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Jun 25, 2022 00:04
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Very much appreciate that Elden Ring actually added checkpoints to go in front of boss doors. I find it interesting that you're happy to freely use blood vials (presumably to get more time learning the fight) but very hesitant to spend your bullets learning the interrupt timing.
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Jun 25, 2022 02:10
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I can feel Yorkshiretea's frustration through my monitor, because the "safe" way to fight Gascoine is to counter him. When he winds up the axe, shoot him, then charge up that heavy attack. Since you seem to be swayed by broad design philosophy talk, Gascoine's role in the game's design is as the moment where you're all but forced to use a previously optional mechanic, because said mechanic is important enough that you need to be able to do it later on, or you'll have A Bad Time. So, Gascoine is there to give you A Bad Time early on, until you can consistently counter him, thus preparing you for later enemies that either require countering to beat with a reasonable degree of challenge, or are just much faster to kill by countering (such as those giants, who have enormous parry windows on their basic brick swings). You might notice that Gascoine usually starts shooting after performing a couple melee attacks. This is why he uses a blunderbuss rather than a pistol, is so that the shot is very hard to dodge consistently, punishing the player for letting him get to that point in the first place. The way to avoid taking that damage is to interrupt his attack pattern with counters. He also changes form at low health, where he becomes much faster and less vulnerable to normal hitstun, but his attacks still have quite a few frames of wind-up, essentially serving as the "final exam" where you need to counter from within the foe's attack range due to how good the beast form is at getting in your face (whereas in his human form, it's not difficult to parry him from safely outside the range of his axe). He also has a couple attacks that can't be parried, to help you recognize the broad differences between attacks you can and can't parry (the animations are the key). You could absolutely brute force it, grinding your level and loading up on items until you can't possibly lose, but this is not only going to make the game less fun because grinding is tedious, it's also a waste of one's finite time to spend hours and hours grinding rather than spending significantly less time just engaging with the game's mechanics. I get you don't want to "waste" bullets, but parrying is 90% of the reason you have bullets in the first place, so conserving them is kinda pointless if you can't do the main thing they're there for.
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Jun 25, 2022 07:38
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also the game hands out bullets like candy (basically every gun-using enemy drops them) and gives you a way to get more ammo in the middle of a fight. I know this is kind of a bit you're doing, but please engage with one of the central mechanics of the game.
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Jun 25, 2022 10:56
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I will say now. My logic in the video is that I'm not parrying because I've observed that when I did, I got basically no damage off it and I've judged it to not be worth the risk. My talk about item hoarding isn't relevant here. This is a boss fight. It is explicitly where you spend resources. If I thought bullets would do anything helpful I would be using them.
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Jun 25, 2022 11:33
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The problem with the parry is that you never actually performed the visceral follow-up. I'll say it again: once the enemy is in its staggered state, after the sound cue, you have to get right next to them and press R1 from a neutral position (so you don't do a quickstep-R1 instead). Your issue is that you have a long range weapon, so you were never doing a visceral on accident. I don't agree that Gascoigne teaches you to parry or lose, by the way. Imo he teaches you that dodging away from enemies is a bad idea in BB. You should dodge towardsthem at almost all times. EDIT: your thoughts at the end of the video about having to beat the boss right now and exploration being worthless are entirely wrong, Nat. From games want you to explore to get that edge. It's not "not fun", it's literally what's expected of you. Going into areas you haven't seen right now might give you upgrade materials, weapons to try out armor, and, most importantly, Echoes without needing to boringly farm, as well as plain experience with the game. Simply Simon fucked around with this message at 11:59 on Jun 25, 2022 |
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Jun 25, 2022 11:41
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Honestly, I'd just leave it to Tea to gently nudge Nat in the right direction. The current discussion seems somewhat heated and really, really backseaty.
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Jun 25, 2022 11:44
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I think Nat would have been better off with a different starting weapon. The reach of the whip has taught Nat some wrong lessons about the combat system, imo. It's more of a Dark Souls style weapon than the fast paced BB weapons
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Jun 25, 2022 13:57
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I will say I am a God Gamer for a reason And you disgusting mortals dare to DOUBT ME
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Jun 26, 2022 01:06
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You never specified the type of god. you're clearly demonstrating the folly of hubris to teach a lesson to us mortals.
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Jun 26, 2022 01:37
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Natural 20 posted:I will say I have no doubts, but you need to explore more, fromsoft games reward poking in odd corners that have nothing else going for them Thats where they hide the GOOD stuff
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Jun 26, 2022 02:21
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Natural 20 posted:I will say Oh, sorry, I didn't mean to come off like I didn't think you could do it, I just felt there was an approach that would be less frustrating, since you seemed to not be loving the game so far. I think what we're all rooting for, more than you being good at the game, is for you to also have a good time playing it.
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Jun 26, 2022 03:23
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Upon further inspection what I have concluded is that drunk Nat should not post in the LP thread.
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Jun 26, 2022 13:04
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Drunk Nat should absolutely god gamer the other Fun Stuff near the bridge werewolves that tea pointed out though
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Jun 26, 2022 13:26
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Jun 26, 2022 13:35
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I used to play this game drunk and it was hard as hell! Sobered up and did another playthrough, so much easier, just disrespecting Gascoigne Use your fuckin gun, nat, Jesus loving Christ
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Jun 26, 2022 18:42
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Isn't the problem that he's used it but didn't realize it needed a followup?
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Jun 26, 2022 19:32
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Omobono posted:Isn't the problem that he's used it but didn't realize it needed a followup? Yeah, he paried with the gun properly and then used a dodge lunge attack to try to exploit it, but since it can't start the actual riposte and he wasn't standing in the sweetspot either, it staggered Gacoigne out of the parry stagger. BTW, GodGamerNat20, I entirely share your opinions regarding that loving lockon, the way it refuses to lock on properly and the way it randomly drops if there's an obstruction to the target. It's bad and it's something that about 15 years after Demon's Souls, is still the same piece of poo poo. I love From games to bits but I have a couple longstanding grudges against them.
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Jun 27, 2022 16:37
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tiny brain: the lockon is poo poo normal brain: lockon is a crutch and you should learn to do without galaxy brain: lockon is a tool like any other and it's also often poo poo
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Jun 27, 2022 17:31
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yeah it's a shame he didn't discover riposte/crit hit in the time honored BB fashion of fisting the pig
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Jun 27, 2022 21:31
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Jun 27, 2022 22:47
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It's pretty funny watching you theorycraft about stats from like three neighboring data points. (Other stats are also good to get to equip more equipment, and also have more stamina to not get stamina starved and die to a stunlock.) Also, in terms of spending souls, I generally find that spending to the very last soul like that is, well, there's this saying in computer science, that you should avoid premature optimization, I propose you just shouldn't care about so few souls, just let them hang around in your pocket, it's no big deal, soon you'll lose a few hundred thousand from a bad fall while distracted, it'll be alright.
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Jun 28, 2022 00:44
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SIGSEGV posted:in terms of spending souls, I generally find that spending to the very last soul like that is, well, there's this saying in computer science, that you should avoid premature optimization From agree with you, that's why they put the twin husks shop in the aisle where Hewg and Roderika aren't, they want us to suffer.
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Jun 28, 2022 01:19
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Good job against Gasc! It seems you already learned two important lessons he's meant to convey: how to parry; and that dodging towards attacks is often safer. There are attacks that are unparryable (e.g. you can't parry Gascoigne's shotgun blasts or other ranged attacks), but there's no such thing as "superarmor" protecting enemies. Here's what happened in the cases you failed to visceral: - your and the enemy's attack connected at the same time. It's simply a question of momentum and bullet travel time. They're flying towards you, weapon/claws extended; they're hitting you with the hurtbox before the bullet connects with their center mass. If the attack is strong enough, you get knocked on your rear end and can't get up in time for a visceral. If the attack is weak enough, you just get a little bit of damage and can heal all of that back in the visceral, making the attempt worth it (you heal all the orange bar with a visc) - you dashed towards them and hit R1 too quickly, making it into a dash-attack. That's the combo you're thinking of; you can't combo off parry [attempts] - you tried to visc on a slope. It just doesn't work Hilariously, the brick troll's charge is the easiest to parry attack in the game. You can shoot them whenever during its entire animation. But it does carry them forward towards you and they extend the brick in front, so...use the fact that you can parry from a distance! Their overhead slam is also no issue to parry. You just failed the timing! However, minor detail about this: big attacks like those do tend to have hyperarmor, in the sense that it's very hard to stagger (as in, make them stumble, not set them up for a visceral) the enemy out of them. Different attacks have different stagger values, so it might still be possible (e.g. the Axe's extendo-spin has insane stagger and can knock pretty much anything over out of any attack), but a simple gunshot doesn't stagger the brick troll out of the overhead slam if you don't hit during the parryable window, i.e. when the active attack part actually starts (arms going down vs. he's just rearing up). This is where e.g. the Blunderbuss might also fail, while it can interrupt other, less "heavy" attacks. Finally, the form of your weapon has nothing to do with visceraling. You're not viscing with your weapon. You're pushing your arm into their guts. In fact, the weapon's damage does not matter in the slightest for visc damage. It only scales with Skill...and the gems on the weapon, for some reason.
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Jun 28, 2022 07:32
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Nat20's Tuesday Essay 2. The Run Back Back in episode 08 Tea and I talked a little about the run from the save point to Gascgoine. One of the most bitter arguments I've ever had spawned as a result of this. Which is about whether a save point that's far away from a boss (far save point) is bad design when compared with a save point that's close to the boss (near save point). Of note. A game designer can do whatever they want with their game. They can make it impossible to beat apart from on one second of one day twenty years from now if they want. They can make the game a simple act of pushing a button once and credits rolling. There is no limit on what games can and should be. But equally that stance is tremendously unhelpful in a lot of ways. It means that criticism of design becomes invalid because who are you as a person to say that something should be done differently? So whilst I do ascribe to the idea that a game can be almost anything with an interactive component I also think we can think of design when it comes to objectives or ideas that we think we can glean from a developer. This is important to state outright because "It's just your preference," is an incredibly frustrating response when you're trying hard to think objectively and seperate yourself from those preferences. Let's start then with simply this. How did it feel beating Gascgoine? I can honestly say I felt absolutely nothing. There might have been relief. But it wasn't satisfying. Why? Because I broadly do not feel any more skilled at the fight now than when I started. In many ways I was worse. I cheesed through phases one and two with geometry and then phase 3 was essentially a RNG fest where I spammed gun when I saw him move until eventually I won. (Knowing that I *should* spam gun was a simple knowledge gap that I had because visceral attacks are very very poorly explained) Why is this? Because the run back fundamentally disrupted my method of fighting and defeating bosses. The way I fight, the way I learn is pretty simply to take half an hour of my day and just sit down and run attempts. And I'll do this every day for a week until I feel I've mastered it. I did this with Absolute Radiance in Hollow Knight, I did this with Death in Aria of Sorrow. You practice for a short time and little by little you internalise what to do to get better until you are. The run back to Gascgoine times in at around 2 minutes, with an attempt on him typically lasting 3 minutes to get through Phase 1 and 2 and then 1 more minute to deal with Phase 3. So a full Gascgoine cycle is around 6 minutes, with 1/3 of that being not fighting the boss and 2/3 being attempts on said boss. So I'm losing a full 10 minutes of my 30 minute practice sessions to doing nothing. What's worse is that the 2 minutes is an active 2 minutes. I need to think about the enemies and obstacle on the run back instead of on what I was doing before. By the time I'm back I've lost a lot of the muscle memory and pattern recognition I was building. To make a long story very short. The way that I've learnt how to learn things does not work on this boss. So during the very bitter argument, a few things were mentioned to me as, very reasonable justifications for the run back. 1. The walk back is good for you because it forces you to take a break. 2. The walk back is good for you because it encourages you to do other things. 3. The walk back is good for you because it builds tension for the fight. For the first two. I believe very strongly at this point that a developer does not know the player better than they do themselves. The difference between a long and short save point is, to me, one of whether you trust your players. I should be trusted, as a person, to take a break if I feel I need it or to go and explore other things if I feel I need it. If I don't do these things, that's my own fault, but a developer shouldn't seek to protect me from myself, especially when doing so removes options from other people who might well not need it. To me, the removal of player agency in most aspects is a net loss. I think the long save point is bad design because functionally it just does fewer things than the short save point to accommodate play style. (This concept has a lot of interesting logical extensions when applied to other games, like Roguelikes for example, but to discuss it more deeply would go too far off topic potentially) So the third option is the most interesting. The walk back did put at least some pressure on any individual attempt. Because I'd have to endure the drudgery again and I didn't really want to. But I can't say that the tension built during the walk because I was just bored by it. The tension built during the boss because the fight was difficult. So there I would say that tension can be built by the walk but can just as easily come from other sources. But I had one more think about the topic afterwards and this is where I want to leave it. What if the disruption of flow is the difficulty itself? Beating the fight is secondary to learning how to handle that disruption. Is that a legitimate course for difficulty to take? If it is, how do you learn to handle it? And is it worth people potentially coming away frustrated because they don't feel they're improving? I don't really have an answer to this. My instinct is to say it's not legitimate because there isn't a way to learn about dealing with flow disruption. But I've not read a lot of material here so I could very well be wrong.
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Jun 28, 2022 15:55
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There is a fourth potential justification besides the three you mention - the pause gives you time to process the fight between runs, while also giving you the opportunity to practice some of the basic skills you need. In this case, for example, it very much looked like you were able to figure out Gascgoine's parry windows between runs by practicing on the intermediate enemies. Gascgoine seems to be a much more complex early boss than in other Soulslike games, as does the Cleric Beast, which likely adds to the frustration you're talking about here.
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Jun 28, 2022 16:50
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To be honest I'm basically in the same boat you are in right now when it comes to all early souls bosses, even after playing most of From's output, I only start to get it right significantly later in the game, after a lot of victories through flailing about, said flailing about got me past a number of bosses apparently meant to be serious gatekeepers and yet I squeak past. Then again, I suppose darksydephil also got past those hurdles so maybe a less grandiloquent description should be used for them. Then I reach the big nasty fights that come later on, the obligatory "kinda peer sword-waver", the nightmare rear end in a top hat duo, and whatever else and I actually enjoy those, and then I roll back around in new game plus and absolutely paste those early bosses.
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Jun 28, 2022 17:28
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I don't play Souls games and don't often play Souls-likes (I'm oddly quite fond of Jedi: Fallen Order, which shares some DNA including the runback), but listing to how others have talked about it I see it as Phase 1 of a bossfight where your goal is just to optimize resource use as you get to Phase 2. People tend not to talk about runbacks in general, they'll say "the runback to Gascoine" or other bosses in the same way they'll say "I hated needing to do the first phase every time before I could get to the fight proper." That doesn't make a bad one suddenly good, but it's a view I found interesting when I first noticed it.
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Jun 28, 2022 18:27
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Nat, as a god of gaming, may have the responsibility and self preservation skills needed to take breaks but devs have to design for us wretches of gaming. Who will destroy our bodies and psyches if not held in check for our own good. Sorry nat, there's no money designing a game with a single god in mind.
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Jun 28, 2022 19:36
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I think the clear point in Nat's favor is that From have, while not generally making the games easier, drastically reduced runback time in their games over time. Elden Ring usually has a respawn point either right outside the boss room or within a minute's run to it.
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Jun 28, 2022 20:29
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Yeah. Having the respawn points right outside the boss door in ER makes hard bosses so much more forgiving. Its not nearly as frustrating when the run is past 2 guys over a minute instead of 4 mins past 7 or 8 guys
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Jun 28, 2022 20:40
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Part of it I think is also the fact that the game spawns a lantern in the boss arena at the end of most boss fights, and they don't want to have two lanterns that close together. So as a result, they rarely have boss fights super close to the lanterns that you use to get to them. Whether that's a good idea is a different matter entirely; I just think that may be an additional reason for why they did that. They still could have made it so that there was always a lantern right next to the arena and the arena itself didn't spawn one, which is where the other reasons come in.
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Jun 28, 2022 22:40
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whowhatwhere posted:I think the clear point in Nat's favor is that From have, while not generally making the games easier, drastically reduced runback time in their games over time. Elden Ring usually has a respawn point either right outside the boss room or within a minute's run to it. Elden Ring, in particular, added a new kind of checkpoint in front of every boss and major encounter that doesn't have a nearby grace site that you can respawn at when you die. It doesn't give you access to a level ups, warp points and your customisation stuff, so there's still a run-back in those cases, but only if you want to change up your strategy or go and do something else - if you just want to take another stab at the boss just like before and try to get the hang of it, you can go right back in. It's a pretty good system, but it does mean that whatever they were trying to achieve with the run-backs, the benefits of convenient checkpoints won out in the end.
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Jun 28, 2022 22:45
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Arkanian posted:Part of it I think is also the fact that the game spawns a lantern in the boss arena at the end of most boss fights, and they don't want to have two lanterns that close together. So as a result, they rarely have boss fights super close to the lanterns that you use to get to them. Anyway, about the question itself: imo runbacks suck and they're unfun. However, something about the "teaches the player to become better" argument does ring true - for me, at least, in Dark Souls 1, my first From game, the runback to Taurus Demon almost broke me. I died so often on the way, and then I died so quickly to the boss and had to do all that again, I almost quit the game. But I didn't. And eventually I had figured out a good tactic for each enemy on the way, so the runback became routine, and then I won and it felt amazing. Then the rest of the game began, and I was completely hooked. BUT I almost quit. And Nat's situation is obviously different - he has absolutely no issue with the runback. It's already routine. It's teaching him nothing, it's just a waste of time. So that point falls flat. I do agree that From does often want players to be learning a certain lesson, play a certain way, and it's perfectly happy to have you suffer until you learn the lesson, or suffer because you don't learn it and bruteforce through. This sometimes works well - hell, the entire idea of getting good at the games instead of them being "okay bb don't worry we'll just reload that checkpoint and look, there's plenty of ammo" is what draws people to them. But there's a limit, and as with many games, it's tedium. People rarely learn anything from that. It's why falling down a vertical platforming section feels worse than dying, even though both mean you have to redo it. It's psychologically obvious that your time is being wasted, and that's devastating for a game to feel like. This runback was so bad because there was nothing to learn. As long as I could optimize something in the Taurus runback, my time wasn't wasted. Nat's was, and he felt it.
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Jun 28, 2022 23:03
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Jun 29, 2022 22:40
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It looks like Cleric Beast is a much more straightforward fight, and a lot closer analogue to the first "actual" boss in Dark Souls. Suspect you'd have had a less frustrating onboarding if you had fought it first.
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Jun 29, 2022 23:14
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It's an extremely persistent myth that you can parry Cleric Beast. You cannot. What you can do is break its head. First stagger: you threw a molotov at it, breaking it immediately. Note that the next Molotov you threw at its head dealt roughly double damage - that's because the head was still broken, and bloody. CB then did that red aura thing; that healed the head, and it took normal damage again. You could have broken it again as a trade-off, but the next Molotov missed a tad. Second stagger: you shot him in the head twice. Second time dealt enough cumulative damage to break the head. Then he doubled over so you stood inside it. I said it on YT, but the visceral animation is you ripping his brain out. The game does not, for better or worse, want to teleport you in front of it for the animation, so you have to start roughly in front. That's why you couldn't pull it off. And yes, it's finicky as hell, not meant as a defense. The Threaded Cane is serrated, by the way. In whip form. Serration (and the other one) is a hidden stat, it's not stated anywhere in-game except for the vague "this rips apart beasts lol" on the Spear.
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Jun 30, 2022 07:12
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Yeah, there are other hidden bonuses on certain weapons against some types of enemies. You'll eventually discover that (or not) because pretty much any weapon in the game is valid and will carry you the entire game. I hope Nat "finds" the Kirkhammer
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Jun 30, 2022 08:31
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Simply Simon posted:Serration (and the other one) is a hidden stat, it's not stated anywhere in-game except for the vague "this rips apart beasts lol" on the Spear. WHYYYYYYY?
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Jun 30, 2022 17:23
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Natural 20 posted:WHYYYYYYY? Apparently you have to git gud at wikis too to play this game.
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Jun 30, 2022 17:26
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