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The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters

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Re: The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters

#121

Post by ASalazarMX »

AlienRobot wrote: post #115
myfonj wrote: post #12

> As a result, the game offers no easy satisfaction of hacking and slashing through weaker opponents. Besides the questionable morality of kill=experience=progress in typical hack'n'slash or roguelike, what started to irritate me in there as I grew older as well, was the stupid mechanics where crowds of enemies described as intelligent humanoids (i.e. not animals or robots) facing clearly overpowered high-level PC (f…

That's because the only thing that became "realistic" were the graphics. People don't really want realism anywhere else, because realism means infinite complexity. They just want to hack'n'slash.

I'd argue that people want entertaining mechanics, not just mindless action. At least not always.

Re: The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters

#123

Post by lopsotronic »

alansaber wrote: post #41
david_shaw wrote: post #4

The Fallout games often exemplify this: nearly every decision you make is morally ambiguous, and often has far-reaching repercussions in the story and world.

Fits the setting well. Especially New vegas.

FNV is peak franchise, IMHO. Master's study of how to make a sandbox tell a narrative.

Also, and this is trivial tiddlywinkies, the designers bothered to do a little bit of light reading about how guns actually work. I am continually distracted by impossible mechanisms in later FO games.

Re: The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters

#124

Post by lopsotronic »

Old Guy here calling out Planescape:Torment for directing us to perhaps the most insidious monster of all.

It's an old isometric Infinity Engine game - although the engine is heavily hacked - but if you get the urge to play an older game, and you don't mind reading a whole bunch of text, well, it's got the rep for a reason. Although it's been nigh 30 years I can't bring myself to spoil it. It's a good 'un.

Re: The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters

#125

Post by sedimannapoleon »

gainda wrote: post #103
belval wrote: post #89

Perhaps not a monster, but in "It takes two", there is a particular scene where you have to murder a friendly stuffed elephant to get your in-game daughter to cry. I have been playing video games for decades at this point but that one really shook me up. You pretty much execute a toy begging for its life. As soon as that scene was over it genuinely took me a few days to come back to it. That was a hard rewatch: https…

Long time gamer here too and this also really got me. I'm not sure exactly what it was; perhaps a turn to a darker tone where I wasn't expecting it. For all the interpersonal disagreements the game is generally 'whimsical.' It was the desperation of the elephant that really got me ... the bargaining, the confusion. I find that as I get older I respond more to media like this. I'm not sure if it's emotional intelligen…

[dead]

Re: The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters

#126

Post by setr »

myfonj wrote: post #62
Jensson wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I guess the "fun aspect" of seeing them flee and not restraining your movement at all could be slightly more satisfying than taking them down in a single hit one-by-one for the thousand time. Chasing enemies is much more annoying than them coming to you, so that would be a punishment to the player. Players don't like when you punish them in that way, they want to kill the monsters they don't want an upgrade that ma…

> Chasing enemies is much more annoying than them coming to you, so that would be a punishment to the player. It seems I've failed to express myself clearly. The idea was that at some point, "low-level" adversaries simply stand no chance against a "high-level" PC, which should be obvious to both sides -- so acting accordingly on both sides would make sense without taking the fun out of the game, because -- and hear m…

The truly correct answer is give the player a mild damage aura/aoe and let the mobs die at your feet on their own. Running away breaks an annoying amount of mechanics, like ingredient farming.

The power fantasy just needs them to die trivially. So just do that.

Re: The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters

#127

Post by sfink »

ajuc wrote: post #32
shevy-java wrote: post #27

> This non-battle turned out to be a powerful experience, but its power stemmed mostly from the contrast between this and my other monster encounters. This is more correlated with modern games. Modern games, at the least non-Indie games, dumbed down the gameplay. I am not saying such games are awful per se, but they are often very simplified to the 1990s era in many ways. Many old RPG games are quite complex; or told…

1. there's a trade-off between graphics/sound quality and story complexity. The better quality your voiced dialogue is - the more you have to pay for every additional line - so you tend to shorten it. Same with graphics - it's one thing to paint 8 frames of 32x32 sprites. It's another to motion-capture, model, texture, and process 100s of different versions of each character animations. 2. you're comparing unfairly (…

> 1. there's a trade-off between graphics/sound quality and story complexity. The better quality your voiced dialogue is - the more you have to pay for every additional line - so you tend to shorten it. Same with graphics - it's one thing to paint 8 frames of 32x32 sprites. It's another to motion-capture, model, texture, and process 100s of different versions of each character animations.

There's another reason for this beyond those practical limitations. The imaginary world that these games inhabit isn't more or less complex depending on the bit depth of each pixel. The difference is made up by the player's own imagination. There's a tradeoff in the space of possibilities of what something could be -- if you give the player more data (better resolution, animations, whatever), then they're more constrained and less free to imagine their own version. One or the other isn't strictly better; stunning visuals provide one kind of value, uncertainty and suspense and filling in the blanks can bring another sort of value. (And both can destroy their own sources of value -- a high-definition but cartoonish boss image or animation can ruin the mood just as much as a botched reveal of some mysterious aspect of the setting.)

Re: The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters

#128

Post by xkcd-sucks »

ellefire wrote: post #3

The Cogwork Dancers in Hollow Knight: Silksong are a recent example of this https://hollowknight.wiki/w/Cogwork_Dancers

All of Silksong did this really well - Killing the bosses is the point of the game; each boss fight starts out frustrating and becomes quite fun, but at the point where the fight becomes pure fun you kill them and can never repeat that fight again. With the exception of its wonderful final boss fight, but still

Re: The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters

#129

Post by vector_spaces »

tptacek wrote: post #111

Well, Ebrietas and Rom in Bloodborne are the only two monsters that aren't actively hostile, and both have lore backstories (including their genetic relationship) explaining that. Killing Ebrietas is optional, which works against the idea that the game is setting you up to question the ethics of monster-killing; many players don't even realize they can walk away from Ebrietas, because the game absolutely primes you t…

The game very explicitly implores the player to question the ethics of monster slaying -- most directly through the character of Djura, who points out that the beasts were once people too. The game goes so far as to give you a dialogue box when talking to him, with the options to spare the beasts or not

There is also the romp through the Hunter's Nightmare, whose first act is replete with beasts cowering in fear at the sight of the player character. Even if you spare them you'll usually see them brutally slain by mad hunter compatriots anyway

And it's no mistake that all the "kin" type characters you encounter in the game, like Rom, Ebrietas, and Moon Presence, are all deeply tragic.

Thematically Bloodborne is deeply concerned with humanization/dehumanization and how those interact with violence, and it plays a lot with this in the narrative to subvert with the usual power fantasy of the soulslike genre -- the beasts cowering in fear in the nightmare seem more human than the mad hunters, Ebrietas appears to be grieving when you encounter her, and with Rom you might systematically murder her children before directing your blade at her. Like you can live out that power fantasy, but it won't always feel great.

So no, I don't think that Ebrietas being optional works against this idea at all. It just allows the narrative to explore different facets of this question -- it humanizes her, and if you choose to fight her it's because you chose to be the aggressor.

Re: The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters

#130

Post by gnerd00 »

zoogeny wrote: post #116

My own anecdote related to this idea was on a playthrough of Skyrim. I was between objectives and wandering through the map. I came across one of the ubiquitous caves which I decided to enter. I was attacked by some generic low-level bandits and I cleared the cave. After dispatching the enemies I was looting through the cave and came across some letters. They detailed a tale of a family that came on hard times in a n…

I knew a Buddhist monk in Berkeley in the 1990s who was very interested in "games" to teach Dharma.. Games in those days did not look like they do in the last ten years.. Obviously what is now called AAA games are very much the opposite of Dharma talks..
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