Natural 20 posted:

I will say

I am a God Gamer for a reason

And you disgusting mortals dare to DOUBT ME

Natural 20 posted:

WHYYYYYYY?

SIGSEGV posted:

Yeah, let's start with AC4A, that one is good, clean fun.

Natural 20 posted:

Natural 20 posted:

Slaan posted:

Check out your blood gem fortification screen again. Upgrading the cane did something

Natural 20 posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMnAqGwdqzc

Art will be along when I'm not getting drunk with Tea.

Simply Simon posted:

Here's a bit of a boss analysis.
- you can break his limbs like most beast bosses'. The forelegs are obvious and it happened often, but you can also break the hind ones - they are much more durable tho - and the head, which happened at the end with the BMA'd gunshot
- limb breaks stun the boss for a bit (not a stagger that can be visceral punished, so it doesn't play the you-parried-sound, TEA) and make further hits on the limb deal more damage
- the boss always responds to a leg break with an AOE explosion, so punishing his stun is actually a bad idea, at least if you wildly combo your stam away
- the phase transition is signified by the big explosion where it sucks sparks in. This doubles as its limb heal move, making the legs take less damage again, but open the boss up to being staggered again
- trying to break the head is insanely risky, but if you find a good way to do it (e.g. by whipping it from far enough away that you can evade the bites), you can really rack up damage after it's broken. Maybe not the best tactic, but it exists
- you cannot parry any move this boss does. It's simply too big

I don't like Watchdog much in practice - it is a boss that forces you to be defensive, to avoid its constant tantrums, AOE explosions, and of course the charge, and that is not fun in BB's system - but it's definitely well thought out overall. Again, this is a boss that would be better in a Souls game.

Natural 20 posted:

Bloodborne - 21 - Djura The Hunter

Crazy Achmed posted:

On weapons and playstyle:
It's ironic, really - what's winding some people up is that you are intentionally missing out on a lot of the breadth of the game, but is precisely because of the game design allowing the player to succeed with any one of a variety of weapons and playstyles that you are able to do it. And it's fine.
It's the same as Pokemon. Want to solo the game with your best buddy starter, who's monstrously overlevelled due to being a party of one? Sure you can. Accumulate a balanced team as you go to deal with any type of threat? Also works fine. Meticulously plan your roster, swapping mons in and out until you have an unstoppable team of legendaries? Hell yes. Just roll with whichever mons you think look the classiest? Yup, you can also beat the game like this.

On agression:
I think that the "be aggressive" thing is only true if you are looking at it as a specific comparison to dark souls. Compared to a lot of other games, then it's just "play normally, I guess", and compared to something like bayonetta it's "be extremely conservative". Dark souls combat is really slow and tactical since most enemies will kill you in a few hits, and attacking & dodging uses up a lot of your stamina. Patience and timing is everything - and you're probably also carrying a shield.

Shields in DS were so drat good that you can deal with most enemies by waiting until they bonk an attack off your shield, which puts them into a recoil/stun animation allowing you ample time to murder them. The wooden shield that we just picked up is a direct nod and wink to this - it's a useless gimmick item that is there to tell you, "hey Dark Souls fan, don't bother trying to hide behind a shield, you have to actually dodge and kill stuff fast before you make a mistake and die".

GimmickMan posted:

I have never played one of these games before but stubbornly optimizing for one thing (a skill cane build) instead of keeping your options open during a semi-blind first playthrough isn't the prudent thing to do. You lack the necessary information to know what is or isn't worth fully committing your resources to, after all.

Like, If I want to make an optimized character on my own, I'm going to throughly research the character options and game mechanics first. Otherwise, I'm going to either play a balanced character that can be taken in any direction in the late game or (yuck) straight up copypaste someone else's build.

This especially holds if you don't trust the designers to have balanced all the options. Just because a build seems viable in the early game doesn't mean it'll be viable to beat the endboss with. Given your experience so far, Nat, do you trust the From Soft team to make the skill cane build worth it in the end?

Natural 20 posted:

Natural 20 posted:

Apologies for the late release everyone! I was out longer than expected.

Slaan posted:

I'm glad you like the blades so much. From games are difficult and annoying... until you find the weapon you love. Once you do?

Natural 20 posted:

anilEhilated posted:

Ah, the traditional frustrating-rear end poison area.

Natural 20 posted:

This fact is likely to be eaten by the montage, but those things continue to frenzy you even if you kill them.

Simply Simon posted:

For a few moments, killing them does shut it down but it lingers a little. It's rude!

Generally I also think the Frontier is the worst area in the game, it's just unneccessarily confusing on top of being the Obligatory Poison Swamp. Very easy to get lost in even on repeated replays.

It does have a shortcut in the parts you've generally seen, though, not a super useful one but it exists. You can also fall down, down down quite a lot of it and get through it faster. The hunters don't respawn, making the first area much easier to just run through, and knowing how to reach the rock throwers from behind also adds a bit of a meta-reduced difficulty. It's still got the From design touches!

Overall, a key problem is however that you seem to just be insanely pissed off by the game killing you outright, and that's a mindset thing that can't be argued away. I personally do not care about dying in From games at all, and I care less if the game just goes "lol you're dead now". I think it's actually insanely funny and cool that the designers put a deadly trap here. Too few games are bold enough to risk pissing their players off. If this weren't an LP, they'd lose you here - they'd have lost you long ago, honestly - and the people at From basically say "that's fine by us, you'll never buy another From game, but we are absolutely willing to accept that". I'll buy this poo poo until I die because I LOVE this boldness. I LOVE seeing a clear vision that purposefully includes "we are going to attempt to kill you", because that also includes a) me coming back with knowledge on the second attempt, tripping the trap and avoiding it and going "heh, fool me once", and b) the option of me seeing it coming, or getting got but not dying because I react properly in the moment, and feeling like a champion.

If you do not like these moments nearly as much as I do, if you do not accept that in order for them to exist you sometimes just need to eat poo poo, then yeah, this game will sometimes be extremely unfun for you.


Anyway, I also think Tea's struggling hard with how much he's willing to help you. If he had not told you that Frontier is optional, you might have felt a lot differently about only giving it one more go before giving it a chance entirely. Same goes for other areas he's marked as "optional", actually. However, the result might also have been you assuming that Frontier is NOT optional, bashing your head against it for an entire episode and having less and less fun each time until you end up just miserable.

(or you would have succeeded eventually but ended the episode with "I killed a boss I guess but I hated getting there so much that the victory means nothing")


On a final note, Frontier is actually not optional if you want to do Chalice stuff. The Coldblood Flowerbuds in there are often overlooked, but you absolutely need them a few levels of Chalice down, and there's a more obvious thing I'm not gonna spoil of course.

Natural 20 posted:

Natural 20 posted:

Natural 20 posted:

SIGSEGV posted:

Actually watching nat20 learn to murder AC4A would be very funny, also it's a good game, also there's a lot of fun history about it to explain to bewildered people.