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Natural 20 posted:What's a gun? A miserable little pile of secrets.
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Jun 14, 2022 02:07
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| # ? Apr 29, 2024 13:42 |
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Nat's fundamental disinterest in any item he picks up is sending me dark places (Yharnam)
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Jun 14, 2022 07:33
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Episode 04 - Brick Troll Art will go up shortly!
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Jun 15, 2022 23:08
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Looking forward to the upcoming "zero Blood Echoes spent" run of Bloodborne.
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Jun 16, 2022 00:12
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We're going to be here for a while, aren't we.
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Jun 16, 2022 12:32
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I trust God Gamer Nat 20 to roll all over those punks at SL1.
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Jun 16, 2022 12:38
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I can get what Nat is saying about the bloodstains at this specific point in the game. It'll change once you reach the point where the upgrades you might want to buy cost more than you earn in a run so you can't meaningfully bank your echoes at each checkpoint, but until then it doesn't really matter if you beat a stretch the first time or die repeatedly and lose your echoes.
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Jun 16, 2022 13:40
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Oh yeah, losing a single run of souls isn't much but once you need to bank more than that to upgrade or buy or level something, it quickly becomes a different matter.
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Jun 16, 2022 13:57
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Tenebrais posted:I can get what Nat is saying about the bloodstains at this specific point in the game. It'll change once you reach the point where the upgrades you might want to buy cost more than you earn in a run so you can't meaningfully bank your echoes at each checkpoint, but until then it doesn't really matter if you beat a stretch the first time or die repeatedly and lose your echoes. By my understanding of the genre, this is when "Soul of a X"/the various coldblood items show their true value, because they can be banked, so they're best saved until later in the game, to ensure you can level up from a run, at least for a while.
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Jun 16, 2022 23:20
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Or you use them to top off if you're just a little short of what you want to spend on, so you don't risk going out to farm that last bit, die, and lose everything.
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Jun 16, 2022 23:25
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EclecticTastes posted:By my understanding of the genre, this is when "Soul of a X"/the various coldblood items show their true value, because they can be banked, so they're best saved until later in the game, to ensure you can level up from a run, at least for a while. I mostly used them when I wanted to buy something.
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Jun 17, 2022 00:29
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SerSpook posted:I mostly used them when I wanted to buy something. I thought that was what I said, with the caveat that early in the game, you don't need to use coldblood as often to afford things you want to buy, whereas late in the game, when stuff is much more expensive, coldblood makes the difference between buying it now and having to keep going without and risking what you've saved up.
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Jun 17, 2022 00:43
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Jun 17, 2022 22:59
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The issue of not having a clear goal is one of the reasons I haven't gotten through this game. Dark Souls is much better about that, as you always know what you're trying to accomplish and why.
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Jun 18, 2022 00:13
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Gnoman posted:The issue of not having a clear goal is one of the reasons I haven't gotten through this game. Dark Souls is much better about that, as you always know what you're trying to accomplish and why. What goal? Like Bloodborne is more linear than Dark Souls and your purpose is to hunt some beast, for your own good. You should give it another go and see what happens if you keep pushing through. You may see some weird poo poo 
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Jun 18, 2022 00:19
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Jun 20, 2022 23:03
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Can you elaborate on your thoughts on the limited healing items? The hoarding items trope is usually applied to things like elixers in Final Fantasy games, where you can hold 99 at once but have to go far out of your way to find more than a few. But the blood vials in this game appear be a relatively common drop from "easy" enemies, but you can only hold 20 at a time. It looks like the game is encouraging you to use a few if you need them and resupply along the way.
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Jun 21, 2022 02:49
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Not only are blood vials (and silver bullets) common as drops and preplaced loot, but you can also buy both from the bath messengers. Common wisdom in the community is to occasionally dump windfalls of blood echoes into maintaining those stocks.
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Jun 21, 2022 04:11
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Of course! I actually wanted to do a write up on a topic about design each week if I could and this seems like a good one to start. Items and Hoarding We've all seen it happen. A player gets a super rocket launcher and refuses to use it on anything for the entire game because they're saving it for something important, only for them to beat the game and never use the thing. (I'm looking at you past Natural20). People do it in RPGs all the time, hoarding elixirs because they're worried about something in the future. This is commonly thought of as a dumb behaviour pattern, you're making the game harder on yourself now for some prospective challenge in the future. Except when it's not. In Fire Emblem 5 you can gently caress yourself if you don't carry enough door keys into the final map and in many games, optional superbosses might well come in with an expectation that you have hundreds of elixirs at your disposal to win. In Octopath Traveller, stat permaboosters are stronger on characters that have levelled up because higher base stats are enhanced further and endgame strategies in that game revolve around taking a character with middling magic growth to cap using this strategy. At your core as a player, you do not know what smart or dumb design decisions a game developer has made. Unless you've been told what to expect beforehand or you have some modicum of trust for how that developer makes games from past experience, you simply do not know whether an item will have high or low value going forward. So the instinct to hoard those items is actually pretty reasonable and comes from a place, not of lack of skill, but lack of trust. In Bloodborne, I've been hoarding bullets and vials. Bullets I hoard because the parry system is basically just arcane magic to me and I don't understand it or what a parry window looks like. But vials; I've been hoarding because I don't know if there are enemies that will require 20 to beat. From my understanding the game autosaves the moment you die. Which means that if there's anything that's particularly difficult that I need practice on, then running out of vials during practice means that I need to stop practice and go farm blood echoes for more vials since I can't just reload a save with all my vials in tact. The reality is that I just simply don't know FromSoft or their design philosophy. Everyone has told me that these games are really hard. It's why I didn't question being weaponless, for example. But absent any real understanding of what they want, I'm going to hoard my items because who knows if having 20 molotovs will come in handy at some point?
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Jun 21, 2022 10:20
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The issue with that mindset is that, it starts to make less sense when the game is absolutely throwing resources at you. Every third enemy or so drops blood vials or quicksilver bullets. And, the equation you should be thinking about is "is it worth spending a blood vial now to avoid having to repeat the last hour or so of progress I just made?". The best way to approach FromSoft games (or any of the games inspired by them) is as little individual slices, each representing the journey, either to the next bonfire/lantern/boss fight, or to a shortcut to a previous one that allows you to start the next leg that much closer to the next bonfire/lantern/boss fight. If you fail to reach one of those two goals, then the trip has been wasted. Everything else is secondary, your one and only goal is that next checkpoint or actual progression marker. Blood Echoes, blood vials, etc., they all exist to give you tools to make that journey easier, which is why you should use them rather than save them. Whatever it takes to get to the next checkpoint. And, as for FromSoft's design philosophy, their games are difficult, but they're mostly fair. When you die, it's almost always your own fault (not that there aren't a few cheap tricks). But, one thing to keep in mind is, if the devs are giving you things, it's because they want you to use those things. The game is designed around the assumption that the player will be using healing and parrying attacks. Not doing these things is like that time I picked up No More Heroes after like five years, started up my save that was on the final boss (Jean, not Henry) on a second playthrough, and got stomped for like forty-five minutes before I remembered that Dark Step was a thing I could do.
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Jun 21, 2022 11:14
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Natural 20 posted:
Ribbing aside, there is actually a good way to do that - use the blood bullets. For less damage than a Vial heals, you get 5 tries to hit a parry. Of all Soulsborne games (explicitly excluding Sekiro ofc), parrying is easiest in BB - the window is generous, and it's ranged, so often if you gently caress up, the enemy doesn't hit you anyway. Also, bullets often stagger (moreso with the Blunderbuss, admittedly) so maybe you interrupt the attack even if you don't get a riposte ("visceral") window. If you stick with the Cane, you will want to go into Skill, and visceral attacks scale with that. Parries will allow you to do insane damage then. quote:But vials; I've been hoarding because I don't know if there are enemies that will require 20 to beat. From my understanding the game autosaves the moment you die. quote:Which means that if there's anything that's particularly difficult that I need practice on, then running out of vials during practice means that I need to stop practice and go farm blood echoes for more vials since I can't just reload a save with all my vials in tact. In general, never run around with Echoes to spare, imo. If you don't want to pop Coldblood to make up the difference to the next level's requirement, buy armor from the shop, or a new weapon, or Vials, always more Vials, or Bullets. Much better to have 6 more Vials than hope you don't die, then die, die again, and waste 2k Echoes. By the way, now that you're way past that: there is an insanely convenient shortcut that I was slapping myself for only noticing super late. On the plaza with the brick troll banging against the door, to the left (as you come in from the big street) of the crows, there's some smashable objects. Behind them, you can drop down to where the dog cages are, turn around and unlock the shortcut to the house's ground floor immediately! No need to fight through werewolf bridge.
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Jun 21, 2022 12:24
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Fromsoft games also encourage some exploration, even if there are no enemies or no plot there are generally goodies stashed off the beaten path, and really smash everything, unless you are given warning that smashing something in particular is bad, smash.
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Jun 21, 2022 13:20
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Always try rolling and always try jumping. And use as many vials and bullets as you need. Getting the next checkpoint is the only thing that matters in Fromsoft games. Ive only ever finished Bloodborne, but effective my mediocre rear end only had to farm vials because of a couple optional bosses. You get tons of them naturally over time
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Jun 21, 2022 15:03
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As I recall, my first playthrough of the game I think I ended up having to farm for blood vials about...three times? However, I think there's a key thing to recognise from how the game is structured: there are basically two ways to gain blood vials: drops from enemies, or buying with echoes. And occasional solid blood consumables aside, there's basically one way to get echoes: drops from enemies. That means all the blood vials you're going to get come, directly or indirectly, from the enemies you kill. Blood vial usage that lets you keep killing more enemies and avoid losing your accumulated echoes is a profitable investment in that sense. So the time when you actually need to be saving vials isn't when you're killing enemies, it's when you're failing to kill enemies, and that's when you're stuck on the harder bosses. If you're practicing on a boss and run out, that's not really because you spent too many vials while you were out in the world progressing, that's because you spent too many vials practicing, and it's that part players do best to get a hold of--if you're dying a lot to a fight, you most likely need to get better at avoiding damage, rather than trying to tank through it with vials. Once you can start dodging with at least some degree of reliability, then you can use your vials to get you over the line. However based on Hollow Knight I'd not be surprised if Nat gets through the game without needing to farm once.
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Jun 21, 2022 15:49
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Like with the first fight when trying to do it via fisticuffs, if Nat had used a blood vial just once strategically he could have cleared it bare handed like a proper gentleman.
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Jun 21, 2022 16:51
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Yeah, blood vials and so on are so plentiful and easy to farm that you should think of them entirely as blocks of health that aren't yet in your health bar, just shove them back in at earliest convenience.
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Jun 21, 2022 18:45
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There are games where I think Nat's argument in favour of hoarding makes sense, but this is very much not one of them, and I can tell that even without having played it. A fairly small inventory cap of 20, coupled with how frequently the vials drop, screams "use these things already so you're not leaving free value on the ground!". In this kind of system, being at maximum capacity is inefficient. Hoarding because something worse might come later makes a lot more sense in contexts of games with larger, persistent inventories, and when any given item is less fungible (and less easily replaced). I find this whole thing fascinating, too, because Nat was very free with the Molotovs in an earlier episode in a way he can't bring himself to with healing vials, and the Molotovs honestly seem a lot stronger (at least right now, maybe they fall off in effectiveness later?), or at least more game-changing as a strategy. It might also be worth talking about the different philosophies games can have where health is concerned. Some games view health metres strictly as what I'll call a "mistake buffer", in which skilled/correct play is expected or assumed to avoid all damage, and the health meter is a measure of how many times you get to screw up before losing progress (this is more common in genres like action or platforming but obviously not exclusive to them). Other games treat health as a resource for the player to manage and have a baseline expectation that you're going to be losing and gaining it frequently, and might even make avoiding all damage impossible (you see this a lot in RPGs, but it's prevalent in a lot of action genres too). This isn't a strict dichotomy (and I'm sure there are other paradigms beside these too), but I bring it up because so far it looks like Bloodborne is leaning more toward the "mistake buffer" side despite having some resource elements. There seems to be at least some expectation that you should be avoiding damage more often than not (or, when you do make a mistake, take the opportunity to correct it by beating your health back out of the enemy), and "how many hits can I tank" seems pretty far from the most relevant question when considering if you can win a fight or not. Which, practically, means I think it's better to view the vials as an "oh poo poo, undo my mistake" button than a resource to be hoarded for some challenge that might require them. I could be talking completely out my arse here, but that's the impression I get from what I've seen so far. Intentionally ignoring the signals the game is sending doesn't seem like a great recipe for success.
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Jun 22, 2022 00:37
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I will say, my usage of Molotovs in the first few episodes was largely trying to stress test what they could do/did (and one time pushing the button by accident). Given what I know now I wouldn't have used any apart from maybe on the double werewolf pull. I do want to add a little to my thoughts. In this game, you are showered with vial drops and I, as we watch here, was relatively unwilling to use them because of my discussion about items from before. Up and down the thread, including Explory's most recent comment, we had the note that Bloodborne is showering me with these item drops and encouraging me to kill enemies to get them. The idea being that they are effectively allowing me to extend and kill more things. They're dropped in a way to encourage aggression. We now know I have the opposite response. "These are plentiful but they are a limited resource that caps my ability to progress/practice on a boss. If I use them now then I have to interrupt my learning to farm them later." I'm not saying that this is a legitimate or fair response, just that it is one. So let's contrast to another game, Hollow Knight. Healing there is tied to attacking in a similar way, soul accumulates on a per hit basis. You spend soul to heal HP. But notably, it's capped much lower. You can store enough soul to at most heal around half your health. And you have a way of converting excess soul to offense via the Hadoken attack. I think that this is probably a better system for achieving the same effect. Through both the lower cap encouraging frequent use and the ability to be rewarded for not getting hit by allowing you to generate more offense.
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Jun 22, 2022 00:57
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Most other From games and Soulslikes agree, and instead of consumable healing potions they'll give flasks, stimpacks, or something else that refreshes at every savepoint encouraging you to use them to push farther. I haven't played it firsthand, but if I've parsed other people's play correctly Elden Ring goes a step further and restores consumable weapon buffs and such if you die while trying to use them on a boss? Either that or the people I watched had farmed up a buttload of em.
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Jun 22, 2022 01:25
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Nat look what youtube threw at me, someone's done a gun-only run of Aria of Sorrow. Back on topic, I think I agree that the vial system is less good at communicating how they want you to interact with it than Hollow Knight's soul is, and it sounds like later From games have improved in this aspect.
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Jun 22, 2022 02:40
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Explopyro posted:Back on topic, I think I agree that the vial system is less good at communicating how they want you to interact with it than Hollow Knight's soul is, and it sounds like later From games have improved in this aspect. Earlier ones. The flask system described by Bruceski was used in the original Dark Souls, and works much better for setting expectations. It is one of the reasons that I always thought Nat would actually like that game if he spent long enough to get used to the movement (which, IIRC, was his reason for disliking it).
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Jun 22, 2022 02:52
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Natural 20 posted:So let's contrast to another game, Hollow Knight. I can absolutely see this point based on the way you handled Hollow Knight, but anecdotally having seen many people play through that game, very, very few made any sort of frequent use of spells on their first playthroughs. Tying the spells to the same resource as healing made them very reluctant to use spells, basically ever.
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Jun 22, 2022 03:03
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I am weird in that I prefer the Soulsbornes that allow you to stock up on consumables at the risk of running out (Demon's Souls, Bloodborne) to the ones that have the refillable health restoration system (Estus Flasks)
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Jun 22, 2022 03:29
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Let's put it this way, Nat: you have already correctly identified that there's a certain chance that at least one boss will take you quite a few tries. You also realize correctly that using Vials on attempts that end in failure will drain your stock until you have nothing left. Here's where you're wrong: you think that you will be able to prevent that stock from draining by being extremely conservative with Vial use before said boss arrives. That's not true! There's only one thing that prevents running out of Vials and having to farm them: being (not getting!) good at the game. - if you beat a boss quickly enough, obviously you won't need many Vials - if you don't get hit too much while exploring, Vials don't drain as you go through the game, leaving you with more - if you die during exploration (say, because you were conservative about healing!), you lose the Vials used up to the point of your death as if that were a boss fight attempt. If you're experienced at the game, you won't die much just going places, but you're not However, you're a God Gamer, so maybe you are already good at the game. Then there's no worry, you'll kill every boss in three tries max, and you'll never run out of Vials. Let's hypothetically say you're not and there's a boss that kills you a bunch. Here's what your options are: - you hoard Vials by not healing up as often during the stages, playing risky at low life, - you just heal when you're hurt and don't worry about it. You have to farm after, say, attempt 7. I really don't think the difference is going to be more than one or two boss attempts, is what I'm saying. In later areas, enemies will stop dropping Vials as frequently. Your assumption that saving one here and there and that adds up is plain wrong. The way to get a huge stock of Vials is by buying them with tons of Echoes you don't need for anything else right now, another thing that favors experienced players, because a) they won't need high levels to feel safe, they won't waste points in levels they know they don't need, b) they will lose Echoes much less often, c) they know that just buying a bunch of Vials at once when you have leftover currency is the way to go. Bottom line: if you're new at the game, you will have to farm Vials at some point. No matter what. Unless you git gud extremely quickly, which is a possibility, don't get me wrong, but then you don't have to worry about conserving Vials now either.
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Jun 22, 2022 07:20
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Has it ever been said why Bloodborne went with this blood vials system rather than the flasks worked in the Dark Souls games? Having your healing be a known quantity that resets at every checkpoint has always been very good for these kinds of games. Most of the differences Bloodborne has to the Souls games are built around forcing you to play more aggressively and decisively but I have no idea how this serves that purpose.
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Jun 22, 2022 09:49
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Forgot to mention something, by the way: I'm not being super facetious with the God Gamer remark. Nat has been doing exceptionally well so far. Only one death to the werewolf bridge, only minor slip-ups on the big street, easily dealing with the brick troll without parries, an actually substantial stock of Vials already, and all that with the arguably most difficult to use starting weapon (main arguments: it simply has less damage than the others, less stagger in cane form, and is slow in whip form). Tenebrais posted:Has it ever been said why Bloodborne went with this blood vials system rather than the flasks worked in the Dark Souls games? Having your healing be a known quantity that resets at every checkpoint has always been very good for these kinds of games. Most of the differences Bloodborne has to the Souls games are built around forcing you to play more aggressively and decisively but I have no idea how this serves that purpose. - incentivises you to engage with the rally system - rewards you for killing enemies along the way (at least the ones that you know drop vials) - this extends to boss runs, making it rewarding to not just sprint past everything - "safe" kills like parries, backstabs etc. have more value, again rewarding you for being better at the game - when you run out after a few boss attempts, the game forces you to take a break and cool down while you farm Especially the last one imo only applies to people with a specific mindset, and it can maybe help you break out of bad habits, but I kind of doubt that someone who gets tilted easily from failing bosses will appreciate being told "calm down bucko and farm some Vials". Anyway, that's the gist of it. Of course, Vials themselves have certain advantages over Estus: - you always start with 20, don't need to upgrade the flask for quantity/kindle bonfires - the heal is always a percentage of your health, so you don't need to upgrade for heal amount either - animation is super quick - because you can get them back during the level, if you keep up a good rhythm of using one before you get a drop, you can reach a boss after your first run through an area with almost full Vials imo best of all worlds would have been a baseline of, say, 10 you always get and more that are farmable/storable. Which is what Nioh does, and DS2 as well as Sekiro accomplish with a secondary healing resource that's farmable/non-replenishing.
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Jun 22, 2022 10:39
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Simply Simon posted:imo best of all worlds would have been a baseline of, say, 10 you always get and more that are farmable/storable. Which is what Nioh does, and DS2 as well as Sekiro accomplish with a secondary healing resource that's farmable/non-replenishing. anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 12:28 on Jun 22, 2022 |
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Jun 22, 2022 12:25
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Jun 22, 2022 22:48
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psh, not even first trying Gascoigne? Some god gamer you are Tea got the visceral explanation wrong. I posted about it on Youtube.
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Jun 23, 2022 00:03
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Jun 23, 2022 00:07
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