AfricanBootyShine posted:

lol @ recommending playing 120+ hours of other games before playing the one that is best for a newcomer

StrixNebulosa posted:

Instead of purchasing Elden Ring I decided to play Dark Souls 2, since I own it, and so far I'm having a good weird time. It feels like I've stumbled into somebody else's dream. I am a [person] who is being driven mad because my [zombie curse] has ruined my memories of some nice lady, and now I'm in a ruined kingdom stabbing zombies (and really tough pigs?) for souls, which I am giving to a lady in order to become more powerful.

Everything feels intensely familiar thanks to my watching of like 3+ LPs of Dark Souls 1 (it's a fascinating game) but also terrifying because I don't know where any of the traps or ambushes are, and the notes and bloodstains aren't reliable.

Also I managed to go through a long passage and make it to a kingdom(?) full of armored giant knights first and that taught me a lot about watching enemy patterns and dying. I later came back to the first "main" hub bonfire and found a much easier place full of trees and angry zombies.

I'm playing as a knight, as it starts with a big sword, and in Monster Hunter my best weapon was the greatsword.

(Bonus aside: I've played a lot of Nioh and enjoyed it, some Monster Hunter and enjoyed it - need to return to both to beat 'em - but none of the From games yet. I've tried Dark Souls 1 several times but between my first experience being keyboard controls (it was bad!) and the LPs spoiling it, I no longer want to learn that game. I want new stuff!)

Bad Seafood posted:

My favorite part of Dark Souls 2 is the (killable) merchant who sets up shop right next to a batch of enemies who run at you and explode.

ymgve posted:

With DS2 they made bonfire warping much more powerful, which is good from a gameplay perspective (apart from the gotta warp to level up part), but that meant they didn’t need to make the overall game world a tight knot, which meant less major shortcuts and a more «flat» world feel.

DS3 and Bloodborne were a bit better but the worlds were still more spread out than DS1.

lih posted:

when people talk about the world design they generally meant how the world all fit together fairly coherently in interesting ways, rather than it being good at guiding player progression or anything. the master key is basically just a trap if it's your first playthrough yeah. the bit people like is that it's cool to explore and have the world loop back around on itself and encounter lots of interesting side paths that still feel like important parts of the world. like you can get to darkroot pretty early via the entrance below andre even without the master key & that's all optional except sif at the very end, eventually, who you can get to by a completely different entrance.

there are certainly big issues with the progression though - it's clear they meant for the catacombs to be tackled before the lordvessel, but there's never any reason to before then and if you do you just have to backtrack all the way out of it which is a chore. the game also kinda pushes you towards new londo if you got cursed since ingward can heal it and the ghosts are damageable if you're cursed, but that was just aggressively cruel design. the moss lady merchant didn't even sell purging stones originally lol

a lot of the issues would be solved by just having bonfire warping from the start like the later games, so you don't run into issues like beating the catacombs too early and having to climb back up with little reward. you do lose a tiny bit of the appeal of the world looping back on itself, having to trek away from safety & the relief at finding new routes back to firelink, but that's relatively minor and the world interconnecting is still cool regardless. i'd like to see a future game try to do what ds1 did with its world, just more polished (& having the quality of life changes from the sequels), since the closest any have is just bloodborne which has some moments but doesn't go anywhere near as far there.

JollyBoyJohn posted:

its actually the best designed videogame world ever op

The 7th Guest posted:

i think HROT and Wrath will. it took wrath a long time because of the pandemic but they are working pretty consistently on it now, and HROT already has a couple of e3 maps i think

dread delusion i'm not sure because if it's going for elder scrolls the dev might take some time to put a lot of content in

i expect Dread Templar, Viscerafest, and Blood West to hit 1.0 this year. My Time at Sandrock, Satisfactory and Slime Rancher 2 are possibly edge cases, and then Lunacid 1.0 I expect in 2024.

JollyBoyJohn posted:

whats the best platformer? (on pc) I really liked the Rayman games but I haven't played anything new from the past decade or so

StarkRavingMad posted:

More games should just have a slider for how much they respect you

haha what posted:

sentient for ps1

StarkRavingMad posted:

Sentient, a DOS/PS1 game from the 90s. Here's SGF's blind playthrough of it: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLaSPgE4K0SB2BfYFVQWQYc_igiW4H2h-N

haha what posted:

so its included separately to play in a cd player while u play lol

Perestroika posted:

Yeah. There was some hope that it was just a matter of a separate trailer production team going for a weird tone that wouldn't necessarily be reproduced ingame, but now it sure seems like that was on purpose and the whole game is like that.

pentyne posted:

Forspoken just went from "lol no" to "yeah on sale probably" for me if my computer can run it in a stable, even 30 fps manner.







Like drat, I will definitely support games going all in on that whole customizing game difficulty values and settings, it needs to be standard in every game of reasonable size going forward.

Anno posted:

There’s seemingly unlimited bad dialogue floating around from this game, but this seems fine?

zoux posted:

So, "comedy"

mistermojo posted:

I forgot how incredibly creepy the the spiders in Rain World are. it doesn't help that a dead one wound up in my shelter somehow

Mr. Fortitude posted:

“Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”

― C.S. Lewis

I mean, different mediums but same idea. Acting like Saturday morning cartoons are cringe for idiot babies and adults can't enjoy them is way more cringe than just enjoying the ride.

Bumhead posted:

Similar here. I need to be better at valuing my own preferences and time, because nothing about Hades or Hollow Knight managed to convince me those games were for me even after I played them.

Inscryption and Outer Wilds are two big ones for me every time there's a sale on. I can almost guarantee I won't like either, but the reception to them is so positive it's tricky to ignore them at discount.

Sway Grunt posted:

Coincidentally I just started this today after buying it in the winter sale. Put in five hours so far and I 100% co-sign everything, it's just fantastic. I could almost instantly tell it was one of those rare titles, so immediately captivating that it reminds you how good games can be. The combat is janky for sure but it works, and even as someone who generally hates fighting flying enemies I've been having fun with it.

I'm done for today having just come back from the Nokkpond but I really hope it stays this good.

ninjoatse.cx posted:

The combat really is something else. You think you're doing something wrong, the game can't possibly be expecting you to do that, but sure enough, that's exactly what it wants you to do. And after you've shown you can do it, how about doing it while dancing on a tight rope above instant death and stuff is shooting at you. Yeah.

It also has some of the most memorable moments and OST in a video game I've played in the past 10 years. Even linking what they are is kind of ruins it since the music transitions hit you much out of nowhere as much as the gameplay itself.

The 7th Guest posted:

Jack Trades posted:

Ciaphas posted:

Returnal's out now. Looking forward to hearing about the port quality, or possibly lack thereof

Jack Trades posted:

What's the deal with Returnal? Why is everyone raving about it?

From what I've seen it just looks like any other shooter in the roguelite pile except with the AA coat of paint, and somehow I doubt it's best in the genre when it comes to gameplay.