God Gamer Natural 20 vs. Bloodborne: Let's Play Bloodborne Blind

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Let's Play! > God Gamer Natural 20 vs. Bloodborne: Let's Play Bloodborne Blind

EclecticTastes: Sep 17, 2012; "Most plans are critically flawed by their own logic. A failure at any step will ruin everything after it. That's just basic cause and effect. It's easy for a good plan to fall apart. Therefore, a plan that has no attachment to logic cannot be stopped."

This is a subgenre of game I have only ever enjoyed from the outside, but something about these sorts of games makes them very entertaining for me to watch. Bloodborne, in particular, is one I'm forced to enjoy vicariously due to not having any of the Playstations, which is too bad because the trick weapons and how they define one's playstyle seems like my kind of jam for the sort of gameplay found in Soulslikes. I'm curious which one you'll end up sticking with. Assuming you ever find one, of course.

Me, if I ever get a chance, I'd go straight for the Kirkhammer, it just looks rad as hell.

EDIT: By the way, the word "milquetoast" is actually a reference to the character, Caspar Milquetoast, from a 1920s comic strip, The Timid Soul. The character was named for milk toast, which is toast in warm milk, and was generally given to children and the infirm, as it was considered easy to digest (as we all know, nobody anywhere has difficulties processing dairy products or wheat). Thus, the character was timid, ineffectual, bland, and that's why we now use the word to refer to anyone who displays those same qualities.

EclecticTastes fucked around with this message at 01:44 on Jun 10, 2022

# ¿ Jun 10, 2022 01:37

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 12:17

EclecticTastes: Sep 17, 2012; "Most plans are critically flawed by their own logic. A failure at any step will ruin everything after it. That's just basic cause and effect. It's easy for a good plan to fall apart. Therefore, a plan that has no attachment to logic cannot be stopped."

Good choice on the threaded cane, I enjoy seeing that one in action, probably because it's the classiest of the starter weapons.

# ¿ Jun 11, 2022 02:21

EclecticTastes: Sep 17, 2012; "Most plans are critically flawed by their own logic. A failure at any step will ruin everything after it. That's just basic cause and effect. It's easy for a good plan to fall apart. Therefore, a plan that has no attachment to logic cannot be stopped."

Natural 20 posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYcXh3be3n0

Largely just highlights for everyone here. But I had fun making it.

This highlight reel inspired me.

# ¿ Jun 12, 2022 23:47

EclecticTastes: Sep 17, 2012; "Most plans are critically flawed by their own logic. A failure at any step will ruin everything after it. That's just basic cause and effect. It's easy for a good plan to fall apart. Therefore, a plan that has no attachment to logic cannot be stopped."

One mechanic I'll point out because it appeared in the video, and apologies if it's out of line to do so, but you might notice if you keep whacking an enemy after they're dead, there's actually a brief window in which hitting them will still recover your health, if you have any pale red bits on your health bar. Good way to mitigate the game's attrition mechanics.

# ¿ Jun 14, 2022 00:28

EclecticTastes: Sep 17, 2012; "Most plans are critically flawed by their own logic. A failure at any step will ruin everything after it. That's just basic cause and effect. It's easy for a good plan to fall apart. Therefore, a plan that has no attachment to logic cannot be stopped."

Looking forward to the upcoming "zero Blood Echoes spent" run of Bloodborne.

# ¿ Jun 16, 2022 00:12

EclecticTastes: Sep 17, 2012; "Most plans are critically flawed by their own logic. A failure at any step will ruin everything after it. That's just basic cause and effect. It's easy for a good plan to fall apart. Therefore, a plan that has no attachment to logic cannot be stopped."

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.

# ¿ Jun 16, 2022 23:20

EclecticTastes: Sep 17, 2012; "Most plans are critically flawed by their own logic. A failure at any step will ruin everything after it. That's just basic cause and effect. It's easy for a good plan to fall apart. Therefore, a plan that has no attachment to logic cannot be stopped."

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.

# ¿ Jun 17, 2022 00:43

EclecticTastes: Sep 17, 2012; "Most plans are critically flawed by their own logic. A failure at any step will ruin everything after it. That's just basic cause and effect. It's easy for a good plan to fall apart. Therefore, a plan that has no attachment to logic cannot be stopped."

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.

# ¿ Jun 21, 2022 11:14

EclecticTastes: Sep 17, 2012; "Most plans are critically flawed by their own logic. A failure at any step will ruin everything after it. That's just basic cause and effect. It's easy for a good plan to fall apart. Therefore, a plan that has no attachment to logic cannot be stopped."

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.

# ¿ Jun 25, 2022 07:38

EclecticTastes: Sep 17, 2012; "Most plans are critically flawed by their own logic. A failure at any step will ruin everything after it. That's just basic cause and effect. It's easy for a good plan to fall apart. Therefore, a plan that has no attachment to logic cannot be stopped."

Natural 20 posted:

I will say

I am a God Gamer for a reason

And you disgusting mortals dare to DOUBT ME

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.

# ¿ Jun 26, 2022 03:23

EclecticTastes: Sep 17, 2012; "Most plans are critically flawed by their own logic. A failure at any step will ruin everything after it. That's just basic cause and effect. It's easy for a good plan to fall apart. Therefore, a plan that has no attachment to logic cannot be stopped."

It's probably worth pointing out at this point that, generally speaking, hitstun is somewhat proportional to a weapon's size/bulk. Like, the saw spear was clearly applying more hitstun to the Cleric Beat (read: any at all) than the threaded cane. If you want to be able to sometimes knock enemies out of their attacks, you'll want a bigger, heavier weapon.

# ¿ Jul 2, 2022 00:58

EclecticTastes: Sep 17, 2012; "Most plans are critically flawed by their own logic. A failure at any step will ruin everything after it. That's just basic cause and effect. It's easy for a good plan to fall apart. Therefore, a plan that has no attachment to logic cannot be stopped."

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.

# ¿ Jul 14, 2022 10:35

EclecticTastes: Sep 17, 2012; "Most plans are critically flawed by their own logic. A failure at any step will ruin everything after it. That's just basic cause and effect. It's easy for a good plan to fall apart. Therefore, a plan that has no attachment to logic cannot be stopped."

The amount of Blood Echoes you gain over time versus how much it costs to gain levels do not even the tiniest, remotest bit keep pace with one another unless you're an MLG Pro Gamer doing a low-level run. Like, a decent run between lanterns in the early game could get you three or four levels, while by the end of the game, a similar run will only get you one, if you're lucky. York is absolutely on the money that it's easier to branch out your build earlier in the game. By the end of the game, your build will be mostly fixed in place, and you'll be spending Blood Echoes more on upgrading gear and topping off consumables.

# ¿ Jul 23, 2022 10:45

EclecticTastes: Sep 17, 2012; "Most plans are critically flawed by their own logic. A failure at any step will ruin everything after it. That's just basic cause and effect. It's easy for a good plan to fall apart. Therefore, a plan that has no attachment to logic cannot be stopped."

You keep blaming the game when many of your issues come down to your refusal to use a different weapon. The threaded cane has comparatively little reach when untransformed, and does next to no hitstun, and here you are, whiffing tons of attacks because you overestimate the length of the weapon, and getting hit back because enemies aren't taking enough hitstun. Seems like there might be a connection, there. The threaded cane's intended playstyle is "whack, sidestep, repeat" because it does nothing to prevent foes from smacking you around. If "aggressive" to you means "murder them before they get a hit in by mashing the attack button a bunch", you're going to want a heavier weapon, period.

# ¿ Jul 25, 2022 23:58

EclecticTastes: Sep 17, 2012; "Most plans are critically flawed by their own logic. A failure at any step will ruin everything after it. That's just basic cause and effect. It's easy for a good plan to fall apart. Therefore, a plan that has no attachment to logic cannot be stopped."

Obligatum VII posted:

It's good to experiment with different weapons in From games, particularly Bloodborne because they're largely all so distinct in it. I just think it's fun to try out different stuff as a change of pace. I'm one of those people who makes weapons of every single type in monster hunter and rotates between them.

Edit: Also, I forget, but was it brought up that fire adds arcane scaling? At least, that's what I remember.

I would actually say that Bloodborne and Monster Hunter have something in common, as far as weapons go, in that in both, your choice of weapon is the primary thing that defines your playstyle. The Threaded Cane plays completely differently from the Kirkhammer, which plays completely differently from the Tonitrus, etc. Very few weapons play even close to similarly to others.

# ¿ Jul 30, 2022 01:31

EclecticTastes: Sep 17, 2012; "Most plans are critically flawed by their own logic. A failure at any step will ruin everything after it. That's just basic cause and effect. It's easy for a good plan to fall apart. Therefore, a plan that has no attachment to logic cannot be stopped."

The Rifle Spear scales primarily with Skill, but the gunshot scales with Bloodtinge; in other words it's basically both a melee weapon and a gun. Its best quality is that it can serve as a replacement for firearms, allowing you to either conserve upgrade materials, or use alternate, more gimmicky lefthand weapons such as the Flamesprayer, Hunter's Torch, etc. As most skill-only weapons are found in the Hunter's Nightmare (Fromsoft clearly realized how few skill-only weapons were in the base game when they made the DLC), it's probably your best alternate option if you don't plan on playing the DLC anytime soon, and want to try literally anything aside from the threaded cane. The one thing to be careful of is that the range on the rifle spear's shot is shorter than many other firearms, comparable to the Hunter's Blunderbuss, so you won't be able to parry from outside the enemy's range as often (though, you almost never do that anyway, so it won't change much for you).

# ¿ Aug 1, 2022 23:40

EclecticTastes: Sep 17, 2012; "Most plans are critically flawed by their own logic. A failure at any step will ruin everything after it. That's just basic cause and effect. It's easy for a good plan to fall apart. Therefore, a plan that has no attachment to logic cannot be stopped."

I literally said this at the beginning of the thread, you can continue rallying off of dead enemies for a couple swings, so those enemies at zero health Nat's been whacking? They were dead, just in the middle of their death animations, and Nat got health back because that's just how rallying works.

Additionally, York is just plain wrong about falling deaths. If you fall to your death, one of two things happens. If the pit is bottomless or the fall is long enough that it's instant death from any height, your Blood Echoes will be placed near the edge you fell from. If the surface was close enough that you could fall safely with just minor damage, but your health was low so the lesser fall damage finished you off, the Blood Echoes will be placed where you died. In both cases, it's possible for an enemy in the area to absorb the Blood Echoes, as usual.

# ¿ Aug 9, 2022 00:29

EclecticTastes: Sep 17, 2012; "Most plans are critically flawed by their own logic. A failure at any step will ruin everything after it. That's just basic cause and effect. It's easy for a good plan to fall apart. Therefore, a plan that has no attachment to logic cannot be stopped."

You're a little mixed up about your churches. The church you seemed to be thinking of is Oedon Chapel, while the Great Cathedral is where you fought Vicar Amelia. So, "to the right" in that context is a little easier to parse, because it obviously means to the right when approaching the cathedral, because the interior is a dead end.

# ¿ Aug 11, 2022 08:06

EclecticTastes: Sep 17, 2012; "Most plans are critically flawed by their own logic. A failure at any step will ruin everything after it. That's just basic cause and effect. It's easy for a good plan to fall apart. Therefore, a plan that has no attachment to logic cannot be stopped."

Natural 20 posted:

This is going to get debated further.

But I just don't think winning with help is winning. I don't begrudge anyone who does that, but I would feel like I hadn't really won anything if Tea just murdered a boss while I watched or whatever. Or I just didn't have to deal with boss attacks because they were taunted by a summon.

After I've killed a boss I'm absolutely fine grabbing a party and stabbing it to death on a refight.

There are four other Bloodborne LPs in the archive, and while the only one I've watched in full is CJacobs', I'm reasonably certain they all killed at least the vast majority of the bosses solo. It's completely achievable.

# ¿ Aug 16, 2022 12:21

EclecticTastes: Sep 17, 2012; "Most plans are critically flawed by their own logic. A failure at any step will ruin everything after it. That's just basic cause and effect. It's easy for a good plan to fall apart. Therefore, a plan that has no attachment to logic cannot be stopped."

I'm a big fan of this episode. Good to see Nat has good taste in webcomics.

EDIT: To comment in more detail on the actual gameplay, everyone hates the Nightmare Frontier, it's a miserable area that's no fun, which is seemingly obligatory in every FromSoft title. You're actually doing fine now, Nat, and York's weird, bitter rants about "hubris" and "proper hunters" are kind of starting to sound uncomfortably sincere, rather than the joke I've been assuming them to be. Like, you're officially having a totally normal time playing Bloodborne.

EclecticTastes fucked around with this message at 02:30 on Aug 20, 2022

# ¿ Aug 20, 2022 02:11

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 12:17

EclecticTastes: Sep 17, 2012; "Most plans are critically flawed by their own logic. A failure at any step will ruin everything after it. That's just basic cause and effect. It's easy for a good plan to fall apart. Therefore, a plan that has no attachment to logic cannot be stopped."

Here's a bit of fun: If at any point before killing Rom, you'd had 40 or more Insight, you'd be able to see the Lesser Amygdalas even before the blood moon phase. You'd likely need to down a bunch of Madman's Knowledge to get there, but if popped a bunch for an upcoming shopping spree, you'd be in for quite a shock.

# ¿ Aug 27, 2022 04:37

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