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Watching this made me want to replay the game and I'm impressed with how good the design is from the very beginning. Every game should just steal the tutorial from this because it explains and shows you so many mechanics just in the opening sequence before you get to town. Nat calmly beating bosses reminded me that you can just take your time and observe their movement before settling on a strategy. I normally get nervous and overextend myself trying to do damage quicklyor get in one more hit. They do such a good job making the fights intense yet seem very doable even if you screw up majorly at first.
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Mar 30, 2021 13:39
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Yeah, the worst enemy in boss fights in this game is greed and Nat doesn't seem to suffer from that... yet. Doesn't make the no-death-so-far run any less impressive, mind you; Hornet can be quite the roadblock.
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Mar 30, 2021 16:52
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I wonder what the first boss that gives him trouble will be. Not going to speculate obviously because spoilers but I've got a few ideas.
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Mar 30, 2021 17:07
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Maybe it's just me, but I kept getting distracted during the Hornet fight by her cries, it sounded like she was constantly yelling "SHARK!" and that feels really incongruous in this setting 
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Mar 30, 2021 17:21
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Explopyro posted:Maybe it's just me, but I kept getting distracted during the Hornet fight by her cries, it sounded like she was constantly yelling "SHARK!" and that feels really incongruous in this setting It's real tempting to try and read English meaning into Hornet's callouts.  It's nice to see Nat has apparently been charmed by the cuteness of the designs and wants to be friends with Hornet. The other LP (Spoilers in video titles) I watched was also trying to make bug friends. Transferable skill is always nice to see. The appeal of LPs (at least of games I haven't played) to me is threefold: Experiencing a new story, sharing that story with someone else for the first time and seeing their reaction, and watching displays of skill at the game. Usually I have to settle for two out of three. I've bought games on the premise that the LP I was watching was terrible at the game and I could do better. The fact that Hollow Knight is enough like Megaman that your platforming and fighting skills carry over means it'll at least be a significant while until you start really flailing.
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Mar 30, 2021 18:12
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I finally got around to watching the LP today. You're doing so well! We can go watch anyone die a bunch on blind playthroughs, your success so far is refreshing. Plus hearing Tea baffled about it is funny.Dareon posted:It's nice to see Nat has apparently been charmed by the cuteness of the designs and wants to be friends with Hornet. The other LP (Spoilers in video titles) I watched was also trying to make bug friends. Obviously Nat needs to offer Hornet some frozen yogurt. or maybe some sea salt ice cream
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Mar 30, 2021 21:51
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pointlessone posted:This right here is why I absolutely love Hades, and hope it sets an entire new trend in gaming. God Mode's progressive +2% damage reduction per death made it possible for me to not only beat the game, but actually feel like wasn't hitting a brick wall. No judgement, no mocking, just toggle it on and you still get to enjoy the game. I wanted to save this discussion until after Episode 6 aired so sorry for the long time on getting to this! I said at the end of episode 6 that I'm sure this isn't a game I could play outside of the LP format. For full (potentially too much) disclosure, I come out of every session sweating buckets because I'm so anxious in the game about going the wrong way etc. It's not a game that isn't fun to me by any means but I literally couldn't deal with that level of stress for a long time and I definitely wouldn't be able to make it work without talking to Tea the entire time. To bring this on topic, the atmosphere of this game is a choice by the developers and one that honestly would drive a person like me away from the game. It strikes me that in the same way that atmosphere or art can evoke certain emotions in a player then so can difficulty. If it is a legitimate choice to say that making the game friendlier or less isolated would compromise the emotion the developers want to evoke from a player, it is probably also legitimate to say that a game should be x level of difficult because of the emotion that struggling against that difficulty can evoke. I'm not sure that's the right decision to make, but I feel like it's one that isn't necessarily wrong to make either. (Even though as I get older I would really like there to be busy adult modes in more of the games I play)
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Mar 30, 2021 22:54
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Part of it is just how thoroughly Team Cherry succeeded in building an emotionally resonant setting, it pulls it off far more convincingly and totally than most any other game I can think of. You could do some interesting literary analysis on it, but even avoiding spoilers I don't want to color Nat's experience, so I'll abstain for the duration.
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Mar 31, 2021 01:55
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Natural 20 posted:I wanted to save this discussion until after Episode 6 aired so sorry for the long time on getting to this! I understand the desire for developers to say "This is my vision. This should be difficult for the player to overcome." I can respect that as an art form. As an artist, it's your choice to make something direct or as obtuse as you'd like. Write a poem in 6th century Latin if that's what you're moved to do. That's your call as the creator, and maybe that's how you are best able to express your vision to the world. Now it's time to sell the poem. The critics who read poems professionally praise it for really stretching their skills. It gets highly rated reviews. Streamers read the poem and make it seem reasonable to digest, so it becomes a wide market hit. Now there's a large portion of people who've bought the poem who are unable to read it. Sure, they might make it through a few lines, and some might really get dedicated to the idea of reading it and manage to force their way through after hours and hours of struggling. The artist could easily include a translation, but a bit of the nuance would be lost. A pun here, an entendre there, but a translation would make it accessible to large amounts of people who bought the poem. Not handing out that translation is the poet saying to everyone who bought the poem (and were unable to return it because it'd been over two hours that they'd tried to read it or it could only be returned for another copy since the shrink wrap was removed), to "Ut banum". The most frustrating part about games going for the "Hard Games" ideal for difficulty is that the developers have almost 0 issue including challenge items that allow the player to handicap themselves. An item that sets you to 1 heart or makes you take double damage? Perfectly fine. An item that can be used to let you take half damage? "THAT'S NOT OUR VISION."
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Mar 31, 2021 04:01
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I adore Hollow Knight but the skill ceiling is somewhere above my head and after 60 hours of playing it there's parts of the game I will never see because I absolutely can't defeat some of those bosses. And I play it on the Switch so I can't install a cheat mod or whatever. But every part of the game that isn't me being brutalized is beautiful, I love the setting and the colours and the soundtrack and the exploration.
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Mar 31, 2021 04:54
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pointlessone posted:I understand the desire for developers to say "This is my vision. This should be difficult for the player to overcome." I can respect that as an art form. As an artist, it's your choice to make something direct or as obtuse as you'd like. Write a poem in 6th century Latin if that's what you're moved to do. That's your call as the creator, and maybe that's how you are best able to express your vision to the world.     Title: Profound, inscrutable artistic vision Artist: EggsAisle Medium: SA smilies (I get what you mean, I just... guh.) EggsAisle fucked around with this message at 05:58 on Mar 31, 2021 |
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Mar 31, 2021 05:47
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SA smilies are an excellent medium of artistic expression, but I must admit I'm biased to take a single smiley more seriously than the medium of smiley juxtaposition
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Mar 31, 2021 07:48
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To add to the difficulty discussion, I think it comes down to just giving the player options. Obviously the developers will have an ideal level they want you to experience the game at, for many different reasons, so that should absolutely be the default setting and they should make it very clear at the start of the game that that's what they recommend. But there should also be the option to change it if you want to or need to, without shame. It's a game. By definition it is a thing that should be fun to play, and that means different things to different people. And there are accessibility reasons too. Gamers are flexible people. Every big-name game immediately attracts a flock of modders who make tools to customise the experience to be easier or harder as the player desires, and a dozen different unofficial challenges - low%, speedrun, no-healing, no-item, solo character, Nuzlocke, etc. - except in those rare instances where the game already offers it. Sometimes casual gamers want to challenge themselves more. Sometimes diehard 'git gud' serious people want to just relax and gently run through an old favourite without stress. Not including ways to alter the difficulty just means you're declaring your game off limits to some of your potential audience for no real reason until they band together and find ways to do it without you (or just give their money to a different game). I'm tired of games that try to force me to play a certain way. I promise I will enjoy your content just as much if I'm occasionally allowed to cheese a boss that's caused me a lot of issues or bypass a really tedious encounter. In fact I'll likely enjoy it more than if you make me spend hours trying to brute-force something, because at that point I'll be tired and stressed and pissed off and just want to move on as fast as possible, and when I look back all I'll remember is that I hated it.
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Mar 31, 2021 07:59
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Aside from the example of releasing works in some dead language that was given (and is pretty rare), it is kind of problematic to an extent that video games are the only entertainment you can buy that you are prevented from fully enjoying unless you're "good enough," books and movies don't do that. Not every game needs to be Kirby's Epic Yarn by default (and I'm not bashing that game because it's one of my favorite games), but I feel like every game should be allowed to be that easy if that's what the player wants. There's plenty of people who want this, little kids who enjoy games but aren't that good at them, people who enjoy the story and atmosphere but don't have enough time to "git gud," or people with handicaps or other limitations.pointlessone posted:"THAT'S NOT OUR VISION." And I hate that as an excuse too. If your vision is just to make a really difficult game then don't put effort into the story. I know that sounds kind of dumb, but seriously. If you want to make your game world cool and interesting and have all sorts of secret lore in it, that means people who aren't good at difficult platforming but enjoy interesting stories and atmosphere will want to experience it, and by making the game difficult you're essentially telling them "Sorry you don't get to enjoy this, we have deemed you not worthy." Like look at Super Meat Boy. It's insanely hard, and it has no story. "Rescue your girlfriend from the evil guy." Boom that's it, who cares about the story, it's about the gameplay and challenge. That's fine, because people who don't enjoy playing the game for the challenge itself aren't missing out on anything. The people who made it just wanted to make a challenging game and that's what they did. Even JRPGs kind of do this, like I'm replaying FFX right now and there's tons of superbosses in the monster arena but defeating them doesn't unlock any new story scenes or give you new information about the game world, it's just "Hey here's a challenge, if you want to do it, do it, if you don't, who cares." Some people might feel like it isn't "fair" that someone who isn't good at games gets to play the full game on a super easy difficulty while they played on a super hard one (whatever "fair" is supposed to even mean in this situation, or how someone else plays a game affects them) but that's what trophies should be for right? Trophies don't actually add anything to the game itself but there's trophies for "Beat this game on the hardest difficulty" and hey that's what you can point to and say see, I did the thing. I got recognition for wanting to be challenged and overcoming it. And if you don't care about that, you don't have to get the trophy, you can just enjoy the game how you want to play it. Challenge isn't bad, but a player should be allowed to choose how much challenge they want, especially if a person might play the game for reasons like "I want to see the story" or "I just want to explore this cool world."
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Mar 31, 2021 08:53
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Hollow Knight has full mod support. Why not just install a godmode mod? Why do the developers themselves have to be the ones to accommodate you? Also, thisTwelve by Pies posted:Aside from the example of releasing works in some dead language that was given (and is pretty rare), it is kind of problematic to an extent that video games are the only entertainment you can buy that you are prevented from fully enjoying unless you're "good enough," books and movies don't do that.
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Mar 31, 2021 09:32
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I can still read Joyce's Ulysses just fine. I may not be able to understand it, but I'm capable of reading the words on the page. I can still reach the end of it even if I'm completely ignorant of the themes behind it. That still makes it much more accessible than video games. e: I understand your point that some works can be difficult to understand, even incomprehensible if you're not paying attention, but again my point was that in a video game if you cannot fly up to the keyhole in Star World 5, you are prohibited from going to the Special World, it is completely inaccessible to you. Content in the game is totally blocked off. If I'm reading Joyce's Ulysses, the omniscient book doesn't ask me questions about the plot and then say "Whoa there, you totally didn't understand it, so you don't get to keep reading it" and lock the book and prevent me from continuing to read it. I can still read it, the content is still there for me to access, whether I understand it or not, which is completely different from a game. e2: quote:Hollow Knight has full mod support. Why not just install a godmode mod? Why do the developers themselves have to be the ones to accommodate you? Because it's the developers' job to make a game accessible for people, it shouldn't be left to the whims of chance that someone on the internet might do that, because they might not. In a world where Hollow Knight somehow became an unpopular game very few people cared about, there's a good chance nobody would have made a godmode mod for it because nobody with the skills would have cared to do so. But even if a game is hugely unpopular there will always be some people who want to play it or will enjoy it, but wouldn't be able to because the mod didn't exist. Not to mention some people aren't good with computer. Yes, I'm an adult capable of installing a mod myself, but a seven year old might not be capable of that, and their parents or guardians may not have that skillset either. If my mom was taking care of a kid who asked her to install a mod on Hollow Knight my mom would be completely lost, she doesn't have that kind of computer knowledge, she wouldn't even know what the kid was talking about. Not everyone is capable of doing things that you might consider super basic, that's kind of the point of this discussion in the first place. Besides "why do the developers have to be the ones to accommodate you" can also be extended to things like making sure the game is playable for deaf people, or colorblind people, and it should be obvious why it's kind of hosed up to ask that question when it comes to those sorts of limitations. Twelve by Pies fucked around with this message at 11:50 on Mar 31, 2021 |
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Mar 31, 2021 11:12
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Twelve by Pies posted:Besides "why do the developers have to be the ones to accommodate you" can also be extended to things like making sure the game is playable for deaf people, or colorblind people, and it should be obvious why it's kind of hosed up to ask that question when it comes to those sorts of limitations. "Not being good at platformers" isn't an accessibility issue, and making this comparison, independent of everything else, is really dumb
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Mar 31, 2021 12:13
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Jen X posted:"Not being good at platformers" isn't an accessibility issue, and making this comparison, independent of everything else, is really dumb Of course. There are no visual, nerve or motor control issues that would impact someone's ability to play platformers. None at all. Anyone struggling is just bad. People are suggesting an option. As in, you do not have to do it if you don't want to. It's not instead of anything, it's not changing the default game. Nobody's Hollow Knight experience would be altered by there being a completely optional setting to change the difficulty slightly. Developers would have to invest more time, money and resources to do it, obviously. But the end result is a game accessible to more people that will therefore sell better and make more money back.
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Mar 31, 2021 12:42
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I'm not sure it's true that video games are the only entertainment you can buy that require you to be good enough to enjoy them fully. Escape rooms are a form of purchased entertainment that requires some degree of skill to complete (varies by escape room, obviously). Depending on how you define "entertainment", you could include things like puzzle books, or jigsaw puzzles. We like to compare video games to passive forms of narrative entertainment because most of them these days have a narrative, but that's not all a game is. A game is a blending of that form of entertainment with skill-based recreation, and there's lots of skill-based recreations where you need to be "good enough" to enjoy them fully. You can't ski down a double black slope unless you're good enough at skiing, you can't make tempered chocolate unless you're good enough at cooking, you can't put a ship in a bottle unless you're good enough at model building. Why is the appropriate comparison for video games to film and books, and not to hobbies?
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Mar 31, 2021 12:44
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Black Robe posted:Of course. There are no visual, nerve or motor control issues that would impact someone's ability to play platformers. None at all. Anyone struggling is just bad. And surprisingly enough, game developers are not magical beings of infinite power, and rebalancing the entire game a second time to make a second difficulty setting feel satisfying to play does in fact take a large amount of time and effort that would otherwise go to refining the intended experience! Whether they feel that’s a trade-off worth making in exchange for reaching a wider audience is a decision that’s up to them, not you.
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Mar 31, 2021 13:32
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pumpinglemma posted:And surprisingly enough, game developers are not magical beings of infinite power, and rebalancing the entire game a second time to make a second difficulty setting feel satisfying to play does in fact take a large amount of time and effort that would otherwise go to refining the intended experience! Whether they feel that’s a trade-off worth making in exchange for reaching a wider audience is a decision that’s up to them, not you. Who says it has to be rebalanced around a second difficulty? I think the game people have in mind here is Celeste and the options there include infinite jumps; the argument is for accessibility, not a new difficulty level.
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Mar 31, 2021 14:14
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Throwing in a god mode toggle is easy enough and a number of games have even done so. However, when approaching platforming challenges, this becomes more difficult to address. It is a mite bit unreasonable to demand that the developer make two (or more, because you might get people choosing the easy one and complaining it's too easy!) versions of every platforming challenge and there isn't really a good way to add an assist for this short of that approach the wii mario world game took where it straight up takes control of your character and plays the segment for you. Would a lot of people find that satisfying? I have no idea. Edit: I suppose you could do the infinite jumps method, but if anything, that's even more unsatisfying than the auto-play in my opinion because it's not even cool to watch. Obligatum VII fucked around with this message at 15:32 on Mar 31, 2021 |
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Mar 31, 2021 15:30
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Without wading into this, the trillion options in Celeste are very, very thematic.
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Mar 31, 2021 15:42
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The thing about Celeste was that it didn't just have the infinite jumps thing, that was sort of the last resort option. It also had other things like a speed slider so you could slow the game down incrementally until you found something you could handle, etc. I don't really know what the solution to this sort of thing is, either. I'm the sort of person who is generally more willing to quit playing a game than turn the difficulty down, for instance (in the case of Celeste, I got through a couple of the C-sides after 100%ing A and B, hit a brick wall and decided I was just done, I didn't care if assist mode existed); I know this is a bias I have, but I've tried and I can't change how I feel about it. This means a lot of these options exist in a purely theoretical space for me: I'm glad they exist for people with disabilities, but I can't imagine using them personally. pumpinglemma posted:And surprisingly enough, game developers are not magical beings of infinite power, and rebalancing the entire game a second time to make a second difficulty setting feel satisfying to play does in fact take a large amount of time and effort that would otherwise go to refining the intended experience! Whether they feel that’s a trade-off worth making in exchange for reaching a wider audience is a decision that’s up to them, not you. I'm of two minds about this too. Sure, nobody has an obligation to do good things! At the same time, nobody else has the obligation to not criticise their priorities in choosing not to. I've dipped my toe just far enough into game design to know how difficult this stuff can be; even just baseline mechanical decisions can engender tens if not hundreds of hours of heated debate. I don't think it's unreasonable in any way for designers to say "here's what we want the experience to be like, deviate from that at your own risk", but at the same time, how much effort does it really take to offer a "gently caress with anything you want if that helps make your experience better" menu? (Also, anecdotally, I think people are more willing to give higher-difficulty games/settings a chance when they know they can back out at any time without consequence; oftentimes people will actually develop the skills and then choose not to reduce it, when otherwise they'd just have chosen to start on easy.) The answer to a lot of this is better communication up front. If you tell the player what the experience is supposed to be like, and why you chose the settings you did, then they can make an informed choice about when and whether to disregard this.
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Mar 31, 2021 15:45
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Explopyro posted:but at the same time, how much effort does it really take to offer a "gently caress with anything you want if that helps make your experience better" menu? A lot. For the same reason that very few games release full-scale modding tools.
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Mar 31, 2021 16:00
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Zurai posted:A lot. For the same reason that very few games release full-scale modding tools. Yeah, this is kind of the issue with this whole conversation. No one participating is a game developer[citation needed], and we collectively have little to no idea how much effort goes into a given thing. To this end, I feel explicitly allowing modding is the best compromise. If you don't like a given feature, you or someone like you is welcome to change it, you/they just have to put in a significant fraction of the work we did to make that feature in the first place. Accessibility is great, I love that more games are offering colorblind options, descriptive audio subtitling, and other features intended to allow more and more people to experience them. But I think you have to balance effort required with expected return. This may in fact be an untenable position because I am neither a game developer nor significantly disabled in a way that prevents me from playing video games.
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Mar 31, 2021 17:05
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pumpinglemma posted:Mainstream books and movies don’t gate your ability to enjoy them based on how good you are at engaging with them on their own terms, just like mainstream video games don’t, A bunch of gacha games will want a word if you try to play not on their terms (i.e. F2P). Seriously, though, I like that more game developers are making an effort to accommodate people these days - as opposed to nothing at all.
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Mar 31, 2021 19:34
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I'm going to chime in and point out that if you want the lore and story information from a game, but you find the game too difficult, you do have the option of looking it up. Hollow Knight has a wiki and there's dozens of lore videos on Youtube. Or, y'know, you could watch a Let's Play. You might argue that that's not the same as playing through it and making the discoveries for yourself. And you'd be right. But the claim that the game's story, etc. is "locked away" behind a competency barrier isn't really true.
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Mar 31, 2021 19:37
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Reveilled posted:A game is a blending of that form of entertainment with skill-based recreation, and there's lots of skill-based recreations where you need to be "good enough" to enjoy them fully. You can't ski down a double black slope unless you're good enough at skiing, you can't make tempered chocolate unless you're good enough at cooking, you can't put a ship in a bottle unless you're good enough at model building. Why is the appropriate comparison for video games to film and books, and not to hobbies? That's a pretty good point and actually I did think about sports when I was writing that post, like you probably aren't going to play baseball if you're not good at baseball. Then again some people are terrible at sports but enjoy playing them anyway, and we do make some sports easier for kids (tee ball is just an easier version of baseball), so something like model building is probably a better comparison. I guess the difference is that with something like that, there isn't much you can do to make the experience easier. There's definitely lower skill levels of models out there that have snap together parts and are pre-painted, but there's a limit to what you can do before you're just selling a pre-assembled figure. Video games are different in that you can't sell a "finished" video game. Not a joke about how games are buggy, but you can sell a finished model, I can build a model and then sell it to someone who can't build models. But you can't just sell a copy of Mario Odyssey that's at the ending, if that makes sense (or a save file that's at the ending). Giving someone a save file with all fifty billion moons collected means they don't get to see or experience the story stuff in earlier levels because it was already done. I guess the reason I'm mostly comparing video games to books and movies is in the sense that games often have characters, story and endings, the same way movies and books (usually) do. There are exceptions of course, I mentioned Super Meat Boy in my post which doesn't really have a story and is there just for the pure challenge of playing a difficult platforming game. You don't have to be "smart enough" to finish a movie or book, nobody's going to come into the theater and tap you on the shoulder and say "I'm sorry, you lack the understanding needed to finish this movie, so you're going to have to leave," whereas a game with a cutscene or lore hidden behind a superboss or kaizo-level platforming challenge is perfectly content to say "I'm sorry, you lack the skill needed to finish this game." You could look up the cutscene on Youtube I guess, again, assuming enough people play the game that someone cares enough to upload it, but if someone doesn't, you're kinda screwed. There's content in your game you paid for you can't access, which makes it fundamentally different from a movie or book where every word or every scene on film can be read and watched. A puzzle, or model building, or playing baseball, none of those have that issue, which is why books and movies are a better comparison I feel. Essentially building a model or playing a sport, the activity itself is the fun, whereas with a game the fun could be from the story or lore even if the game isn't as fun as a game. One of the things I've heard about the Skyward Sword release is "I can't wait to play it again, even though that does mean playing it again." They enjoy the world and exploration but think the swordfighting and the "Dark World" challenges (I don't remember what they're actually called) really suck. Still, they're willing to play parts of the game they think aren't fun because it allows them to get to more fun things later. The activity itself isn't the fun for them, it's something else they find fun that the activity gets them to. There isn't really a direct comparison for that in sports (except maybe "being rich and famous from getting good at sports") or model building (since you could just buy a finished model, if the model is all you care about). Dareon posted:To this end, I feel explicitly allowing modding is the best compromise. If you don't like a given feature, you or someone like you is welcome to change it, you/they just have to put in a significant fraction of the work we did to make that feature in the first place. Despite my earlier post I do think that's a pretty great compromise even if I think it still has problems (lack of interest from a modding community, lack of knowledge of how to apply a mod), but it at least allows for the possibility of changing a game to be more comfortable to someone. Like there's an old NES game I like called Arkista's Ring. loving nobody else has heard of it, and as such there's no mods for it, or at least no dedicated modding community. So if I wanted a mod to make the game more playable, I'd be poo poo out of luck because nobody's made a mod for it, and I sure as hell don't have the programming skills to mod a game. So this is why I kind of feel like "Just leave it up to modders!" is a bit lacking as a solution. Though, again, I do think it's a good idea to explicitly allow modding in games and it definitely helps.
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Mar 31, 2021 19:54
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I really liked that argument too, of comparing a game to sports or hobbies instead of books and movies. If you just want to see how the story turns out, you could either mod away any difficulty in the game, or watch someone else play it like we're all doing here, but you lose some of the experience that makes video games video games. Feelings like anxiety and frustration about making a mistake, which can become relief and joy when they're overcome. Or feelings of just being more personally invested because you're the one pushing the buttons. But there's some give and take here, because aside from all art being subjective already, video games are going to have a whole nother layer of subjective variety in player responses and experiences, based on how they play or choose to interact with the game. That variety is pretty inherent to the medium as well. Even if you're fully committed to playing a game on its own terms, and investing whatever effort you must to get through it, people will have different experiences based on their skill levels. Someone who's extremely good at a game and just smashes through a hard boss effortlessly may miss out on an intended part of the emotional rollercoaster in the story. So let's imagine you have a precise artistic vision that demands someone feels difficulty at point X of the story and relief at point Y. Instead of translating your work into different languages for everyone to understand it, your challenge would be to "translate" the difficulty, so players of all different skill levels will be appropriately challenged by their own subjective standards at each point of the game. But even if you take the time to develop all these different tools or difficulty levels to allow this to happen, players could still choose not to use them. Someone who's good enough at games that they could have played on Normal and experienced things "perfectly" might say "meh I can't be bothered" that day and pick Easy mode instead. Or someone who could have done fine in Easy mode might stubbornly insist that they're gonna get through it on Hard no matter what, and just keep beating their own head on the wall for no reason. So I agree that game developers providing more options is better, especially for busy adults, since the ideal of someone experiencing a game exactly how you want is pretty ridiculous to begin with. But good design can allow for a surprisingly large number of people to have vaguely similar experiences! And everyone does need to decide for themselves in the end how they're going to engage with a game, and how much they're willing to invest. Or whether they'll even bother playing it as a game at all. Some games (like Undertale) I'll start reading an LP of cause I want to see what they're about, but then quickly decide "oh wait, this looks really cool, I'd much rather have the experience of playing through this myself while I can, instead of having it all done and spoiled for me. I'll be back later." While other games might make me waver more on whether I want to. I've actually never played Hollow Knight so watching these episodes made me think... man, this game is gorgeous, I bet I'd really love the experience of wandering through if myself, but it's supposed to be pretty hard while Nat's just making it look easy. I don't think my skills are nearly as good since I've grown away from platformers as I got older, and I'm of course a busy adult too. I might still want to try and actually play it myself sometime later, but I'm not going to stress about getting spoiled first or missing out if I don't ever play it. Because I do have the past experience of playing more platformers back when I was younger. So when I watch the gameplay, I do at least have some reference for what that subjective experience might be like and I don't feel like I'm missing out on a huge unacceptable thing to just be watching it.
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Mar 31, 2021 22:25
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Mar 31, 2021 23:03
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I'm reminded a Bioware dev said a decade ago that there should be an option for people to simply skip the gameplay and see the story alone if they want to without playing the game. She got poo poo on hard for it because gamers will be gamers, but you know what? She's right. People should have that freedom, no matter the reason, as a matter of decency from the developers. And if that extreme is allowed, then poo poo, developers should go a lot harder for allowing accessibility options. In today's day and age where they can add patches as much as they want to, no excuse for not giving one that allows a god mode or failing that, just difficulty toggle options. It should be normalized, the same way that good controls and other basics are normalized. re: disability chat, maybe easy mode accommodations are all that's needed for now. Fine tuning the experience might be what's ideal, but the perfect is the enemy of the good. It's a step in the right direction.
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Mar 31, 2021 23:19
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Shitenshi posted:I'm reminded a Bioware dev said a decade ago that there should be an option for people to simply skip the gameplay and see the story alone if they want to without playing the game. She got poo poo on hard for it because gamers will be gamers, but you know what? She's right. People should have that freedom, no matter the reason, as a matter of decency from the developers. And if that extreme is allowed, then poo poo, developers should go a lot harder for allowing accessibility options. In today's day and age where they can add patches as much as they want to, no excuse for not giving one that allows a god mode or failing that, just difficulty toggle options. It should be normalized, the same way that good controls and other basics are normalized. There's been some trending toward doing "story mode" difficulties, and I've found it to be fantastic. Horizon: Zero Dawn has an amazing story and some of the most interesting world building I've seen in a game, all with gameplay that I absolutely *hated*. Story mode turned it from something I would have quit playing a couple hours in and wrote off as a negative experience into a game where I've completed nearly every sidequest and the DLC just to get more of that world. EggsAisle posted:
Well said.
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Apr 1, 2021 00:39
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Ah Tea you spoiled the name of an area that hasn't actually been revealed! Shame on you. Also Nat you'll definitely want to get accustomed to using the dash in combat.
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Apr 1, 2021 02:41
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Out of curiosity since Nat bought three colors, do you get multiple pins if you just buy one color or are you limited to one of each color (and thus four in total)?
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Apr 1, 2021 04:20
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You get four of each color I think. I don't really have anything significant to add to the discussion earlier. I really like this game, but it sucks that not everyone is able to beat it or even progress that far in it. But in a spinoff note, this is why it's good that LPs exist though. I tend to enjoy watching playthroughs of games I haven't played more than those I have, because it's kind of interesting to follow along and learn the game's systems and try to understand what's going on in it. Like for example I've been watching a longform stream of the entirety of Divinity Original Sin II and while I haven't put my hands on the controller I'm learning a lot about positioning, what moves are good to make in what circumstances, the interactions of the different elemental powers, what to begin to expect from enemies every now and again, how to get around threatening statuses and crowd control, and stuff like that. And in a game like this while you're watching it's easier to see, oh he should have jumped here or did this attack or whatever because you can focus on it fully without it draining on your brain. And there are a variety of different approaches you can use in Hollow Knight that all are able to succeed. Which is one thing I really like about it.
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Apr 1, 2021 04:26
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A side point I have on the difference between a difficulty setting and an accessibility mode: You are able to turn a real accessibility option on and off, like inverting your mouse. If you have to decide before even trying the game it is not an accessibility option. Strict pre-game choice means the easiest mode is the default, and the rest is only for people who want to brag about it to other people. If you want to play a "hard" game as closely as intended as is possible with your needs/skills, it means you might just turn on accessibility option for one or two areas. Or turn the game to normal after treating the first half of the game as a tutorial. Hollow knight is the kind of game that is hard to fully understand from just watching an lp and where finding what to cut for a "cutscene only" mode makes little sense. So it really needs the detailed accessibility options that Celeste pioneered.
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Apr 1, 2021 12:35
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Apr 2, 2021 23:14
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Welp I was wrong about how many of each marker you get. Still, I was wrong in the right direction to be wrong, as there's more than I thought.
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Apr 3, 2021 01:03
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This isn't a spoiler, just part of the controls I don't think it tells you, but in the spirit of maximum hands-off-ness I've tagged it. If you double tap the map button it zooms out.
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Apr 3, 2021 03:16
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