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Hidetaka Miyazaki sees death as a feature, not a bug

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Re: Hidetaka Miyazaki sees death as a feature, not a bug

#61

Post by mrmuagi »

nassimsoftware wrote: post #27

I'm new to From Soft games and decided to buy Elden Ring because it's a similar game to Zelda Breath of The Wild which I really liked. I was afraid that the game would be too difficult. After playing 17hrs, the game is indeed difficult but there are many things you can do in the game to make it easier for yourself (Which I did because I'm more interested in exploring the world than mastering the gameplay). For exampl…

And there are things you can do to make it harder too! Like limiting yourself to certain weapons, speed running or even doing a no hit run.

Re: Hidetaka Miyazaki sees death as a feature, not a bug

#62

Post by xeromal »

goldenkey wrote: post #52
xeromal wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If space travel is cheap enough when I die, I'd like to be shot into the sun.

That sounds awesome. Like an immolating monk except by pure light/EMG itself :-) Count me in!

Hell yeah man! Just going back home.

Re: Hidetaka Miyazaki sees death as a feature, not a bug

#63

Post by tshaddox »

wyager wrote: post #30
shhsshs wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just my own opinions to respond to a couple of your points: - Visuals: Disappointing. Looked like a cheap free-to-play MMO. Cheap-looking textures, stock-looking characters What settings did you have the game on? This has never been my experience with a Souls game - and definitely not Elden Ring. - bad rigging (e.g. characters holding things in unnatural poses), etc. Yeah, agree. Pretty typical for every game though.…

> What settings did you have the game on? 1440p "high" on 3060 Ti. My visual objections weren't just the low-quality lighting, textures, framerate cap, etc. (objectively kind of bad) but also the visual design of the game (which I thought was kind of tacky/garish and reminiscent of 2010-era low-budget multiplayer games). > Pretty typical for every game though. I saw some stuff that looked really out-of-place in an AA…

I’ve watched around an hour or so of gameplay and reviews, mostly with footage from consoles (I think almost entirely PS5) and while I noticed some frame rate inconsistency and some image quality weirdness on like shadows and vegetation, mostly I’ve found the game to be extremely impressive visually. Sometimes jawdroppingly so.

To compare it to low budget free to play games from 10 years ago honestly makes me wonder if your setup is majorly borked somehow. I’d love to see footage straight from your system to know if you’re seeing something very different or if our ideas of what looks good are truly so fundamentally different. Maybe the PC version is uniquely terrible or something?

Re: Hidetaka Miyazaki sees death as a feature, not a bug

#64

Post by DanHulton »

ShroudedNight wrote: post #60
DanHulton wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very simply, no other game series does the "mastery" thing so well. The game is both wide and deep, and even though there's superficially a leveling system, it won't save you if you can't actually play. This raises some accessability issues, definitely. I'd love to see Fromsoft games take that challenge on next. (Or another studio, there are plenty of great Souls-like games out there.) Especially as I'm getting older…

> This raises some accessability issues, definitely. I'd love to see Fromsoft games take that challenge on next. > Especially as I'm getting older, I definitely feel like I have a lot more "knocking the rust off" to do... I would definitely appreciate novel takes on accessible mastery. I likely [1] have visual memory (immediate + delayed), subtle but measurable visual motor difficulties, and ADHD:I. Having zeitgeist…

Why that sounds very familiar. I'll have to see what I can do about increasing refresh rates, seeing if that helps.

Weirdly, what I've found helps is restarting games. Like, play 2-3 hours, go offline for a day, then come back and replay those 2-3 hours. I find I have a lot less "newness" fighting for attention, and my subconscious has had time to assimilate a lot of it subconsciously, and then I have a much better "second play" experience, and then I can continue on happily after that.

Also, same tactic for boss fights. Sometimes I'll be stuck on a boss for an hour or so, and all I really need to do is go to sleep and try again tomorrow. I actually spent like 1.5h on a miniboss in the first major castle, then the next day, came back and beat him first try. Feels bad to set it down, feels great to smash through that barrier later.

Re: Hidetaka Miyazaki sees death as a feature, not a bug

#65

Post by tptacek »

wyager wrote: post #14

I bought ER the other day after hearing rave review and was super disappointed. I ended up returning it after a couple hours. * Visuals: Disappointing. Looked like a cheap free-to-play MMO. Cheap-looking textures, stock-looking characters, bad rigging (e.g. characters holding things in unnatural poses), etc. * Controls: Unpleasant. Controls felt very sluggish. If this is supposed to make the game more challenging or…

To everything else people have said about the controls system, I'll add that the combat system these games use is the only thing that really makes the diversity of weapons meaningful; if your play style is zippy and responsive, you need to use zippy and responsive weapons, and there are dimensions to it besides "fast" and "slow"; a curved sword, a straight sword, and a poking sword will have different movesets, and differing levels of commitment and payoffs. Without that system, the only difference between these things would be damage stats and maybe an AOE radius.

Horizon is a game series that makes the opposite decisions --- it's amazing looking, super responsive, and extremely ergonomic. And for me it might as well be a 2D platformer. Combat looks spectacular, but nothing means anything, as you quickly come to realize while your character crafts 20 special arrows that involve soldering robot parts onto twigs in slow-motion as she aims. Why even maintain the conceit that she's shooting arrows? Just give her a ray gun.

I agree with you about the visuals! I'm playing on a PS5, and this is the least visually impressive Soulsborne game I've played. The comparison downthread with the Demons Souls remake is spot on; Demons Souls looks incredible on the PS5, but Elden Ring isn't even competitive with From's PS4 stuff.

I also think the game suffers visually from the open-world design; the linear paths in previous Soulsbornes have let them do a lot of interesting stuff with level design, but in this game almost everything on screen has to be addressable by the character, from arbitrary directons. This was especially apparent to me when I got to the Hieronymus Bosch-inspired midgame. In previous Soulsbornes, that would have been a wall of composed visuals; here, it's a flat plain studded with red blobs.

It's also much easier than any FromSoftware game since Demons Souls, which may be good for you, or may make it harder to see why people love games like Sekiro so much.

Bloodborne is the canonical starter Souls games for Soulsborne skeptics, and my bid for best AAA game of all time (but I don't play a lot of these games, so, grain of salt.)

Re: Hidetaka Miyazaki sees death as a feature, not a bug

#66

Post by steveklabnik »

autoexec wrote: post #53
makeitdouble wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To note, there are many other mechanisms to adjust the playing experience than a difficulty slider or an explicit "easy" mode. I think a lot of us prefer a more natural and "legit" integration of different paths into the gameplay. It requires more effort and creativity on the developer side, but it also allows players to move from laid back/easier playing to more demanding play in a seamless way. To put it in your te…

> To put it in your terms, I prefer games where the player chooses _in game_ what they are and what they aren't capable of What are some examples of games that do this? I haven't played many recent titles, so the only examples of this I can think of are some games like skyrim that let you max out everything so you can play as any class you like and move between them at will or Final Fantasy/Pokemon where you can grin…

Celeste, another famously hard game (that incidentally I used to speedrun and am wearing a tshirt of right now) has "Assist Mode." (which I now see was mentioned downthread) When you select it from the menu, it states:

> “Assist Mode allows you to modify the game’s rules to reduce its difficulty. This includes options such as slowing the game speed, granting yourself invincibility or infinite stamina, and skipping chapters entirely. Celeste was designed to be a challenging but accessible game. We believe that its difficulty is essential to the experience. We recommend playing without Assist Mode your first time. However, we understand that every player is different. If Celeste is inaccessible to you due to its difficulty, we hope that Assist Mode will allow you to still enjoy it.”

Well, more properly, that's what the initial version said. There was a lot of discussion in accessibility circles about this; it was clear that they had their hearts in the right place, but it was still a little ... condescending is too strong, but a little too judgy, maybe.

When they released Chapter 9, it was updated to instead say:

> “Assist Mode allows you to modify the game’s rules to fit your specific needs. This includes options such as slowing the game speed, granting yourself invincibility or infinite stamina, and skipping chapters entirely. Celeste is intended to be a challenging and rewarding experience. If the default game proves inaccessible to you, we hope that you can still find that experience with Assist Mode.”

This is still an options/settings style solution to this problem, but the way it's framed is significantly different, and the options are fairly granular, so you can tune things as you wish.

Incidentally, Maddy, the game director and one of the devs for Celeste, had a Twitter thread about what she would imagine an Assist Mode for Sekiro might look like: https://twitter.com/MaddyThorson/status/1113534763564826624

Re: Hidetaka Miyazaki sees death as a feature, not a bug

#67

Post by AmericanChopper »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #36
AmericanChopper wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The "difficulty" stems from the game developers anticipating how you will approach situations based on earlier situations, and adding new caveats to the rules. This assessment seems very strange to me. Their games are hard because you need to be rather competent in their demanding mechanics to progress, and you need to learn every encounter perfectly to get past it. That’s why so many reviewers trashed Sekiro, beca…

It's in part this process of learning new encounters I'm talking about. In the beginning of Dark Souls, you can kill every enemy pretty much the same way. Then gradually you need to use more mechanics to get forward. Very little of it is actually mechanically demanding. What's demanded of you is that you observe and correctly assess the situation, that you recognize that what you are doing isn't working, and the solu…

All of their games demand that you get better at the game mechanics as you progress through them, which is what you’re actually describing, but for some reason you think controlling your character in combat is something other than game mechanics? The fact that people have practiced these games enough that they can beat it with all sort of whacky interfaces doesn’t really prove anything.

Re: Hidetaka Miyazaki sees death as a feature, not a bug

#68

Post by this_is_not_you »

markus_zhang wrote: post #16

I heard about these gamed and watched a few hours of gameplay each. I was unconvinced and closed the YouTube tabs after it became too boring. I guess I have to play it to feel it? But most of the games I enjoy playing are fun to watch. Duke3d and Baldurs Gate are two examples. Can someone elaborate why Dark Soul is actually fun to play, and more importantly why sold for so many copies? I read other comments and the t…

I have a different take on what makes the Souls game interesting (but it has changed somewhat with Elden Ring).

What I enjoyed most about the Dark Souls games and Bloodborne was the sense of adventure/exploration/dread that comes with leaving a safe zone (bonfire, lamp) and venturing out into the unknown. You don't know what to expect, there will be new enemies that you don't know how to deal with yet, there might be traps but somehow you forge on, not knowing when you will reach the next save point. With every enemy you kill you gain currency you can use to level up, but one mistake and it's all gone. Then you have to be extra careful to get it back. The sense of relief you feel when the level design all of the sudden brings you around to an old safe zone is beyond anything I have felt in other games.

That's also why I didn't care so much about the boss fights initially but I came to enjoy them for the challenge. To the point that I spent 2 hours yesterday in Elden Ring trying to defeat a boss that was totally optional.

Re: Hidetaka Miyazaki sees death as a feature, not a bug

#69

Post by idle_zealot »

autoexec wrote: post #59
idle_zealot wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What are some examples of games that do this? The Souls games, and Elden Ring. There are places you can go in-game to find powerful weapons and easily level up. If a boss is too hard you can go explore surrounding areas and come back when your character is more powerful. Or you can choose to persist and master the boss’s mechanics to beat it at your current strength. Each area in these games works like a puzzle wit…

Dark souls has been on my list of games to try for some time. Sounds like they went the route of the grind which I'm fine with as a compromise (in some games I even prefer to be over-leveled). I'm still trying to decide between playing on PC or console though. I know the PC port had issues, but there have been plenty of times when a mod or simple console command would have saved me from bugs if I were on PC instead o…

Grinding is certainly an option, but wasn’t what I was trying to communicate. The games tend to have dense worlds that reward thorough exploration. It’s in the course of this exploration that player characters have the opportunity to become more powerful by finding valuable items tucked away off the main path.

Of course, if the player doesn’t know what to do with the things they find then the extra exploration won’t help. A common mistake is failure to engage with the weapon upgrade system. Encounters seem a lot harder when your attacks do half the damage they ought to.

Re: Hidetaka Miyazaki sees death as a feature, not a bug

#70

Post by lmm »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #67
marginalia_nu wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's in part this process of learning new encounters I'm talking about. In the beginning of Dark Souls, you can kill every enemy pretty much the same way. Then gradually you need to use more mechanics to get forward. Very little of it is actually mechanically demanding. What's demanded of you is that you observe and correctly assess the situation, that you recognize that what you are doing isn't working, and the solu…

All of their games demand that you get better at the game mechanics as you progress through them, which is what you’re actually describing, but for some reason you think controlling your character in combat is something other than game mechanics? The fact that people have practiced these games enough that they can beat it with all sort of whacky interfaces doesn’t really prove anything.

By that definition, "getting good at game mechanics" is so broad as to be meaningless, and "need to be rather competent in their demanding mechanics" is no explanation at all.
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