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The elegance of movement in Silksong

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121–130 of 358 posts

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#121

Fluid & fun movement feels great and a lot of my favorite games have it - Doom, Hades, Ori, Celeste, Apex Legends, The Finals and more. To me it's an ingredient in a great game, not something necessarily unique to Silksong though.

I hesitate to call Doom and Apex movement fluid. Well, it is fluid in the sense that it feels like you're on cart with exquisitely greased bearings and futuristic servos. FPS movement is inherently unnatural because no organism moves like that. That's not to say they don't control well, but they don't control naturally. Third person games can actually flow naturally, because you can animate things like turning around…

Never let realism get in the way of fun, to paraphrase GabeN :) The whole Earth gets taken over by demons from hell isn't super realistic either, that's not why I play it.

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#122

Dying 30 times to a boss isn;t that bad…

Is it if this constitutes an hour of two of your time, most of which is not actually fighting the boss, but walking back to it?

You arguably shouldn't be grinding a boss for several hours. The game is taxing and bashing your head against the wall for several hours will just mean you get sloppier and prolong the losing streak.

Take a 15 min break, either go somewhere else in game or better still, in real life. It really makes a world of difference. Dying over and over again from increasingly sloppy mistakes is not anyone's idea of fun.

This is generally true for any mechanically taxing skill. If you push yourself for too long you get tired, and when you get tired you get worse. Learning to identify this as a sign to step away is a very good life skill.

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#123
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hesitate to call Doom and Apex movement fluid. Well, it is fluid in the sense that it feels like you're on cart with exquisitely greased bearings and futuristic servos. FPS movement is inherently unnatural because no organism moves like that. That's not to say they don't control well, but they don't control naturally. Third person games can actually flow naturally, because you can animate things like turning around…

Funny, because the most fluid movement I have ever seen and experienced comes from a (25yo) FPS game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvAbbye-oCY

Oh man I forgot to mention Quake, but yeah rocket jumping on Quake was maybe my first experience with awesome movement and I spent a lot of time perfecting rocket jumping in Q3DM6. Quake might have even been the first 3D game or atleast FPS ever to have that kind of fast & skillful movement?

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#124
post #67

> Silksong as a game should not exist. It is so brutally difficult that it stretches the very definition of the word "game". Games are supposed to be fun [...] I haven't actually played HK yet, and I don't normally play Souls-likes, but I did finally start playing Elden Ring about two months ago. Yes, I've had times where I'm cursing out loud because I've been trying to beat a boss for three hours without success, so…

My first play through of Elden Ring was a pseudo challenge run - capped at 125RL (pvp meta) and dual UGS style. No ash of war usage. No guides for bosses. Malenia took me over a month, and probably over 500 deaths and I had to relax the ash of war usage (still limited by my very low FP) The entire end game was brutal as this was before the buff for UGS animation speeds and most boss openings were shorter than anythin…

>One meta lesson I like about Souls is it provides a safe environment to learn what performing under pressure is like

They used to give you unlimited time to deal with difficulty and always gave the alternative of rolling back and getting more levels. That's until Nightreign -- you are almost always under time pressure.

Forget Malenia -- everdark Libra is the current standard of the most diabolical Souls experience. The time is against you, the music is maddening. You either clear the summons in under 20 seconds or you get another stacked debuff and the goat is casting.

Can't wait for the Depth version to be released this Thursday.

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#125

> Silksong as a game should not exist. It is so brutally difficult that it stretches the very definition of the word "game". Games are supposed to be fun [...] I haven't actually played HK yet, and I don't normally play Souls-likes, but I did finally start playing Elden Ring about two months ago. Yes, I've had times where I'm cursing out loud because I've been trying to beat a boss for three hours without success, so…

Lots of people say this but they can unfortunately never articulate why that works in Elden Ring. Making a game that is insanely difficult will not be enough to give you that feeling of accomplishment. If that's all it took there's be thousands of games that gave you that feeling. And yet there aren't. So whatever makes Edlin Ring so special, it's appearently really hard to describe in a way that separates it from le…

Elden Ring, and Dark Souls before it are hard but fair. That separates it from lesser games.

Each boss has a moveset puzzle, where you have to figure out how to beat it, and to win it's not just enough to find the solution; the execution matters as well.

Other games usually just add boss HP or damage, instead of interesting movesets.

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#126
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the same boat here - I played it for a while, but was (and am) sincerely super confused what people find so amazing in it. I mean, it's an ok game, and I get that some people may like it, why not; but the repeated claims of it being the best of all time, to me totally baffling. Already the respawning of the critters, and the grind to get some coins to get such a basic game feature as a map, two early aspects that…

> I played it for a while, but was (and am) sincerely super confused what people find so amazing in it. That's very easy to explain. It's a Kickstarter effect. Boardgamegeek is a website that, among other things, aggregates ratings of board games into a big master list of which games are the best, kind of like imdb. The list has been corrupted by Kickstarter - it turns out that, when a game with a Kickstarter campaig…

Nope! Alot of people just really love the game. I'm one of them! I only heard about the game after its release, and the first time I played it was in during the end of 2017. The only expectations I had for it were that it was a difficult exploration game. What captivated me was the music, the level design, getting lost before realizing what exploration options were available to me - I could go on forever about the game.

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#127

Dying 30 times to a boss isn;t that bad…

Is it if this constitutes an hour of two of your time, most of which is not actually fighting the boss, but walking back to it?

In Act 1, there's usually a bench fairly close by. Runbacks are often also easy, don't even try to eliminate the enemies, just sprint and jump over them (timing matters of course).

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also played Elden Ring recently. I wish I could share your dopamine rush because I never had one during the playthrough. Certain bosses caused so much frustration that the net sense of achievement for the game was negative for a decent margin. I've also played Dark Souls and Sekiro and I found them better on this aspect. After beating them after an extended period of struggling, my thought was not "I finally got it…

Sekiro was so good at engendering this feeling. The first time you fight Genichiro you will probably die within seconds. The next fight it might take you 20+ tries to beat him. And then the last time you fight him you can basically no-hit him.

IMO, while Genichiro and sword/spear-wielding enemies are mostly fun, non-humanoid & gank bosses suck so bad.

Those bosses felt way too frustrating to me because they force you to unlearn the entire deflect gameplay, turning it into an annoying, slow-paced & somewhat janky fight.

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spoilers: Silksong has arenas with 3 mobs that throw discs plus you. Idk about you, but I can't track 7 things moving at once. This isn't fun. Nor is it challenging, you just have to get lucky. I like Silksong, but the only way some the bosses were made challenging was because of constant adds. Hollow Knight rarely had this.

Have you tried turning the “Backer Credits” setting on? The game reportedly becomes substantially easier afterwards. Source - https://youtu.be/1rsWTBGY_cY?t=777

[deleted]

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#130
post #7

Am I the only one who didn't like Hollow Knight? In theory, it's just the game for me: indie, charming graphics, technically well done. What's not to like? In practice, it felt too difficult, too much work, too repetitive, and simply unfun to me. edit: interesting, downvotes for expressing an opinion directly related to sentences in the article (how difficult games are enjoyable somehow to some people; the article is…

Just to comment on the downvotes, I think this (a comment to the effect of "I don't like it" being downvoted) is an understandable if unfortunate consequence of modern internet culture not taking "it's just not for everyone" as a conclusion (especially if this is due to something being too hard).

To make something exclusionary, especially if this has a whiff of elitism, is taken by some to be a moral failing. Every complaint that could be read as saying that a work is like that, therefore, raises the spectre of activists or dedicated rabble-rousers using it as ammo to get the developers to ruin it for those who do enjoy it, be it by actually simplifying the game for everyone, devaluing the sense of achievement by introducing an "easy mode", or just changing direction with future expansions.

This has in fact happened with many games I play(ed), live-service games seeming particularly susceptible. The incentive to shout down any complaints about difficulty therefore exists.

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