on the formula with a similar art style. I’m really enjoying Islets so looking forward to playing this one when it comes out supposedly later this year.
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Jan 29, 2024 19:57
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Dread is way more open than Fusion and doesn't lock you out of doing a last scouring around for upgrades and pickups for the endgame. Fusion's model of having all the other modules of the space station locked off until authorized really felt more annoying. Although I didn't mind the exposition dumps from ADAM as much when they weren't fully voiced. I think some people have a mental image of Super Metroid being a lot more open because of the way that glitches and exploits allow for more sequence breaking. Reportedly it didn't do too well over in Japan and they didn't respond well to the barebones openness, so that's why Metroid took a long break for the whole N64/GBC era. There's a lot of push and pull with open world games where freedom is nice, but without structure you can just get lost and confused or bored from the lack of reinforcement. Mobility upgrades are meaningless if new areas don't make them useful, and it gives you more of a feeling of progression if areas are locked out until later. It even allows for games to construct more of a story.
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Jan 29, 2024 20:10
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Schwarzwald posted:Dread is just Fusion 2. I wouldn't even say that it's more open; that's a consequence of it being a larger game with a bigger map.
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Jan 29, 2024 21:24
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Phetz posted:The developer of Islets has released a demo for his upcoming game Crypt Custodian: God I swear metroidvanias need some new ideas, the premise and aesthetic is just straight up Death's Door and that was hardly the most inspired game when it released
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Jan 30, 2024 00:29
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God, Death's Door, what a total waste of a premise/aesthetic. Yes, ravens working in the afterlife, very Grim Fandango, now let's never mention it again after the first two minutes. Christ.
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Jan 30, 2024 01:32
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all i ever remember about Death's Door is a) liking the music, and b) getting incredibly pissed off at the hookshot controls
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Jan 30, 2024 02:34
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Anyone play Convergence: A League of Legends Story? Worthwhile? It's on sale on Steam right now.
ExcessBLarg! fucked around with this message at 02:37 on Jan 30, 2024 |
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Jan 30, 2024 02:35
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Quote != Edit
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Jan 30, 2024 02:36
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Prince of Persia: In the Temple of Knowledge, on the 4th puzzle where you have 3 copies of your character (where you need to pull a lever in a little room to make a vertical wall pop out), I think I know the solution but my idea requires really insanely precise split-second timing to actually pull off. Don't really want detailed hints, just yes or no confirmation, is it true the solution to that puzzle requires super precise split-second timing? Not sure if I am wasting time practicing the timing or if there's a different solution which is easier to pull off.
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Jan 30, 2024 17:21
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From memory none of those needed split second timing just sensible placement of each copy. But I can't remember any of the actual solutions so lol
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Jan 30, 2024 17:34
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Confirming none of them require split second timing. You just need to figure the puzzle out.
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Jan 30, 2024 17:41
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Yeah, you're probably doing something inefficient or giving yourself less time than necessary.
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Jan 30, 2024 17:51
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I overall really liked Prince of Persia although I specifically hate basically every boss except the second to last one because they're just, like. A pain. I don't know how best to qualify the difference between these and other difficult bosses that I don't hate all of, it's like, they all feel like bullshit but unlike in, like, a Souls or something, or in Metroid Dread, where they usually start out feeling bullshit but you slowly start to get to grips with them, these never stopped feeling like bullshit, they have constant and terminal "what was I supposed to do?" syndrome, they never feel better, it always feels like luck when you eventually win, it never seems like you ever got to grips with any of them, most of them still have attacks that I never figured out how to mitigate, and most of all, the game really, really, really wants to be Devil May Cry and it just. Isn't. It's not equal to that. Outside the bosses this problem vanishes, I like fighting almost every enemy and all the combat rooms and most of the platforming was great with the unfortunate exception of the designated Final Platforming Challenge which tried really really hard to be Celeste and got most of it right except the Most Important Rule (which is: no waiting, waiting is always bad, your platformer is bad if the optimal solution is not full speed ahead at all times). I love that this got made and that they made it a metroidvania and that they decided to crib so liberally and so well from Metroid Dread, Hollow Knight, and Celeste (seriously, that one room at the top of Archives was like something out of a B-side). E: Also: the self-congratulatory auto screenshot feature was almost completely useless because aside from a minor improvement to the "why did I pin that?" problem it doesn't actually help anyone with anything and still has the problem of needing to be manually managed and cleaned up: the correct solution to this problem is to mark visible pickups and unnavigable points on the map when they scroll into view and then remove them when resolved. Fedule fucked around with this message at 02:55 on Jan 31, 2024 |
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Jan 31, 2024 02:52
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Isnt that what the navigation mode does? Also the one way paths do show up and resolve on the maps Edit: As for bosses on normal at least I beat almost all of them first try once I got the defense amulet and never really learned their moves because that amulet makes you unbelievably tanky Barudak fucked around with this message at 03:29 on Jan 31, 2024 |
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Jan 31, 2024 03:26
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Sakurazuka posted:From memory none of those needed split second timing just sensible placement of each copy. But I can't remember any of the actual solutions so lol Thanks everyone, got it today cant cook creole bream posted:Yeah, you're probably doing something inefficient or giving yourself less time than necessary. Yeah I was overdoing it and trying to dash through / use teleport to dash through the grate in the split-second it opened instead of the much easier actual solution that I realized later. Fedule posted:they decided to crib so liberally and so well from Metroid Dread Yeah was tempted to say "they put an EMMI in Prince of Persia" during all the EMMI discussion
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Jan 31, 2024 12:08
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Barudak posted:Isnt that what the navigation mode does? The guided mode toggle does one specific thing: it marks specific rooms as containing paths toward the main plot that you can or can't access yet (while the exploration mode still sometimes puts destination markers on your map). What's notable about this is that it's at the same time blunt and handholdy, and also worse than using the in-game screenshot pins, because despite giving everything away straight away it also doesn't actually tell you what's blocking you or is freshly permitted in any room, it's just telling you go here or don't go here and you take it at word with no thought. It skips over something it considers to be a problem without any consideration of why that problem causes people to feel bad - this is because the quintessential metroidvania experience is when you get a new ability and three or four locations you previously visited just float up, unbidden, to the forefront of your mind and you decide there and then to suspend the critical path and go exploring. At the same time, if the critical path isn't one of those locations, or if the player just forgets, there needs to be some kind of method for getting back on track. This is a tricky game design problem! Metroidvanias are all about keeping track of things and coming back later but nobody is keeping a photographic memory map of all the terrain and all the pickups - that's why these games started having maps in the first place. But people also don't want to just be led around. The goal of a map is to offload the cognitive tedium of having to meticulously remember everything while still leaving the satisfying work to be done. For the most part, map systems that allow you to see where you haven't reached the edge of a room or been through a door handle this implicitly, you can look at that map and instantly see where you haven't been. What's needed then is some way of knowing what was blocking your path. The screenshot pins can help here, but to be frank, the information contained in the screenshots players are compelled to make is information that should already be marked on the map somehow. If the map is exactly detailed enough, it will give an idea of what the terrain was in a way that if you just got a new ability you could glance at the map and infer if you can now deal with it, without having an explicit Yes You Can Go Here Now marker. PoP does indeed automatically mark one way doors, and unmarks them when opened. This is great and feels like a little bit of an insult because they specifically designed this one thing correctly but didn't extend it to anything else, just so everyone would know they could have but chose not to. When you pass by a chest on a high ledge, the chest should mark itself on the map, and the ledge should be visible on the map. This way, all the information is added, automatically, and removed automatically, and the player can still put the pieces together themselves with regards to figuring out if they can reach it yet. The same goes for places you simply haven't been yet; the map should show, in reasonably granular detail, where there are places in a room you haven't been to, with the terrain marked, so you can look at the map without having to annotate it yourself, and think "oh there was a long gap here". This only leaves the Actual Hidden Stuff. Players love exploring and discovering. Players are willing to search in a manageable space. Players hate scouring. There is no way around this; eventually, you have to start providing guidance (or, you have to have the self awareness not to have a Completion Counter or completionist Trophies in your game. If you have these things, you have a responsibility to help players get them. Every trip to google is a game design failure). By all means have your subtle hints, while players are still exploring, but as you tend towards 100% you need to start getting increasingly specific otherwise it's just going to be tedious. Metroid Dread has a blunt but very good solution for this; every pickup appears on the map but if it hasn't appeared on camera will only be shown as a large-ish but delineated area; "hey, explore around here". Other solutions exist. PoP does very little to help you if you're missing a handful of pale ores or heart pieces or what have you, and frustration results until you crack open PowerPyx and run down each location one at a time. It's wild that the game gives you a hot and cold chest detector but still leaves so many pickups out in the open, thus undetectable. It honestly feels incomplete in this regard. It's wild that there's an NPC who for the whole game will sell you both maps and hints for the critical path (which itself completely upends the guided navigation mode in both utility, adaptability to player needs, and ludonarrative seamlessness) but is silent in the postgame, where it seems like the most obvious thing in all of game design that you should be able to buy hints to missing pickups from her with the currency you've amassed from the 95% of the map you've found and explored yourself (see Chicory for this exact system implemented perfectly and charmingly). This has been a lot of complaining despite how much I liked the game outside of specifically most of the boss fights and the postgame cleanup but I will always analyse game design failures, because it's always fascinating how minor feature changes make fundamentally the same processes feel frustrating instead of joyous, or vice versa.
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Jan 31, 2024 13:02
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This is a long shot, but I do hope the inevitable remaster of Metroid Prime: Echoes comes with some means of collectible tracking like the 2D games. I was lukewarm on Prime due its leaden backtracking and that awful Phazon mine boss. I don't know why they didnt include the tracker from Dread. From what I've seen of Echoes it has a foreign vibe not found elsewhere, and the world design doesn't force you through Magmoor for the sixteenth fecking time.
Inspector Gesicht fucked around with this message at 13:10 on Jan 31, 2024 |
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Jan 31, 2024 13:07
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Thinking the sequels are better than the original is one of the hotter tales in this thread.
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Jan 31, 2024 14:02
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Honestly I prooooobably like Prime 2 a little better than 1 just because it's not so much of a pushover (at least before they moved all the difficulty settings down one) and the bleak atmosphere. 3 is by far the worst though. They're all classics though.
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Jan 31, 2024 14:09
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