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12 hours and 100%. Thoughts. Thoughts. Okay. The game is very, very, okay. A lot of aspects of it are quite good! But it also has a lot of things holding it back. Overall it loves to swing back and forth between deftness and awkwardness. I am definitely very happy to have played it (and to have seen a new Metroid title here in Anno Domini Twenty Twenty One). In many places the game shines but it lacks the overall slickness of the Prime games and honestly makes me almost as curious as I am hype about how Prime 4 will turn out. But let's not compare Dread to an imagined Prime 4. The moment-to-moment basic movement actions in Dread feel very good. Samus is snappy and responsive, breezy yet purposeful, and exactly fast enough to make trekking from one end of a map to the other not feel like a chore even when it perhaps is. The beam and missiles are very satisfying to spam and the platforming is on point. This makes it all the more tragic that the control scheme is liquid rear end. I rate it a solid three Metal Gear Solid 3 Snake Eaters out of five. Even being generous and offering to take the game completely at its word, and even disregarding Nintendo's typical sneering dismissal of literally any worthwhile customisation or god forbid accessibility (for which they should never stop being shamed), the control scheme is wrong. It uses the wrong buttons, for stuff. It doesn't make the game unplayable, it just makes it awkward and introduces a lot of failure points. From the outset it's a little ridiculous to hold two triggers and a stick and tap a face button to fire free-aimed missiles, and that's at a standstill - trying to chain grapple swings is madness. A lot of little ambiguities like sliding quickly and standing back up versus activating morph ball can ruin your day in a boss fight. I think the shinespark situation is bad. Maybe I would have thought differently if I had grown up speedrunning Super Metroid but I just can't make any sense of it. It's an extremely cool and situationally powerful tech with heaps of meaning to players and ideal to build puzzles around, and despite the rest of this paragraph I do think the puzzles built around it were pretty great. But it also feels like a complete afterthought in that it never seems to come up or be tutorialised during the main game ever, and then suddenly it becomes necessary to do some absurd mastery run to get a handful of upgrades later and each one hinges on some arcane application of it which is also never taught to you. Some are completely out of left field, like walljumping maintaining your speed boost, but I gather many of these - like how you can shinespark out of morph ball, or into a slope - are consistent with previous implementations of the tech. This is worse, because that means they are hinging the puzzle experience on knowledge from outside the game. The only pickup in the game I looked up was for, uh, I forget which region it was in but it's a long sequence where you do a lot of short dashes, get the spark, and drop down shafts to spark into slopes. I had no idea this would set you speed boosting again. It took me a couple watches of the video I found to even figure out what the hell the player was actually doing. And this is just the theory - in practice, it's a catastrophe of competing inputs, mostly to do with accidentally going into a spin jump. The speed boost itself is pretty awkward too, seeming to have no real consistency between things that cancel it and things that don't. (One room-elephant-like detail common to both the complaints I've just made is that both - aiming controls and speed-boost puzzles - are matters that Shadow Complex kinda nonchalantly just completely one-ups this whole series in. In particular I adore Shadow Complex's speed boost and its wallhugging runs, especially how flipping between walls or from floor to ceiling flows so naturally and requires so little learning to get your head around even when the implications of what you might be able to do with the tech can be mind-bending.) The world design in general is excellent and it hits all the incredible notes of weaving in and out and through a bunch of different areas and recontextualising entire environments around your new toys that you'd ever dream of. In particular, the ways in which the world changes during the plot are cool, but also kind of a double-edged sword, because it's also used to really irritatingly railroad you. I gather this is a reversal of Fusion's regression in this manner, which I guess is welcome, but it's fairly obnoxious how often the game pulls these cute tricks to completely kill any possibility of you backtracking. Maybe it's just me but for me the quintessential Metroid experience is always getting a cool new power and suddenly having like four or five places I saw earlier just float to the front of my mind as the available actions expand. Dread does this too, except more often than not it then immediately kneecaps that wondrous experience by slamming a door shut behind you. The bosses are really good! I don't have a backhander for this one. They're good bosses. I guess it's a little weird that for all that Samus' power seems to be exponentially increasing and you finishing the game with maybe 16x the HP you start with it never seems like you ever get more defensive, like maybe I'd tentatively say that the 100 point E-tank paradigm serves more nostalgia purposes than gameplay ones, but this is barely a complaint because the game on the whole does a good job of organically integrating the exploration and powerup gathering into the general experience of plot-centric player power growth. The worst I can say about bosses is the same comment about overtuning everyone seems to make. But no, the bosses are great! They're frantic, and short, and hit as hard as it feels like they should be able to hit, and eminently retryable without making you go through minutes of motions every time, and that combination makes how difficult they are into more of an asset than a liability. As an action game, it honestly sings. The only real complaint I have is that I think they should've had health bars, because frequently it doesn't really feel like you're progressing even when you are, and a lot of people have no idea the one experiment guy heals so much, and I gather some of them had invincible phases I never knew about? And I think there's a little inconsistency about what's counterable. The EMMI are an intriguing notion. They both did and did not work out. They're certainly a shakeup to the formula. I like the idea of switching from an outright action game to a tense stealth one using the same concepts, and often I think it worked, although I think the systems were a little underbaked and after a while the EMMI started seeming a little rote and tedious. I would have liked to see a greater emphasis on their individual abilities and interplay between the action and stealth in their encounters. There's one that's notable for being able to lock on for chase mode through walls, and that one was the one that really drove home how samey they all were, because as it turns out it's merely insistent on you taking the approach that the other EMMI all implied you should take; discarding stealth and just running through. I really liked the concept of the Omega Beam and having to game things to line up the headshot - always a sucker for a good execution of "the level is the real boss" - but even these seemed to me to always resolve down to a very tightly designed room with nowhere else to go and not much potential for a real puzzle. I think they tried to have and eat their cake with the counter thing; I think it's an odd mechanic that's there so they can say "it's not necessarily a one-hit kill!" but the design doesn't accommodate these things not being an existential threat. I think they should've stuck to their convictions and made it a straight KO with a very short animation, and get you right back on the retry - like the bosses. The powerups are pretty good. The classics are present and correct and there's some oddballs to shake things up like the Cross Bomb, which for how weird it is I kinda love for adding a little dynamism to the morph ball loadout. On the whole they did a pretty good job of having each powerup - even the incremental ones - feel like a pretty big escalation of your capabilities, and many of them have that "this could really open things up!" vibe to them, if not for how the game just keeps closing doors behind you! The graphical style of the game is great - I get the sense Nintendo leaned on the team to make it a good fit for the OLED Switch, so there's a lot of bright lights in dark rooms (but Hollow Knight remains the undisputed champion of OLED showcases), I love the suit designs, especially, the basic power suit. It seems to perform pretty decently too, but what's with the cutscenes invariably seeming to tank the framerate? I've heard there's a 30fps cap, but this seems way beyond that. Overall the game looks good, but I don't think it really looks distinctive after all, I don't think there are any standout environments, certainly nothing that's gonna stick with me. A little more on this in the next paragraph. The plot is, in retrospect, honestly pretty good. It's one of those humble little things that doesn't harbor any great aspirations to be art but they clearly all sat down at the very outset, decided what The Twist was going to be, and wrote the whole game around it. I can always respect a good twist hidden right under my nose, and I can certainly respect any time a game manages to pull the particular fakeout where it seems like it's badly written but actually it's just telegraphing super hard. Also, the environments we're exploring are a basically functioning Chozo settlement, with inhabitants a lot more recently deceased than usual and plenty of stages set for dramatic surprises. Such character as it has is largely a function of the Chozo who died out in favour of Raven Beak's followers, their facilities of peace crumbling from disuse as they prepare for doubtless glorious war. It seems like a tiny bit of a stretch to say that the environments seeming a little "generic Metroid" (such as it is) is actually a part of the plot in which Raven Beak is setting all this up to basically engineer a character growth beat for Samus but I could buy it, maybe. So, yeah, all the time you think Adam is being an insistent downer, it's actually Raven Beak, because Adam hasn't spoken to us since the first and only time in the game he addresses us as "lady" bit, and the whole thing is just a single, small, well executed, twist, and on some level literally the entire game is telegraphing it. Thematically, I also like Dread as a coda to Fusion's self-reflection about what Samus has come to represent both as an in-universe figure and a player character, and as an occasion to implicitly ask if anyone in this galaxy, even the Chozo, is not just going to try and use her at this point, and if not, what will she do with all the identities she has subsumed? She's now the maybe-not-quite-last Chozo as well as the last Metroid and the last X (I think? Is that what we're to take of the very final scene?), and she's been burned by multiple families over power. There were hints that this would "end" the story as it stands now, and Samus sure does have cause to be thinking "what now?" as she explodes yet another planet and sails off. And always, always, there is the subtext of Metroid, the series, a being with its own power of a sort, brought back from the dead by Nintendo, to wield that power for its own ends, and the dr-- the worry that the game's own ends may not survive intact the weight of their intentions for it, or that it might struggle to contain the legacy it's come to represent as it charts a new course into the future.
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Oct 13, 2021 03:54
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SettingSun posted:In the theoretical sequel to this game, I fully expect a followup to the melee counter that command grabs the enemy with Samus' crab claw and sucks out all their energy. I feel like there's a very respectable precedent for a good melee action game where a flawlessly executed counter sets you up to OHKO your opponent and immediately recover all your energy.
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Oct 13, 2021 16:07
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Araxxor posted:Heck if you want the "Samus is a loving dumbass" angle, there's the Japanese version of the Varia Suit segment in Other M which has you covered on that front. Wait, was that even worse originally? Because the localised one was pretty loving dumb. (I've probably forgotten tons of stuff about Other M like this)
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Nov 30, 2021 14:12
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Absolutely baffled at this missile tank in Elun.  It's like, you need power bombs to get the missile tank, but also there's a power bomb tank just sitting below this that you can roll up and get on your first trip through. In fact, this missile tank is the only pickup you can't get on the first trip through. It's exactly backwards! They should've committed to the bit properly, put the power bomb tanks in more secure spots, and let you have early power bombs if you manage to break into one. Cowards.
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Dec 1, 2021 21:43
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Most of the time, what even counts as a "reboot" of development vs simply going through a lot of concepts in pre-production or even regular production, is a little academic anyway. It's like losing all your Dark Souls because you died before reaching your bloodstain; a number went down but you retain the true experience; you can't really undo pre-production. One meaningful way to define it is as going back from production to pre-production, although sometimes a game can still go through massive changes throughout production. Or maybe you can reboot pre-production of an unchanged concept in a changed context (I understand this is what happened to Metroid Dread; the idea has been there from the start but tech specs didn't permit what they wanted). The big deal with Prime 4 is that it completely changed developers, which is fairly significant, although we don't and probably never will know exactly how much work the original team got done and what it looked like beyond being apparently unsatisfactory. We know even less about Prime 4 than we do about FFVII Remake, whose original development at least produced a trailer we can analyse and compare to the latter team's work. (I also don't think it's worth reading into them hiring; sometimes people leave and need to be replaced when you run a project for literally years.) Basically we have no idea if they were struggling to think of what to even try to make, or having trouble actually making it. Frankly I think they were wrong to announce the game at all and possibly only did because they needed a megaton at the time. Every time they acknowledge it it's like they're trying to play down the hype they managed to spark just showing a 4 on a background with some music. I mean, hell, even the stunning reveal of Metroid loving Dread was framed as a consolation for still not having any news about Prime 4, and that's a little sad. When they finally do show it, it's going to be consumed by people who have long been waiting for it, as opposed to being a complete holy poo poo drop that will get hyperbolic writeups in all the games journalisms. And, I mean, this will be a relatively minor problem, but it's still a shame.
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Feb 10, 2022 15:47
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Who actually did the remaster? Was it Retro themselves? One of the known remake/remaster studios? Some internal Nintendo team?
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Feb 9, 2023 12:07
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Barry Convex posted:tbh it just depends on how you define remake vs remaster. I lean in the direction of only using "remake" when there are significant changes to the gameplay/content, but otoh, "remaster" tends to refer to releases that are just HD up-ports with only minimal changes beyond upping the resolution, so it would be nice if there were a term to use for releases like Prime Remastered and Demon's Souls PS5 that fall in between the two (significant improvements to the graphics but minimal changes to the gameplay). there isn't, so the semantic argument will continue. oh well! The difference is kinda technical and kinda academic and not everybody cares enough to really want to be precise and the line blurs a lot in most cases anywhere but there is a line. Remastering isn't really technically actually a thing you do in video games but the term has been borrowed from other media and it works neatly as a metaphor. In music, remastering (usually) refers to producing a new digital master from the original analog master tape (note that we're already kinda into the weeds here because the actual master master isn't changing at all but an intermediary step which is a master relative to later steps is, but this is a typical usage). The very original source doesn't change but the thing that is later used to make all the copies that actually get sold is remade. With video games the analogy basically works because in a remastered game all the source assets are unchanged but are compiled/rendered/whatever in an updated way, usually with regard to technical details like running at a sharper resolution or higher frame rate. Or maybe you use a new technique for calculating lighting but all the information about light sources in each scene is unchanged, which will produce a different looking scene from the same source material. To use the upcoming Ghost Trick port as an example, Capcom hasn't changed the 3D models they used to make the DS version, but they have re-rotoscoped them in HD and 60fps, producing updated sprites that are night and day from the original game's. They have, of course, also actually changed a few things, like UI elements, which is one part of why the remake/remaster line is blurry. Technically, every port to a new platform is a remaster... if it's done natively and not just made by translating the compiled code to run on a different platform (video games are weird). A remake happens when you literally recreate the source from scratch. Of course, philosophically speaking, you could argue there's a deeper source that's a concept or idea or memory or what the gently caress ever, and that's just one more reason the language doesn't ever fully work and everything is relative but hey work with me here. The thing is, you can do substantive changes to some parts of the source while not changing others at all. The Metroid Prime "remaster" does complete model overhauls on almost everything, but reuses the animation scripting from the original game (I think it is 100% unchanged though I'm interested if there are any deviations). Demon's Souls PS5 and Link's Awakening for Switch are other pretty good examples of complete ground-up visual overhauls that are layered exactly onto other unchanged frameworks. So Metroid Prime Remastered is, in my estimation, definitely a remake using this distinction, exactly by virtue of how much stuff has actually been redesigned from scratch. A remake needn't (but can) change up the playable elements of the game. Conversely, of course, while doing a remaster, you could add to the source, because code be like that. So, I'd class the WiiU port of Wind Waker as a remaster, because most of the source that was already made is unchanged, even though some new source was added, and the overall look and feel is very different but that's due to rendering more than it is changing what stuff was being rendered. See what I mean? The concepts are a mess when you apply them practically but remaking and remastering are definitely extremely specific things. (The tidiest example of all of this is The Last Of Us Remastered vs The Last Of Us Part 1. The worst example is Final Fantasy VII Remake.)
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Feb 9, 2023 22:35
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I forgot that Phazon Elite is a different enemy from Elite Pirate, press F for my log book but otherwise game complete 100% in 12:12. Remaster good. E: Also I found all the items on my own except for two in Magmoor. One was the one loving missile tank in the pillar in Triclops Pit which loving sucks because no point in the game brings you close enough to hear the sound in there, or suggests to use the X-Ray Visor in that room, and the pillar isn't even scannable. I think that's like the most missable tank in the game, possibly excepting the one in Chozo Ruins in some random corridor (Training Hall Access) that's just hidden behind a tree that you can't walk through like other similar screening terrain but have to ball through instead, and players will hear the sound, but probably conclude that it's coming from the energy tank in the next room, and when they get that their hypothesis will be confirmed when the sound cuts out, because the sound doesn't actually go through rooms. The other item I missed was the power bomb tank in the one Shrine where you get, I think, the first possible Artifact, in its own purpose-built room, except there's a grate in there you have to remember for most of the length of the game is there and come back to even though nothing marks that room out. It kinda sucks that Prime 1 leans a lot on you having to just remember where random bendezium objects were. gently caress that. Bendezium nuts in y- Fedule fucked around with this message at 11:42 on Feb 14, 2023 |
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Feb 14, 2023 11:35
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What gets me is how a bunch of the artifact clues in the Chozo's long-shot legacy temple are all: "We have hidden the artifact in a tower built by invaders who will arrive after we have died out"
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Feb 14, 2023 15:53
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Miyamoto had them working 80 hour crunch for months. They were not exactly going to have their lore bible in order. That's not a team that's going to bother to point out "wait how did Metroid Prime get in and out of the crater if the barrier is so impermeable", whether there's a possible good answer or not. Not that they got it in order after either but that's a whole other weirdness. It's still kinda a tall order to get your lore together after shipping. Part of me is sad they didn't seize the opportunity with Remaster to get everything straight once and literally for all, but maybe the janky lore is part of the charm now. At least we still have Hunter Metroid ds present and correct. I wonder if someone isn't already thinking about slyly updating the Dread shoutout in a notional Corruption remaster...
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Feb 14, 2023 20:27
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At the very least they should have put something in the sunken frigate really early on that gates on the Gravity Suit. It's hosed up they let you go so far in before blocking you and then you have to climb the whole way back out, without the Gravity Suit. Absolutely psychotic game design.
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Feb 15, 2023 16:55
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I scraped through that fight, on the one hand first try, but on the other hand with 30 health remaining down from the literal max possible. 80% of that health came from the dodge just not working when those lunges came out. Does the wavebuster cheese still work? I didn't think to try it.
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Feb 16, 2023 00:35
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All the Prime games had it. In 1+2 it's only visible briefly when a bright flash ignites close to the player. The lighting engine probably plays into it although it's not like they're using ray tracing to do it or anything, so it's possible that engine changes in Remaster make it more or less visible in equivalent places. In Corruption, you additionally could also always see Samus' face reflected when using the Scan Visor, because they really really really wanted you to notice how Samus' face was changing over the course of the game and this was an era when the done thing was very much not to trust the player to pick up on anything but the least subtle details.
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Feb 16, 2023 13:53
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Natural 20 posted:245/250 missiles I'm gonna take a wild guess and say, it's the X-Ray visor one in Triclops Pit in Magmoor.
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Feb 19, 2023 03:41
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There should also just generally be huge interest in studying the things; even the Space Pirates have noted that their energy draining bullshit seems to contravene a lot of accepted science and neither the mechanism by which they drain nor the nature of the energy itself have been identified. It should be of equal interest to both mad science and sane science.
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Feb 21, 2023 18:04
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Missable logs and things you'll also miss for having missed those logs is one of those recurring mechanics that's, like there are two kinds of gamer; the ones that resolutely do not care about filling out the log book and are capable of pushing past the compulsion to make number go up and meter get filled, and the ones that will play through the whole game, enjoy themselves, then realise they've missed something, and then feel very bad about the game they just enjoyed playing through. Or sometimes they're the ones that do manage to tag everything but are tense the whole time right up until that 100% notif pops, and it's like you can breathe again. And it's just, why in the ever loving gently caress would you continue to design games this way? What you have created is a misery generator. There is nobody who is grateful for the log book working this way. A game mechanic that players are expected to be able to ignore is a mechanic that should not be in the game.
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Feb 23, 2023 19:01
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Item Getter posted:Just thought I'd drop in to say that playing this game for the first time last week, I had a good chuckle when I got to the Elite Pirates and every boss after that and finally understood why you said Big Shot was "Guest designed by Retro Studios" in your Salmon Run guide. Haha, yuuuup. It's one of those things you just can't unsee. I'm glad people still remember that guide; maybe I should update it again. Retro and shockwaves is a meme that just kind of stuck with me, and now I look for similar things in other games (consider: Team Cherry and lasers/spikes/pillars coming out of the ground at even intervals).
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Feb 24, 2023 09:48
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There is an even worse corollary: some people (like me) really, really like picking apart and analysing video games and examining in detail, where they are or are not enjoyable to someone's determination, why and how they are that way, by what means they are rendered that way, to what extent they were intended to be that way, and what the way they are says about video games. I love nothing more than to scrutinise the failure points of game design, where the rubber met the road, so to speak, and didn't quite hold, where factors the developers thought they had accounted for didn't measure up to the enormity of real life context, and to what extent the developer is or isn't to blame for it all. Take this Metroid map thing. A thing I actually don't know but I imagine someone here can tell me is whether or to what extent the lack of a map in Metroid 1 was a deliberate design choice from the outset (ie, "we want the player to be lost most of the time") or a compromise of some kind ("we think there should be a map, but [probably for technical reasons] we can't have one, so instead we'll lean into not having one"), or did it simply not occur to the designers to have one at all?. We would be hard pressed to call Metroid a failure overall given, y'know, it has half a genre named after it now, and yet it is a fact that quite a lot of people do not like that it does not have a map, and express this when they play it, and often consult external maps while playing it. Metroid 2, released on a technically even less capable system, is quite obviously designed around the lack of a consultable map. Then, every Metroid from Super onwards has had a map, including Metroid 2 when it was remade (did Zero Mission? I'm not familiar with Zero Mission). So is the lack of a map in Metroid a failure? If it was it has certainly been learned from. A thing I've come to believe is that games should have answers of some kind for any possible player frustration. I say answer and not solution because sometimes the answer is "no, gently caress you, git gud" and sometimes it's "this game just isn't for you". Maybe those answers in a wider context may be bad but if the developer intends for you to be stumbling around lost and you are stumbling around lost and you think there should be a map then that's a case of that kind of answer. But if the developer doesn't intend that, then they have no answer, and that's a failure. I had my whole post earlier (e: my bad, that post was actually in the Metroidvania Megathread, not this thread) about how I don't like the map in Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, and I think it's this kind of failure; I have the impression that the developers think it helps players with various tasks that I don't think it actually helps very much with. It has features that they seem to believe there is a widespread demand for because they believe it significantly eases common metroidvania frustrations, and it has consistently been my finding that it does not ease those frustrations at all, the developers have misunderstood what they even are, even as they boast that they have solved them. Meanwhile over in a different game, Hollow Knight has quite an oddball of a map system which is ultimately reactive and detailed and contains quite a lot of information but delays the addition of that information from the usual instantaneousness upon the player learning it until they next reach a checkpoint. This creates somewhat of a frustrating experience in which you are often lost and directionless when exploring new areas until you've made a pit stop, which some people don't like, but this is exactly the intended experience. This system also has some flaws; you can't record your own map of a new area until you've purchased a partial one from an NPC you have to find in that area, which is somewhat incongruous with the idea of being able to record your own map at all and means you're in for a lot of frustration until you find the guy. But the game anticipates this frustration and has somewhat of an answer for it; through level design and some environmental cues, you'll generally always be channelled towards him, there's only one area where he's hard to find (IMO anyway) and I think that's deliberate. Hollow Knight also generally has a pattern of passively recording map information in secret and revealing it to you later; a lot of features that aren't marked on the map by default actually just need you to buy upgrades for your map, but when you buy those upgrades, the features are added to your map instantly. All in all the play experience is exactly as intended, and you can hold (convincingly, perhaps) that they should instead have intended something different but it's much harder to hold that the system in the game is a failure. Fedule fucked around with this message at 02:03 on Feb 12, 2024 |
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Feb 12, 2024 01:59
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Did you know that game design is really hard?
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Feb 12, 2024 23:47
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This whole thing is orbiting the inevitability of an invocation of Dark Souls so let's get it the gently caress out of the way. Okay so you know the Souls Difficulty Discourse. On and on it rages, and ever it will, because there is an incredibly specific reason why FromSoft's Souls lineage of video games will never have a selectable Easy Mode; because these games are absolutely dedicated to situating every possible player in One World, which is Always The Same World For Everyone, and only differs on account of the consequences of things they do while in that world. There are limits to how much of that you can unabstract but FromSoft will always push them, and if Hidetaka Miyazaki ever figures out a narrative justification for there to be an NPC who controls your Vsync he'll loving do it. The way you make and reason about choices remains very Video Gamey, and you are still thinking about numbers a good amount of the time, but it is important to them that that situation takes place, that everything you do is just the consequences of your decisions by way of the game systems. This is why you always have to go to A Specific Guy to level up, they keep that idea as consistent as they can even as they strain to find ways to have you continue to be able to level up even when that character isn't present, and whenever they think of a way to weave the situated game mechanics into the world design they take it, even if it's just a little thing (see: there are no Boss Retry Stakes in the Academy in Elden Ring for lore reasons, which of course has a gameplay implication, but to keep the actual game pacing consistent they design around that). So difficulty in Souls is always, even when very predictable and controllable, still the result of an organic collision of multiple ongoing systems that you can poke and prod in increasingly heavy ways as you progress. The magnitude of available approaches is of course at its peak in Elden Ring, but even in Literal Dark Souls, I think in all those games except Sekiro, while there is never an Easy Mode there are a bunch of things you can do that make individual or multiple parts of the game easier. Or harder. If you're into it, you can make these games far more difficult than they have to be. It is only and always up to you how many of those buttons you press. Now. This approach has limits to how accessible it can actually make these games, and it is not incorrect to note that Souls remains quite inaccessible to large populations for reasons that are not, shall we say, skill issues. No amount of nifty narrative justification can in the real world render it any less of a Bad Thing that a lot of people who really want to play Souls games can't. This is why we are seeing a small but noticeable number of Souls-likes start to introduce these Features Fromsoft Won't, because those games are doing what good creatives do and taking things they like and are inspired by from Souls and leaving behind things they don't like. It's also why we have the weird phenomenon of games that absolutely are not Souls-likes but make a huge mechanical show of pretending to be in order to then add "also it's more forgiving and has difficulty modes" (like Jedi: Fallen Order), to try and capture some of that Can't Souls market. All of this to underscore: there is an external artistic pressure specifically on FromSoft's flagship lineage that they would have to compromise on in order to implement this commonly requested feature into their games. Judge however you like, but this is why they will not do it. Okay, so that's all fascinating, but we're arguing about the Compass in Hollow Knight. To be honest, I don't like it overall. I see the theory, the thing where you can take it off for boss fights for an extra slot to play with. The same theory animates other systems in other games; one direct and distant pull I can invoke is Ghost of Tsushima which gives you outfits, most of which are for fighting, of which there's a lot, but one is specifically for exploration. It's a completely different system to Hollow Knight's Compass but also it's identical; they've situated some game functionality into a practical choice in their world - giant clanky armour or light travelling cloak? - and refused to let you be in both modes at the same time, making adaptability come at the cost of a little tedium. Anecdotally I've only ever known people (myself included) to attempt to roll with the cape at all times, only donning armour when a base turns out to be Actually Difficult and you die a lot, or something. Actually, this is also what I did in Hollow Knight most of the time; that Compass was permanently attached, I just refused to spare the engagement it would take to remove it in preparation for fights, unless I got really stuck or I was doing a superboss or the boss rushes. There are two problems with this theory. One is that tedium is pretty much always bad. It does not quite encroach on The Golden Rule Of Game Design ("don't waste the player's time") but tedium tends to make you feel like your time is being wasted even when it isn't, it's the same reason having loading screens is unpreferable even when they're short, because it just makes people feel bad. Of course, it doesn't make everyone feel bad, but that's the bargain when you make tedium part of your game; you are risking people getting sick of it. A lot of people will come to the conclusion that it doesn't actually matter that you can still see your position on the map during a boss fight. The second is that barely anything else in Hollow Knight presumes to be made a choice in this way. There are no other navigation aids that come at the cost of combat utility, every other upgrade, including ones that you'd think would be way more of a burden on a bug than a compass - like the lantern - just slot additively into your inventory and remain there. I almost think people would actually complain less about the compass if more things needed to be equipped at the cost of other things. It's incongruous, it's less about "why is it like this" and more about "why is this one thing a charm"? Hollow Knight actually does this a lot, although usually more successfully. As noted by others, it brings back the Corpse Run concept from Souls and situates that process in the narrative as a Thing that's happening for a Reason. It has more of a need for this thing to be a narrative element than it does for it to be a thing the player actually has to be doing. So there's this tension; this mechanic is in the game, but the developers are very aware that it's unpopular and they don't really want players to be losing their money. So they go out of their way to file edges off it, even while they also add one that wasn't there before (you have slightly less Soul meter until you get it back, and also you have to kill it, which is easy, but tense). It gets moved outside of boss rooms, and some other locations too, can move on its own to come to where you are (so it doesn't get stuck over a pit) and you can summon it to a designated safe spot and fight it on your terms using a fairly abundant currency which has no other purpose. But, despite all this, the system is still in the game, it's there, and it's real, and it can gently caress you over. They need it to be real even though they don't want it to be real because that makes the narrative more real. And still they design around it, just like Elden Ring's Academy. Basically what I'm saying is that this poo poo's basically Oops! All Art. Sorry. These people are Trying Things, and the things they are trying hinge on difficulty in a way that's affective more than it is abstractly ideal. Sorry. I'm sorry. Game Design is really loving hard. Sorry.
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Feb 13, 2024 03:32
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