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Speedrunners probably hate Hollow Knight combat.
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Feb 6, 2022 06:46
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Speedrunners do some truly dumb poo poo, like opening the menu so that you fall faster sounds extremely annoying but it's a thing so they all have to do it lol
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Feb 6, 2022 07:41
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There's a really interesting design tension that this argument highlights very well. I agree 100% with the principle that good game design means making sure that optimal play and enjoyable play coincide as much as possible. Games where developing mastery is a major pillar should always be more fun the better you are at them -- anything else is effectively communicating to the player that learning the game isn't worth your time. Similarly, having to police yourself and avoid strong strategies because they trivialize the game or otherwise expose faults in the mechanics is inherently anti-fun even if self-policing results in a better experience than not doing it, because it represents conflicting incentives that give you negative feedback regardless of the decision you make. However -- especially at very high levels of familiarity with / mastery of a game -- "optimal" is not a single pole. That is, you can only be optimal with respect to your goal. Speedrunning often represents a deliberate substitution of one form of optimization for another, and I think that's the case in Hollow Knight. HK gives the player almost no reason to rush -- there are a handful of optional achievements, with no in-game reward, and on top of that they scale off of total playtime on a save file rather than fastest single fight clear time. It's not really possible to make both "the experience of trying to get the single fastest time", "learning and mastering the entire fight as quickly as you can from zero", and "beating a fight you already learned in the fewest possible tries" the most fun approach to the fight; there are always going to be certain tensions between the three. So even though I endorse the "optimal play should be enjoyable play" sentiment, I think HK signals pretty strongly that they're aiming for something closer to the latter, and that if you're going to actively replace the goals the game steers you towards with new ones, you have to be prepared for a certain degree of self-policing -- or you need to break the game so badly, and get enough satisfaction from doing that, that you can make brute force solutions more enjoyable in their own right. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 07:48 on Feb 6, 2022 |
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Feb 6, 2022 07:45
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Dammit...that was a ton of posts in one day about nothing. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Feb 6, 2022 07:52
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they were actually about hollow knight.
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Feb 6, 2022 08:28
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Boba Pearl posted:Speedrunners probably hate Hollow Knight combat. Speedrunners find the actual most efficient/safest way to do something and practice and practice until they can do it perfectly. They don't fixate on a strategy that isn't fit for purpose and then complain that that part of the game is badly designed. I mean some of them probably do, actually, but those are probably not very good speedrunners.
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Feb 6, 2022 08:49
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Organza Quiz posted:Speedrunners find the actual most efficient/safest way to do something and practice and practice until they can do it perfectly. They don't fixate on a strategy that isn't fit for purpose and then complain that that part of the game is badly designed. They also don't pogo pure vessel
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Feb 6, 2022 08:56
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Fantastic Foreskin posted:My take on Hollow Knight was "if you're going to do it the easy way, why bother" and so I stopped using magic because it steamrolled everything. For me I never used the spells, not because I was worried about the game becoming too easy but because I was always too busy trying to dodge attacks, healing or saving souls for healing that I always forgot that the spells existed at all.
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Feb 6, 2022 09:01
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Organza Quiz posted:Speedrunners find the actual most efficient/safest way to do something and practice and practice until they can do it perfectly. They don't fixate on a strategy that isn't fit for purpose and then complain that that part of the game is badly designed. lots of games have segments where the best possible time depends on luck, and if your goal is the fastest possible time for the game as a whole you basically just run and re-run those segments until the perfect arrangement lines up. like idk if this is actually the best approach to Pure Vessel or not but the general type of thing he's describing is pretty common
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Feb 6, 2022 09:09
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:lots of games have segments where the best possible time depends on luck, and if your goal is the fastest possible time for the game as a whole you basically just run and re-run those segments until the perfect arrangement lines up. like idk if this is actually the best approach to Pure Vessel or not but the general type of thing he's describing is pretty common Yes, and if this were one of those occasions and if this guy was a speedrunner then it would make sense to complain about it, like the hell room in soul sanctum maybe. But this is not the most efficient way to do the fight and the person complaining is not a speedrunner.
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Feb 6, 2022 09:30
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First off, radiant pure vessel is lame, ascended pure vessel is where you really get to style (notably, jumping at all is not required): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjmygUZQ_iA Second, QuarkJets posted:Speedrunners do some truly dumb poo poo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wmtoYhrV1w Item Getter posted:For me I never used the spells, not because I was worried about the game becoming too easy but because I was always too busy trying to dodge attacks, healing or saving souls for healing that I always forgot that the spells existed at all.  on playthrough 1 but I came around to shaman stone/spell twister/descending dark for the first 75% of the game and strength/quickslash/mark of pride for the end on later playthroughs.To try to rerail (but why should we? thread content is good), I like PV quite a bit more than NKG if only because the vessel has no forced slowdown of the fight via the blowfish section. But while I'd rate PV in the top 3 hardest bosses (measured by how many attempts it takes an average player to reach their first win  ) I don't think it would even crack my top 10 hardest bosses to radiant. For my own strategy, I think the only way to get screwed by RNG is if he teleports away from you offscreen (my response is to jump towards the center; pogo if he charges, shade cloak if he does daggers, max height monarch wings if he void tendrils) and does his daggers which I dash through, then he immediately teleports away and does daggers again before my shade cloak refreshes. Even there if you don't have poo poo reflexes you can theoretically do an early shade through the first daggers and do a late shade through the second daggers.HK is good, folks. BioThermo fucked around with this message at 10:20 on Feb 6, 2022 |
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Feb 6, 2022 10:16
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:lots of games have segments where the best possible time depends on luck, and if your goal is the fastest possible time for the game as a whole you basically just run and re-run those segments until the perfect arrangement lines up. like idk if this is actually the best approach to Pure Vessel or not but the general type of thing he's describing is pretty common Sure. In this case though, speedrunners face-smash Pure Vessel; you won't see them pogoing because that's a lot of additional time spent floating around in the air instead of hitting the boss. They use Quick Slash and dump damage into the boss's face Here's a Pure Vessel speedrun that's pretty cool to watch, they take exactly 1 hit at the very start just to activate Fury of the Fallen and the entire fight is 19 seconds. There's not only no pogoing, they don't even jump a single time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjmygUZQ_iA Leaving that tangent behind and returning to the perspective of a non-speedrunner who's just trying to beat the Radiant version for the first time, I think pogoing is even less effective because the boss jumps if it senses that you're above him. I just loaded the fight and was able to get the Jump to trigger consistently by hanging out in the air above the boss, whereas the boss does not Jump otherwise. So it's not even accurate to say that this is RNG, because the boss will prefer to kill you by jumping if you make it that easy. efb on the video I guess lol
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Feb 6, 2022 10:26
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QuarkJets posted:efb on the video I guess lol Nat20, your LP of the game was refreshing, and your critiques of it were on point, and there are better ways to fight the pure vessel. Cactus posted:Oh my god check out this fight Welonz just had on her blind playthrough with the Broken Vessel.
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Feb 6, 2022 10:59
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Okay okay look. Radiant Pure Vessel is a tangent. I'm willing to just concede that I fought him "wrong" and that clearly I don't understand how to truly enjoy Hollow Knight. The discussion centralised here because of an offhanded comment I made about beating him on Radiant with RNG, but it's not the point of the discussion. Just for normal rear end pure vessel. When I fought normal pure vessel the first few times he kicked the poo poo out of me. So I started thinking about how I could use the room to my advantage. I noticed that when he teleported for spike shot, he tended to teleport centrally. So I started hanging out walljumping on the right hand wall. And it turns out, it makes the fight a lot lot easier. This is because hanging there neutralises every attack apart from the jumps and the spike shot. The spike shot is trivial to dodge from that point because you have all the time in the world and the jump only hits you if he does it from a point that's directly below you. Otherwise the arc misses. So I killed Pure Vessel hanging out in the corner like this. Now you may say that I do not understand how to enjoy Hollow Knight combat because i would choose to "cheese" a boss like this. But I contend that it is satisfying to find a strategy that works and execute it. In fact that is part of the combat experience of a game. The flaw was that in about 1 in 20 runs after I'd finished practicing, Pure Vessel would jump enough times in a row that I wouldn't be able to recover. If you're willing to accept that this is a much easier way of handling the NORMAL Pure Vessel than fighting him in the center then we have a discussion. If you don't accept this premise then we are simply going to spend all our time talking past each other. If you take that and then consider the run to absolute radiance, which takes around an hour. I was willing to accept a 1/20 chance of failure on Pure Vessel because the average opportunity cost is 60/20 = 3 minutes. Relearning the fight to eliminate that final 1/20 chance would have taken a lot longer. (And I had a streaming schedule to keep as well as other things to do in my life) So at the end of my run of Hollow Knight, even before Ascended/Radiant, I came out of Pure Vessel feeling like it wasn't the best fight because the very easy way I'd found of beating him had a random failure chance. I think a better fight would have provoked the jump more consistently for being airborne to make the corner less viable, or not have the jump at all. And that's broadly why I don't think PV is near the Grimm/Sisters of Battle tier for me.
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Feb 6, 2022 13:26
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Natural 20 posted:I came out of Pure Vessel feeling like it wasn't the best fight because the very easy way I'd found of beating him had a random failure chance. It has a random failure chance because it's not the best way of beating them. The best way of beating them is getting good.
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Feb 6, 2022 14:41
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Bleck posted:It has a random failure chance because it's not the best way of beating them. The best way of beating them is getting good. Have you considered that hooting git gud at someone who has literally beaten the entire game including the optional content (okay not everything on radiant) is possibly the stupidest thing in the world to do.
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Feb 6, 2022 14:53
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Natural 20 posted:Have you considered that hooting git gud at someone who has literally beaten the entire game including the optional content (okay not everything on radiant) is possibly the stupidest thing in the world to do. 
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Feb 6, 2022 15:04
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Natural 20 posted:Have you considered that hooting git gud at someone who has literally beaten the entire game including the optional content (okay not everything on radiant) is possibly the stupidest thing in the world to do. This is why everyone is so confused by this and making a big deal about it, because finding a strategy that neutralises most attacks so you don't have to learn to deal with them but which has a random failure chance is the strategy of a person who is not interested in getting good, and yet you clearly must be a person who is interested in getting good because you are doing the fight. That is why the response is "learn the fight properly", because someone who is doing what you are doing clearly values getting to do cool fights with dodging and parrying and finding attack windows, and it makes no sense for someone who is doing what you are doing to instead value a cheap but unreliable strategy.
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Feb 6, 2022 15:29
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I was being unironic, but I realized it probably came off like a poo poo post.
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Feb 6, 2022 15:32
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Organza Quiz posted:Speedrunners find the actual most efficient/safest way to do something and practice and practice until they can do it perfectly. They don't fixate on a strategy that isn't fit for purpose and then complain that that part of the game is badly designed. If speedrunners don't like the optimal route then they switch to a different category/game, they don't play categories they don't enjoy. Dark Souls is a great example here, with the way many speedrunners circle between the 3 major categories as new routes are discovered mostly according to their personal tolerance towards randomness. Also, I haven't watched the hollow knight speedrun in some time but iirc it favours a fighting style that accepts lots of damage and would be unusable for radiant bosses.
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Feb 6, 2022 15:57
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Organza Quiz posted:This is why everyone is so confused by this and making a big deal about it, because finding a strategy that neutralises most attacks so you don't have to learn to deal with them but which has a random failure chance is the strategy of a person who is not interested in getting good, and yet you clearly must be a person who is interested in getting good because you are doing the fight. That is why the response is "learn the fight properly", because someone who is doing what you are doing clearly values getting to do cool fights with dodging and parrying and finding attack windows, and it makes no sense for someone who is doing what you are doing to instead value a cheap but unreliable strategy. But we're not talking about whether I should learn the fight properly. We're talking about whether we like Pure Vessel or not. I have noted my objection. There is a very easy strategy with a low failure chance due to RNG. I don't like that the game is fine with this because I think either, the strategy shouldn't be available or it shouldn't have an RNG failure component. The fight may be really good if you choose to limit yourself and not do that, but I don't think that PV can be ranked as the best boss in the game because of its availability. The same way I wouldn't rank Nosk as a very good fight because you can sit in the nook by the platform and avoid almost everything it does.
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Feb 6, 2022 16:26
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I kinda get that it's a weird sort of midpoint where the strategy is still very viable, and just a bit more frustrating when they should have made it non-viable, if that's what you mean
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Feb 6, 2022 16:40
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I think this is a pretty interesting discussion and it's kind of weird that things are getting a bit heated tbh The part that I have trouble wrapping my head around is that Nat is interacting with the fight in a way that they admit is probably not intended, just not discouraged ENOUGH for their liking, even though it IS actively discouraged. That's not a hard thing to understand, but what's strange to me is arguing that THAT is what makes the fight not enjoyable. The part that Nat seems to not enjoy is the RNG aspect of will-he-or-won't-he-jump, but that's something that Nat introduced himself, so I don't know how that's a strike against the fight? Like, to analogize: If I go to a steakhouse and order a well-done steak slathered in ketchup, it'd be pretty weird of me to complain to the chef that it was overdone and way too sweet, because that's how I'm choosing to interact with the food and it is certainly not the recommended or "intended" way to enjoy it. If that's how you want to enjoy a steak by all means, but complaining that it's poorly designed because of that choice is a bit strange imo Or to be more flippant with a bad analogy instead, Enraged Guardian is my least favourite fight because every time I pogo him it doesn't do any damage and he likes to jump into me, that fight is loving stupid this is a joke and I understand there are differences lol Edit because I didn't see Nat's last post: I disagree and think that it's good that the devs allow that strategy, and I also think it's good they try to dissuade you from it because player choice is fun. Just like I think the steakhouse SHOULD allow customers to order well-done steak slathered in ketchup, even if it's personally objectionable to me, because exploring options is a fun thing to do, even if exploration doesn't always yield good results.
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Feb 6, 2022 16:44
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Hollow Knight's endpoint difficulty was something that frustrated me to no end. The first moment I fought Nightmare King Grimm I thought to myself, "this is stupid", and banished the troupe instead. I thought it was cool that they gave me that option. When Godhome came out, it felt like more of that level of difficulty without the option to see the content in a more simple way. I would have loved if, for example, I didn't need to unlock Godseeker mode, and could just have applied it whenever in order to fight all the new bosses they came up with. While it still let me engage with Pure Vessel and the new Pantheon of Hallownest fights without getting to them for real, I'd forever be locked out of Absolute Radiance because I didn't have the patience for an hour-long boss rush with no checkpoints. That being said, I think Nightmare King Grimm took me longer to beat than Pure Vessel. I don't know if this is because my practice on NKG "prepared" me for Pure Vessel or what, but I found that fight a lot more appropriately scaled to the level of challenge I had come to expect. Attacks were more readable and I felt less inclined to call bullshit on when I got owned. I never considered trying to "cheese" the fight, and I can maybe say that this is because I'm dumb and don't know how to cheese a lot of things, or I don't look for "advantages" in that way. I just learned how to fight it the regular way. It involved some pogo-ing, but only when I knew I was safe, like, for instance, the void tentacle lash-out that has quite a bit of standing still to it. Nat, you know we have this sort of mutual respect and a bit of mutual disagreement at times on how we prefer things, but I think sometimes you have to understand that because a strategy works doesn't mean it's the only strategy, or even the best strategy, to be victorious. For my preference, it's with Pure Vessel all the way, because NKG felt like it didn't have any freedom in the way you were able to approach the fight or diversify the way you battled it, feeling like one of those puzzle games where there's only one solution, but Pure Vessel absolutely had that feeling of being approachable despite its difficulty.
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Feb 6, 2022 16:50
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Natural 20 posted:The fight may be really good if you choose to limit yourself and not do that, but I don't think that PV can be ranked as the best boss in the game because of its availability. The same way I wouldn't rank Nosk as a very good fight because you can sit in the nook by the platform and avoid almost everything it does. This seems like the salient bit. If your metric for whether a fight is good is the existence of efficient, but ultimately unfun strategies, then I guess PV is indeed not the best. I just don't think it's a good metric. Something something players will optimize the fun out of a game.
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Feb 6, 2022 17:33
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I just beat the terrifying, beautiful, and powerful zote for the first time! 🎉 Lordy, nine more times?! Maybe later. Item Getter posted:For me I never used the spells, not because I was worried about the game becoming too easy but because I was always too busy trying to dodge attacks, healing or saving souls for healing that I always forgot that the spells existed at all. I definitely always used to only auto but using my spells more often has made me feel a lot more dangerous. I sometimes eat poo poo for using them inappropriately/at the wrong time, more often than autoing but I'm always more used to swinging.
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Feb 6, 2022 17:53
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brain dammej posted:This seems like the salient bit. If your metric for whether a fight is good is the existence of efficient, but ultimately unfun strategies, then I guess PV is indeed not the best. I just don't think it's a good metric. Alxprit posted:Nat, you know we have this sort of mutual respect and a bit of mutual disagreement at times on how we prefer things, but I think sometimes you have to understand that because a strategy works doesn't mean it's the only strategy, or even the best strategy, to be victorious. For my preference, it's with Pure Vessel all the way, because NKG felt like it didn't have any freedom in the way you were able to approach the fight or diversify the way you battled it, feeling like one of those puzzle games where there's only one solution, but Pure Vessel absolutely had that feeling of being approachable despite its difficulty. So this is I think where we end up. The value of the ability to approach a fight from multiple angles against some of those angles not being as fun. My preference is for a stronger on the rails approach, this is your set challenge, it is fair. Opposed to a more creative approach; this is your challenge, you might find an approach that is less fun/more rng whatever.
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Feb 6, 2022 18:22
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BioThermo posted:Sometimes I fuckin love SA for how it lets people connect over obscure poo poo. I've been trying to nudge her into discovering overcharming without directly spoiling the mechanic in the comments but she ain't biting lol Edit: just watched Skillups review of Sifu and it contains a lot of stuff pertinent to the current discussion happening here about game difficulty. Cactus fucked around with this message at 21:37 on Feb 6, 2022 |
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Feb 6, 2022 21:20
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Natural 20 posted:If you're willing to accept that this is a much easier way of handling the NORMAL Pure Vessel than fighting him in the center then we have a discussion. If you don't accept this premise then we are simply going to spend all our time talking past each other. The argument is against the central premise when applied to Radiant difficulty specifically, sorry. For what it's worth I don't think that there is a wrong way to play the game, gently caress anyone who says otherwise. But I would expect a pogo strategy to be pretty frustrating for Radiant Pure Vessel, like you observed Natural 20 posted:I think a better fight would have provoked the jump more consistently for being airborne to make the corner less viable, or not have the jump at all. And that's broadly why I don't think PV is near the Grimm/Sisters of Battle tier for me. I tried this last night. I can very consistently get the jump to trigger by hanging out above the boss, and to not trigger when I don't do that. Not just airborne though, there seems to be a zone above the boss's head that makes a jump happen, and only between moves. Boss really likes defending his head QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 22:03 on Feb 6, 2022 |
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Feb 6, 2022 21:51
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wmtoYhrV1w This is probably the most efficient way to fight perfect vessel tbh, depending on letter RNG
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Feb 7, 2022 08:19
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Hobojim posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wmtoYhrV1w lmao ok if team cherry takes long enough to release silksong then fireb0rn is going to start solving ancient math problems or something.
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Feb 7, 2022 11:01
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They better put some kind of reference to Fireb0rn in Silksong, he's earned it.
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Feb 7, 2022 13:55
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Yeah I used to not watch his videos because his tone and cadence sound like a cartoon parody of a news anchor, but his content is really good lol Also apparently BioThermo beat me to the Fireborn wordle video, sorry for hijacking it! QuarkJets posted:Speedrunners do some truly dumb poo poo, like opening the menu so that you fall faster sounds extremely annoying but it's a thing so they all have to do it lol Also also I wanted to touch on this for a quick second because menu dropping is literally the easiest speedrun tech to do lol You literally just hit the menu button while in the air and you fall faster and don't have the landing recovery animation. It's only useful if it's a long enough drop to cause the landing animation so it isn't used all that often, but as a trick, it is extremely easy to do and not annoying at all it takes like two seconds lol (This is patched out in the current version if anybody was trying it)
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Feb 7, 2022 18:15
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Cactus posted:They better put some kind of reference to Fireb0rn in Silksong, he's earned it. Good job you just added three months to the release date
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Feb 7, 2022 18:16
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AHHHH NKG down 🎉🎉🎉 God drat. My pulse was going. The intensifying background does it job of making me think "Oh we're pretty far, don't gently caress up, oh gently caress I hosed up!" 
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Feb 7, 2022 18:37
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Deckit posted:AHHHH NKG down 🎉🎉🎉 Congrats!
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Feb 7, 2022 20:09
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Congrats! Definitely an awesome feeling once you finally down him.
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Feb 7, 2022 20:58
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Deckit posted:AHHHH NKG down 🎉🎉🎉 nice. that reminds me i have a big (small) quibble with pantheon 5 the NKG fight should play his drat music. if NO-EYES gets her own music then NKG as the capstone boss should
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Feb 7, 2022 22:19
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https://twitter.com/caffeinewarm/status/1489690115010138114?s=20&t=4Higq6dRS_mSmEEmPSrLPQ
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Feb 7, 2022 22:26
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Thank for posting that Welonz LP, it’s really great but I now understand how badly I play games because I do this same thing and avoid what I think is obviously “the end” and then stumble past the MQ and skip to the end... Maybe she’ll get to ancient basin one day. 
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Feb 8, 2022 01:19
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