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 Current Episode  About the Game Bloodborne is a 2015 action role-playing game released on the Playstation 4. Developed by the (in)famous FromSoftware it is considered to be adjacent to the similarly (in)famous Souls series, taking many of the aspects of those games and transposing them into a Gothic, Victorian setting. Players are dropped into an expansive Metroidvania style gamespace and asked to explore and understand the mystery of what has happened to the city of Yharnam, fighting a myriad of humans and monsters along the way. Bloodborne was released to near universal acclaim with critics praising its setting, gameplay as well as its unyielding difficulty and vision. In the seven years since, millions of players have entered the streets of Yharnam and found themselves giving it similar praise. As of 2022 the game has not seen a release on any platform beyond the PS4 and there's been a growing outcry for a remake or port of the game elsewhere. Even though the response on these requests remains unclear, what is clear is that even after all this time this game is absolutely adored by its fans. About the LP I am Natural20 and I am a living god of videogames. (Ignoring ridiculous mechanics like Space Jumping, or dealing with Spikes, or that insanely difficult corridor in Aria of Sorrow.) Despite being an avatar of game supremacy, I have never played a Soulslike. Unless you count Hollow Knight, which I don't think does count? I'm not really sure. In any case I am going to slap this game around despite the fact that I've never played it before because that's how good I am. If I do die, it's because I'm playing on a Playstation controller and has nothing to do with my failure to adapt, understand or read. The purpose of this LP is to show you that this "hard" game is actually super easy and everyone else needs to get good. This, as with many of our LPs will be a Guided Blind LP, where I will play with no foreknowledge of the game and my erstwhile colleague and best friend Yorkshire Tea will guide me through the world, ensuring that I don’t go too far astray. (Without good reason) Episodes will release on Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 11pm BST, 6pm EST (or as close to that as I can manage) with cheeky Patreon early episodes for those who are really invested. Art and banners, will, as ever, be handled by the amazing Bifauxnen. Episodes                                          Natural20's Notes On Game Design 1. Items and Hoarding 2. The Run Back 3. Bloodborne and World of Warcraft - How I stopped caring and embraced the grind. Links Our Patreon! - In case you want to support our LPs and see episodes early! (Incidentally this is also the only place where I can actually time video releases, so if I need to delay posting a video here, it will show up on Patreon on its own.) Natural 20 fucked around with this message at 22:17 on Sep 12, 2022 |
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Jun 8, 2022 23:12
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Jun 10, 2022 22:58
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Gnoman posted:Wonder how many updates it will take for Nat to remember that he has a gun. What's a gun? Epicmissingno posted:That's just disappointing. I was counting on a full weaponless run. Tea tricked me into picking up a weapon.
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Jun 11, 2022 01:47
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYcXh3be3n0 Largely just highlights for everyone here. But I had fun making it.
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Jun 12, 2022 23:11
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Jun 13, 2022 23:43
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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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Jun 17, 2022 22:59
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Jun 20, 2022 23:03
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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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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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Jun 22, 2022 22:48
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Jun 25, 2022 00:04
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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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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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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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Jun 27, 2022 22:47
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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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Jun 29, 2022 22:40
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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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Jul 2, 2022 00:00
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Simply Simon posted:Hell yeah Alfred, finally someone who's on the level Stamina isn't worthless but it's defined by marginal effect. It's only going to do anything when the increase provides an extra action. On the comparative the marginal effect of a point of health is around a 3% life increase. If each blood vial grants a 40% heal then the marginal effect on overall HP from a point of HP is around 30% of a life bar, give or take. And if there are weapons with long combos with increasing damage, I've not encountered them, nor would I reasonably have any reason to believe that such a system existed. (Very technically that's also a spoiler on a game mechanic I've not encountered yet, but it's obviously meant in good faith so I understand the game better) Which is unfortunate given there doesn't seem to be an ability to respec and if I die twice I lose all my level up points, encouraging me to aggressively spend down to 0.
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Jul 4, 2022 16:13
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OneWingedDevil posted:I do see a bit of an oversight with pumping vitality, and it's the same flaw that the stamina has. It only actually matters when it crosses a threshold. The fact that it scales the blood vial healing causes it to cross those thresholds far more often like you pointed out, but you aren't using all your blood vials in the boss fights (the ones we see, anyway) so your likelihood of crossing a threshold that actually matters is also less than the straight math suggests. I think this is really interesting and a really good point to make. In theory if that extra 30% at the end isn't actually used then you're absolutely right, the margin on HP technically doesn't matter. There are two reasons I think that makes this line of thinking incomplete. The first is that the extra bit on each bar of HP makes it more likely that you don't get one/two/whatever shot. Which means you're more able to use the healing available to you. (which you mention later actually, so not really incomplete) The second is that the extra healing that HP provides (around 1.x% per vial) makes vials more valuable if that makes sense. You use fewer vials in the long run because each vial heals you for more. So there's a real effect beyond just the margin of "Did the extra 33% let me succeed." OneWingedDevil posted:If it's about maximizing your ability to cross thresholds, I'd assume the real stat to pump would be damage. You need to hit the enemy far more than they need to hit you to die, so a 5% increase in damage should reduce the number of attacks you make more than a 5% bump in health lets you take. Less time spent in a fight is also less time to make mistakes, which are what really kill you in a game like this. Yup and I broadly agree with this. What I'm trying to do with damage is take note of how many hits it takes to kill common opponents. Then if I think extra damage is going to reduce the number of hits from let's say 4 to 3, I go into damage on my next level up and see if it worked.
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Jul 4, 2022 18:36
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Simply Simon posted:Personally, I feel like it's extremely hard to argue about stats and the statting thereof itt because Nat's going to say "well with my extremely incomplete information," and all the people who've played the game are going to have to tightrope around those gaps in knowledge in order not to spoil anything. Imo just play and you'll see at some point that there's going to be gaps to be filled: you die too often or you notice that you can't dodge as often as you need to or your damage feels lacking, and then you stat what you were missing. Yeah absolutely. I just wanted to clarify my logic since I'm aware it probably doesn't come through as well when it's part of my stream of consciousness.
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Jul 4, 2022 21:42
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Jul 4, 2022 22:35
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Jul 6, 2022 22:58
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Yeah I think that Tea's description of my method as "efficient" isn't really correct, but in the video I struggle to articulate why whilst I'm also playing the game. My method is safe. I don't know where Gatling gun fire is going to come from so I slow pull things to areas where I know I'm not going to be shot at. The reason I'm playing this way is because I don't know where the next shortcut back or save point is, so in theory if i go slowly and expend fewer resources because everything is very safe, I'll get further into the level. And that actually works out. (Slight spoilers here for the next video) I don't know at this point that the hunter here doesn't respawn. But my slow pace gave me a lot of resources to take him on with, meaning I could spend the first two thirds of the fight trying to fish for a parry and still have enough in the tank to adapt my strategy when it became obvious that it wasn't going to work. It's definitely not what I would call efficient because the time loss is severe. And to me efficiency is represented by the minimisation of resource loss, with the understanding that time is also a resource. Extra time I spend doing something might have been spent doing the central yharnam brick troll loop to get more blood vials for example.
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Jul 7, 2022 12:15
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Jul 8, 2022 23:32
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Yeah I'm going to say feel free at this point. Just had a recording session with Tea and we don't get into it but I've been basically flexing stuff myself and writing down formulae in excel for what I think things do. The results are pretty significant.
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Jul 9, 2022 02:47
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Sorry for the lateness of this episode. The heat here has not been good to me.
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Jul 12, 2022 10:39
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Jul 13, 2022 22:52
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Again, problem of trying to be salient while playing a game and discussing with Tea. The idea I was trying to explain was that exploring another place is also contingent on having Blood Vials available. And that if I run out or die on the way then it's time and more importantly resources wasted as I lose the few blood vials I spent to get wherever.
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Jul 14, 2022 10:01
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EclecticTastes posted:One source of difficulty for you, I think, comes from how defensively you're playing. It means that every hit you end up taking has to be healed with a Blood Vial. More aggressive players will get a lot of their healing from the rally system, beating the HP out of their enemies' faces. Even if they take more hits, they often get that health right back, and when they die, they end up not having spent as many Blood Vials since they weren't hanging back and popping them after each hit. Being overly cautious in Bloodborne just gets you worn down and your resources depleted. This is something that's going to come up a little later in the LP but I just want to note that this comment exists, I've read and understood it and I have opinions on it that I'll voice at a more appropriate time.
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Jul 15, 2022 00:26
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frPVWvz_WZk Art will be along shortly!
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Jul 16, 2022 00:07
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Simply Simon posted:If Tea guides Nat into the dungeons next this LP will end in a ragequit I laughed so much at this when I read it by the way.
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Jul 18, 2022 13:00
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Jul 18, 2022 23:28
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Nat20's Tuesday Essay (on a Wednesday) 3. Bloodborne and World of Warcraft - How I stopped caring and embraced the grind. I hate grinding. I think it's dumb tedious work that games put in when they've run out of ideas and want to pad length. Most grinding games just don't work on me, Diablo bores me in a couple of hours, I couldn't get through more than a few minutes of Borderlands and do not get me started on Roguelikes because we will be here all day. Bloodborne necessitates grinding through its Blood Vial system. As a new player you need Blood vials to progress and if you run out then your progress grinds to a halt. Back when we first fought Blood Starved Beast in Episode 16 you can hear my frustration at the tail end of the episode. Tea and I actually had a much longer discussion over what was going on that got cut because it was long, boring and better written than spoken. After my third attempt on that fight I know for sure that on the fourth attempt the boss is almost certainly dead, I've figured out the trick to beating it, but I'm out of vials so I can't try any more. The more eagle eyed among you might also realise that I went into the third attempt on only 10 vials. I contend that there's a good chance I would have actually won on that third attempt if I'd had full resources going in. To put simply, I was tremendously frustrated with the game after recording Episode 16. I was honestly considering whether I should end the LP because of how angry I was. I just didn't feel like the game wanted me to have fun. I started thinking to myself about a post I might put together about why I was quitting and I kept coming down to a single idea. Bloodborne reminds me of Vanilla World of Warcraft. Those among you who've followed us for a while will know that I've played World of Warcraft from its inception. For better or worse across 15 years I've seen the game evolve and change, aping gaming trends of the time and also just evolving the way that it thinks about games in general. The original, or Vanilla, World of Warcraft had a death system where you lost durability if you died and had to run back to your corpse before you could play again. It had a system of permanent loss of consumables if you died to something whilst you had them. It had enemies that weren't too threatening alone but because absolutely deadly in small groups. Level up points, or talents are very expensive to move around and as a hunter I would consume ammunition fighting enemies that I would have to go back to town to replenish. Every single part of its tertiary loop (so the long term systems you're engaging with, as opposed to primary loop which is the immediate next 10 seconds of gameplay you'll be doing) is just eerily similar to Bloodborne's. But over time we saw Blizzard move away from these systems. Talent changes became free, consumables became very very cheap and lasted through death, you'd respawn in front of, or very near bosses when you died. Hunters got unlimited ammo and yeah, you still lose durability but that's largely so that the economy is kept in check rather than a punishment for the player. This has led to a more streamlined game. Bosses can be much harder than they used to be because players simply get more uptime on them than they used to and everyone thought it was a better system. Right? World of Warcraft Classic launched in 2019 after fan outcry for a return to the old style of MMOs. And weirdly enough I was one of the people who returned and enjoyed the hell out of playing it. But how does that square with my hatred of grinding? It doesn't really. I love raiding (raiding is a concept where a large group of players gather at a specific time and place to take on strong bosses in the game, usually we'd arrange for Sunday 7pm UK as our raid time) in WoW, I love raiding in Vanilla more than anything. Organising 40 lemmings into a group and having them play through and enjoy the game is rewarding for me. I like managing them, ensuring they get their fair share of loot and seeing how happy we are when we progress through the game. So I would just take 20 minutes a day to grind up gold for my raid consumables and they would help make the raid more interesting for myself and also make it go smoother for everyone involved. (To be fair, it helps that the grinding process was *really* interesting and involves a hunter soloing a max level 5 man dungeon, but I still did that upwards of like 400 times across the lifetime of that game) As I thought about this comparison I realised that this comparison was my solution. See I love LPing. I love getting to chat with my best friend about a game we're playing, I love seeing your comments on what we do. I love editing silly videos and discovering new games and skills. So how is the LP any different from my raid night? It's a Sunday activity that takes a set amount of time and is a regular activity. It's just not. It's the same. So what's 20 minutes per day farming Blood Vials to make my raid night smoother? Nothing that I haven't done hundreds of times before. You'll see Tea get worried in the next few episodes about my decision to just grind out resources. But it's not something to worry about. It's just what I've always done and it has done wonders to make this game better for me.
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Jul 20, 2022 12:17
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Jul 20, 2022 23:05
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Natural 20 fucked around with this message at 03:16 on Jul 23, 2022 |
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Jul 22, 2022 22:58
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Bloodborne - 21 - Djura The Hunter
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Jul 25, 2022 22:46
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 04:46 |
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Jul 27, 2022 22:59
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