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I was mostly thinking of raven beak to be fair. That's the epitome of the kind of boss where having an extra hit or two doesn't matter much because either way you're not winning until you've thoroughly learned it
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Mar 23, 2024 23:34
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CharlestheHammer posted:Though the only dread boss that is hard is the last boss so that might not be the best example
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Mar 23, 2024 23:43
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LividLiquid posted:Yes, yes. Your dick is huge. Now hush. What? Why would beating a Metroid game be something to brag about, it’s never been a hard series That would be like bragging about beating bowser in a Mario game. Children can do it you ain’t special
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Mar 23, 2024 23:53
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Woosh.
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Mar 23, 2024 23:57
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TaurusOxford posted:Just FYI, since you mentioned the vaccum attack, you can spiderball that attack and make it completely safe. The game does a poo poo job of giving you any indication that works. Well poo poo lol. I could have sworn I was Spider'd to a wall and got dragged in regardless, maybe I was too close to a bomb and jumped away from the wall by mistake.
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Mar 24, 2024 02:03
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there is nothing that makes gamers more mad than telling them you thought a boss was easy lol
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Mar 24, 2024 05:15
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I'm okay with admitting that I wasn't very good at a lot of the Dread bosses, even on Normal. I'm old, have weak eyesight and not the greatest hand-eye coordination. A lot of people are going to be better than me at games, and I'm fine with that.
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Mar 24, 2024 05:39
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LividLiquid is often livid. Just gotta roll with it. Most the bosses in Dread weren’t terribly painful, but Raven Beak probably took me 10+ tries to beat the first time. Of course, when I did hard mode, I’m pretty sure I beat him on the first try. Once you learn the patterns, it’s easy to never get hit. It’s just a matter of, well, learning the patterns, which is very hard to do for most gamers without dying a bunch.
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Mar 24, 2024 06:15
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Yakuza and Nightmare in fusion were as hard as any boss in Dread.
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Mar 24, 2024 07:24
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cheetah7071 posted:I was mostly thinking of raven beak to be fair. That's the epitome of the kind of boss where having an extra hit or two doesn't matter much because either way you're not winning until you've thoroughly learned it An extra hit or two can matter a lot with tough fights, I find. That little bit of extra safety in execution can either let you learn before the run's over, or make up for a small mistake. It's something that needs to be adjusted carefully, of course. You want finding upgrades to feel rewarding, but you also want victory to feel like it was your skill and not just having a bunch of health kits.
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Mar 24, 2024 07:32
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Augus posted:there is nothing that makes gamers more mad than telling them you thought a boss was easy lol I don't care if I die a lot. I just want it to feel like it was my fault and not the game needing to pad its runtime and pander to people who can only get a sense of accomplishment from dumb poo poo like this, and frankly, I already said that it was a perfectly fine way to do things that just doesn't belong in nearly as many games and genres as it's currently being used. Samus Returns loving sucked, and Dark Souls doesn't need permeate absolutely everything. Teach me everything I need to know to beat the boss on my first go, but make it hard enough that I die a few times because I didn't apply those lessons properly. Don't just not teach me poo poo and then punish me for not knowing it. American public education is not a good model for a boss fight. Hyperbolic rant over. MokBa posted:LividLiquid is often livid. Just gotta roll with it.
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Mar 28, 2024 05:47
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LividLiquid posted:Nothing brings pathetic men — and it's always men — out of the woodwork so they can feel like the most specialist boy by smugly bragging about how everybody who isn't as "good" as them must have done something wrong faster than saying a boss was irritating and not fun. nobody was bragging??? people can just, like, exist while having different opinions about game difficulty than you Augus fucked around with this message at 06:14 on Mar 28, 2024 |
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Mar 28, 2024 06:01
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LividLiquid posted:I just want it to feel like it was my fault and not the game needing to pad its runtime and pander to people who can only get a sense of accomplishment from dumb poo poo like this, and frankly, I already said that it was a perfectly fine way to do things that just doesn't belong in nearly as many games and genres as it's currently being used. For a long time the conversation was pretty toxic around this, particularly with Hollow Knight. But I think the genre is starting to move forward from this. In Axiom Verge 2 many of the boss fights are simply optional (which I'm not sure is the best way to handle it, but it's a way). The recent Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown handles this really well with a range of difficulty levels you can change at any time, and an accessibility menu that allows tuning of specific difficulty modifiers--something that Hollow Knight defenders claim was "impossible" to implement in the context of Hollow Knight. At this point I think it's entirely fair to place blame on games that don't respect the spectrum of user abilities and skills. Even Dark Souls--the alleged root of all this--allows for cheesing of bosses with online help.
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Mar 28, 2024 15:15
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I think it's very distasteful to state that anyone who disagrees with your dumb, angry conclusions must be a man. And this is a thread for discussing the game in question, maybe you could not take a difference of opinions as a personal attack in the gender wars
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Mar 28, 2024 15:23
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The last gamer, is in captivity. The galaxy... is at peace.
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Mar 28, 2024 16:38
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LividLiquid posted:Nothing brings pathetic men — and it's always men — out of the woodwork so they can feel like the most specialist boy by smugly bragging about how everybody who isn't as "good" as them must have done something wrong faster than saying a boss was irritating and not fun. How do you die a lot in a game, feel it is your fault, and also the game isn't 'padding its runtime'? Like it sounds like you want to go "I don't mind dying a lot, as long as I don't die a lot!"
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Mar 28, 2024 16:41
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Bleck posted:The last gamer, is in captivity. The galaxy... is at peace. Finally 😌
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Mar 28, 2024 16:55
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ImpAtom posted:How do you die a lot in a game, feel it is your fault, and also the game isn't 'padding its runtime'? Like it sounds like you want to go "I don't mind dying a lot, as long as I don't die a lot!" Think of the difference between an out-of-the-blue death with very little warning versus a complicated and demanding challenge sequence that is upfront about what is being asked of the player. It's a very subjective distinction and players' tolerance varies but generally most players do have a sense of what they consider a death "earned", think Kaizo Mario vs. Super Meat Boy. Soulslikes fall somewhere in the middle. Some players will call foul at the tricks they pull and some will just shrug and accept it as part of the game. You get a boss's pattern down and then two-thirds of the way through the fight the boss starts throwing in a fakeout and you get clobbered trying to time your dodges based on the tells you had learned previously. Some players think "that's bullshit", some players think "that's ok, the game is designed to take multiple iterations to overcome these challenges", some players think "well, that's why I have a life bar." A lot depends on the assumptions they had going into the game; even Kaizo deaths are considered fair play by players who deliberately play Kaizo levels, where they would be considered very rude in most other games.
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Mar 28, 2024 17:25
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It seems wild to me to go to From games for reference to the modern Metroid games and not anything like Mega Man or Order of Ecclesia, they don't have any of the sensibilities or conventions of those games and From hardly have a monopoly on punishing pattern recognition bosses
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Mar 28, 2024 17:33
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the holy poopacy posted:Think of the difference between an out-of-the-blue death with very little warning versus a complicated and demanding challenge sequence that is upfront about what is being asked of the player. It's a very subjective distinction and players' tolerance varies but generally most players do have a sense of what they consider a death "earned", think Kaizo Mario vs. Super Meat Boy. I mean I can understand Kaizo stuff but Metroid isn't and hasn't ever been that. At its absolute most punishing it still is like easier than most Mega Man games.
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Mar 28, 2024 17:37
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No Dignity posted:It seems wild to me to go to From games for reference to the modern Metroid games and not anything like Mega Man or Order of Ecclesia, they don't have any of the sensibilities or conventions of those games and From hardly have a monopoly on punishing pattern recognition bosses I fell off of Mega Man in the middle of the SNES era but the classic games at least tended to be more pure pattern recognition with fewer changeups or fakeouts. You went into a boss fight and did the same thing over and over until the boss died, except the occasional end boss that turned into a different boss and then you did something different over and over until it died. ImpAtom posted:I mean I can understand Kaizo stuff but Metroid isn't and hasn't ever been that. At its absolute most punishing it still is like easier than most Mega Man games. Sure. Even the new Metroid stuff is still easier than Hollow Knight, which is much meaner about changing up boss patterns and throwing in fakeouts. Raven Beak is hard by Metroid standards because it's a gauntlet of different patterns to learn but none of them specifically punish you for relying on what you learned in earlier phases. I don't necessarily agree with LiquidLivid on the particulars w/r/t to Metroid but I see the general principles. New Metroid bosses are still generally harder than older Metroid bosses, although it's not really an apples to apples comparison because OG Metroid style bosses tended to be more random and their patterns were not designed for "solvability." If you're not big on pattern recognition then SR/Dread are a big step up in challenge from older games where you could easily muddle through on having general vibes for the boss's moves and a bit of facetanking; if you live on pattern bosses then you barely noticed the switch and maybe even found it easier. I remember seeing this debate in reverse when Mega Man 9 came out because its bosses had a lot more randomness than MM bosses traditionally did and hardcore MM fans (the target audience) thought they were brutal by MM standards. I've never been good at cheesing MM boss patterns so I found it very chill and pleasant for an MM game (notwithstanding the handful of Kaizo deaths it threw in, which I mostly just found funny because I didn't have any trouble with the rest of the game.)
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Mar 28, 2024 18:13
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Mega Man 9 is by Inticreates, who also made the MM Zero games, and those absolutely have bosses that you have to hardcore learn and beat with reflexes and attack knowledge.No Dignity posted:It seems wild to me to go to From games for reference to the modern Metroid games and not anything like Mega Man or Order of Ecclesia, they don't have any of the sensibilities or conventions of those games and From hardly have a monopoly on punishing pattern recognition bosses
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Mar 28, 2024 18:39
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ImpAtom posted:I mean I can understand Kaizo stuff but Metroid isn't and hasn't ever been that. At its absolute most punishing it still is like easier than most Mega Man games. Metroid is passive contempt, Mega Man was active malice. Those games were hard.
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Mar 28, 2024 20:22
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Icon Of Sin posted:Metroid is passive contempt, Mega Man was active malice. Those games were hard. Nah. Megaman was one of the nicer NES games. It gave you a lot of options to mitigate its bullshit, taught you about new hazards in safe and controlled environments, and let you try something different when you got sick of one kind of challenge. Megaman 2 even has an easy mode. It's stern, but it's not mean. It wants you to win, and to feel good for winning. Compare to Ninja Gaiden, or Battletoads, and the balance feels very different.
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Mar 29, 2024 08:37
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chiasaur11 posted:Compare to Ninja Gaiden, or Battletoads, and the balance feels very different. Oh, it's easier than the legendary hardest, cruelest, least fair game on the system?
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Mar 29, 2024 13:59
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Mega Man 1 is extremely uneven and fairly bullshit in some aspects (as in, stuff simply doesn't work). MM2 is a huge improvement with some super rough spots that you can fortunately mitigate (Heat Man blocks, fly over; Quick Man lasers, Timestopper) and some that you can't (Buebeam trap). MM3 is quite fair overall but not too easy. MM4 is the first I'd call very polished, it doesn't have any super tough standout spots of difficulty imo. 5 is the easiest despite the bad weapons, just a very smooth experience. And 6 is a bit half-baked but very similar difficulty-wise. I think Metroid 1 if we want to talk about an NES game is easier to play in the moment but clunkier than even MM1 with the need to farm up after deaths. Hard to compare really. Super Metroid is contemporary to the later MMs and has similarly tough platforming, easier bosses (not Phantoon maybe?) and is much harder to navigate obviously. Overall, apples and oranges. I only typed this up because I'm a Mega Man nerd lol EDIT: actually for a better comparison, Castlevania 1 and especially 3 are definitely harder than any Mega Man game in my books. That fixed jump alone...
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Mar 29, 2024 14:12
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The stereotypical 8-bit MM boss is fast but predictable, often to the point of being exploitable. If you don't learn their patterns trying to fight them on pure reflexes is usually pretty punishing. But boss weaknesses are a clever way to keep the game accessible for players who struggle to master boss patterns, because there will always be a couple easier bosses and then you can just take their weapons and use the boss weakness order as a crutch to get through the rest without actually having to get good at them. With the boss order in your pocket all you really had to worry about was the occasional rough platforming bit. They're definitely more demanding than the contemporary Metroid games but other than maybe MM1 they were pretty accessible; I would even say most of them are more accessible than the original Metroid just because it's so obtuse even if it's not particularly challenging.
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Mar 29, 2024 17:41
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Castlevania in particular has an approach to difficulty that I think was relatively common in NES games and not so popular now. I don't want to call it 'outdated' because I love it and it makes me feel sad that games like it aren't being made anymore, but it's definitely a completely different paradigm The idea in Castlevania is that each room is more of a puzzle than a reflexes challenge. Everything you do is kind of chunky and inflexible. Your whip has a noticeable windup. Your jump completely locks you in, with no air control. Every attack you make, whether the whip or a subweapon, has a well-defined attack arc and is completely useless against anything approaching from a different direction--and you can't switch your subweapon on the fly. So the intent--or, at least, what I assume the intent is, is that you hit a new room, take a bunch of damage or die (because your tools are not well-suited for on-the-fly problem solving), and then ask yourself "what could I have done differently?" Should you jump or stay on the ground? Move towards the enemies, or wait for them to come to you? Should you pick up the axe in that candle, or is the cross you already have more useful here? And then on your next attempt, you try it out. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. Crucially, almost nothing in the game is hard once you have a good plan. The difficulty isn't in execution, it's in coming up with the plan in the first place. This can feel brutally hard or unfair because, well, you're expected to take damage or die as you're learning the stage. That's the game communicating to you that you haven't yet found a solution to the room. But I think the reputation they get as unfair mostly comes from thinking about their difficulty in terms other than what the game was trying to be. It's really really hard to just sight-read your way through a room, but the game is about finding a way to make it easy on your second or third or fourth attempt.
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Mar 29, 2024 18:03
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EDIT: ^^^^ this is a good analysis and also a key way to think about these older games - Mega Man as well, it has the same distinct rooms as puzzles, it's just more flexible than CV because of all the weapons, movement items, and a better jump so you can often brute-force challenges without even realizing you did. vvvv original post It's true that most MM bosses become paper tigers once you figure out their very rigid pattern, many can be very demanding before you do though. The weaknesses as easy mode is definitely a brilliant move, but without that I think the core design idea is actually well comparable to modern 2D boss game design. Every attack has a specific way of dodging and/or countering it, and until you figure that out, you'll get hit a few times. I agree that ideally the boss damage should be scaled so if you are quick on the uptake, you can beat it on your first try, but in practice it's impossible to predict if a player will get it in time to apply the lessons or not. Here's of course where modern game design has a huge advantage: an infinite checkpoint right before the boss vs. baseline 2 extra tries at best if you made it through the level unscathed, ignoring extra lives you can find along the way of course. Simply Simon fucked around with this message at 18:07 on Mar 29, 2024 |
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Mar 29, 2024 18:04
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cheetah7071 posted:Castlevania in particular has an approach to difficulty that I think was relatively common in NES games and not so popular now. I don't want to call it 'outdated' because I love it and it makes me feel sad that games like it aren't being made anymore, but it's definitely a completely different paradigm In some ways games like Celeste are the inheritor of this design philosophy. So many great screens in Celeste are challenging because you have to digest the layout and turn it into a game plan, not because of narrow frame windows for actions.
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Mar 29, 2024 18:18
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DoctorWhat posted:In some ways games like Celeste are the inheritor of this design philosophy. So many great screens in Celeste are challenging because you have to digest the layout and turn it into a game plan, not because of narrow frame windows for actions. The first few Castlevanias probably would not have the reputation they have if they gave you unlimited checkpoints at each room.
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Mar 29, 2024 18:50
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True, but a Castlevania-styled chunky platformer that's really difficult but each room is a checkpoint like Celeste could be really good.
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Mar 29, 2024 19:19
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I think there's some merit in allowing you to limp through a room at low health and see what's past it, but not 'lock in' your scuffed victory. Though, there's decent overlap between the size of the largest celeste rooms and the size of a castlevania checkpoint. NES hardware restrictions meant the rooms had to be fairly small, and there's a real psychological difference being sent back two rooms, compared to being sent back to the beginning of a single, larger room e: I'm now picturing a game where every room is a checkpoint, but only if you reach it at full health. You can push forward and practice as much as you want, but it doesn't 'lock in' until you have it down well enough to not take damage. cheetah7071 fucked around with this message at 19:25 on Mar 29, 2024 |
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Mar 29, 2024 19:23
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With Metroid I feel like the ability to go back and get more upgrades should be a balancing mechanism to help deal with difficult bosses, but I think Dread was calibrated wrong for that. Even at 100% Raven's Beak was a real slog. Dark Souls at its core is just a very challenging game, but there's just enough suckerpunches out of nowhere scattered around to make new players expect it's just going to be bullshit while people who already played through it will have forgotten the nonsense. Hollow Knight I feel is probably more difficult overall but there's less sucker punches to distract you. chiasaur11 posted:Nah. Megaman was one of the nicer NES games. It gave you a lot of options to mitigate its bullshit, taught you about new hazards in safe and controlled environments, and let you try something different when you got sick of one kind of challenge. Megaman 2 even has an easy mode. Being a nicer NES game is kinda damning with faint praise. Most NES games were filled with bullshit. SlothfulCobra fucked around with this message at 21:08 on Mar 29, 2024 |
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Mar 29, 2024 20:59
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cheetah7071 posted:I think there's some merit in allowing you to limp through a room at low health and see what's past it, but not 'lock in' your scuffed victory. Though, there's decent overlap between the size of the largest celeste rooms and the size of a castlevania checkpoint. NES hardware restrictions meant the rooms had to be fairly small, and there's a real psychological difference being sent back two rooms, compared to being sent back to the beginning of a single, larger room I would just assume it would have a much smaller health bar and refill health on death like normal. I do like the concept of a tough platformer with a big healthbar that gives you extra checkpoints for perfecting segments though!
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Mar 29, 2024 21:13
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Older Metroids games I've played always felt like they were based around exploring, gradually powering up, and eventually tackling the bosses, and then having a race against the clock at the very end. Once you've cleared the game, the replay value was in going back and seeing if you could do it faster, or with fewer upgrades. Speed running the game was an optional challenge available after completing it. Metroid Dread, by comparison, feels like it's designed from the ground up to be about speed running it, and it's going to force you to learn how to speed run it whether you want to or not. Didn't execute this boss fight or E.M.M.I. section perfectly on your first try? gently caress you, go back to the check point and try again until you get it right. No battles of attrition allowed, either you execute it correctly or you don't progress. And that really sucks if you're not into that kind of game play experience.
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Mar 29, 2024 21:39
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W.T. Fits posted:Older Metroids games I've played always felt like they were based around exploring, gradually powering up, and eventually tackling the bosses, and then having a race against the clock at the very end. Once you've cleared the game, the replay value was in going back and seeing if you could do it faster, or with fewer upgrades. Speed running the game was an optional challenge available after completing it. I thought the EMMI sections were puzzles: no more, no less. There is a "right" way to do them and you just have to figure them out. Some of the early complaints were "EMMI sections have no weight to them because if you die, you just respawn outside the EMMI zone with no repercussions." I think it was obvious that you wouldn't figure it out on the first try and if you had to go six rooms back to give it another shot, people would have bounced really hard off it. If I had to improve on those sections, I would have made the ways of dealing with the later EMMIs more about trapping them in environmental hazards then constantly finding a Mother Brain to kill and go through the same song and dance. Like, doing the hyperbeam thing is fine a few times but after that, it's all about outsmarting them. Drop them in acid or lava, crush them under a rock, cause a bigger enemy to engage them, etc.
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Mar 30, 2024 02:59
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I think there's a fundamental difference between Dread and Souls bosses that didn't come up. Souls games don't expect mechanical excellence. Especially the earlier ones. The games are slow. You have loads of time to react and act. Its a big part of the reason 'newbie plays dark souls' videos are fun. Cause the games are weirdly accessible in that way. The challenge in Souls games is understanding what you can and should do. Actually doing it tends to be very easy til you reach optional post game poo poo. Souls bosses also tend to be rocket tag affairs rather than long punishing tests like in Dread or Hollow Knight. Like I just find calling Dread's bosses soulslike kinda weird. The difficulty Dread pursues is very different.
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Mar 30, 2024 19:37
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Samus Returns update: oh so that's why there's a bunch of upgrades to collect after killing the Metroid Queen. Sure would have liked a few of those Super Missile tanks for that fight though.
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Apr 5, 2024 04:17
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C-Euro posted:Samus Returns update: oh so that's why there's a bunch of upgrades to collect after killing the Metroid Queen. Sure would have liked a few of those Super Missile tanks for that fight though. Good lord they really hosed up the tone of Metroid 2. You know what this mysterious, quiet sequence with a baby metroid needs? Ridley to show up, get his rear end absolutely demolished by endgame Samus, then kick Samus' rear end in a cutscene so they can do the "SAMUS MUST BE SAVED!" shoehorned drama poo poo and oh my god gently caress this, it's terrible.
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Apr 5, 2024 06:08
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