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The elegance of movement in Silksong

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Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#141

Post by aiven »

TriangleEdge wrote: post #83
furyofantares wrote: post #81

> 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. They are meant to delight with their whimsy. Sometimes, yes, they are meant to be challenging. But that challenge is in service of fun. Games, more than any other form of entertainment, offer skill challenges. As they've become more popular they've gotten better ab…

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.

skill issue

game just trying to tell that brute force solution might not work. use tools, use specific charms, use crests that are better suited for specific arena/boss. some tools (such as spiked traps) can literally one shot most mobs and leave you 1v1 with a boss.

dont give up, use your brain, hacker

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#142

Post by M4v3R »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #25

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 see a mention of Celeste, I give an upvote. What a great game, and a perfect showcase of what the OP writes about too. The movement is Celeste is so fluid and expressive, which is super important because the game is crazy hard so the movement has to feel great, otherwise the game would be annoying to play.

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#143

Post by M4v3R »

par wrote: post #15

Cute article but skong isn’t as hard as op makes it out to be. I wonder if he’s played any soulsborne games or even hollow knight. Git gud!!!

Silksong is objectively hard, and if you're trying to argue otherwise you're either the mythical "god gamer" or just trolling. The game is unapologetically hard and punishing right from the beginning. The very second boss you encounter already hits you for 2 masks (which effectively means 3 hits and you're dead), and each time you try to fight him you first have to run back for a minute before you reach him. He even does 2 masks of contact damage. Heck, even some normal enemies you encounter in the first two hours deal 2 damage. The original Hollow Knight bosses didn't do 2 masks damage until half way through the game.

Don't get me wrong, I still love the game and consider it pretty much a masterpiece, but many people believe (myself included) the game could have a better difficulty curve from the beginning and be less punishing (just give me a freaking bench before each boss so I don't have to run through 10 screens to have another try at it) while still maintaining the overall difficulty and challenge.

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#144

Post by gyomu »

aiven wrote: post #141
TriangleEdge wrote: post #83

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.

skill issue game just trying to tell that brute force solution might not work. use tools, use specific charms, use crests that are better suited for specific arena/boss. some tools (such as spiked traps) can literally one shot most mobs and leave you 1v1 with a boss. dont give up, use your brain, hacker

so much this

Most AAA videogames seem to teach people "mash attack button until enemy goes away, move forward to the next shiny dot on the map, repeat". It's crazy that when a game asks the player to actually take stock of the situation and learn from their mistakes, it gets billed as "brutally difficult".

For what it's worth, I find Silksong challenging, but I really don't get the "impossible difficulty" complaints. I think I'm about halfway through the main game and the most I've spent on a single boss is ~30 minutes.

And I don't think I'm a crazy pro gamer with insane reflexes - I play only a few videogames a year (I mostly care about the art), every time I've tried a multiplayer FPS I get utterly destroyed by other players.

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#145

Post by M4v3R »

thedrexster wrote: post #21

Savage Beastfly killed me 43 times in a row. :/

Most people struggle with this boss, I stopped counting how many times it killed me but I spent probably close to 2 hours fighting it. The fight is just unfair. And when I finally beat it I didn't even feel satisfied, just glad it's finally over and I can move on.

Heck, there's even a dedicated subreddit for hating on this boss: https://www.reddit.com/r/fucksavagebeastfly/

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#146

Post by gyomu »

crooked-v wrote: post #87
TriangleEdge wrote: post #83

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.

Silksong has the basic issue that it was effectively designed as extended content for people who had already beaten the secret harder stuff in Hollow Knight, rather than as its own game or even as a sequel for people who had "just" beaten the basic game in HK.

Everyone repeats this, but is there any information that confirms it?

Yes, it started as a DLC for Hollow Knight - but the devs have known for the past 5 years that it would be a standalone sequel. Is there any evidence that they designed it as "extended content for people who had already beaten the secret harder stuff", rather than approached it as a game on its own right?

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#147

Post by gyomu »

foresterre wrote: post #115
yladiz wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that’s a slightly uncharitable take. Yes, it was originally DLC, and yes it is unforgiving, but it’s nowhere near as hard as the White Palace from the first game, and it’s not brutally punishing (you are quite agile and get good upgrades pretty early on).

I felt that the beginning of the game is pretty punishing, exactly because you don't have these movement abilities yet. After getting Swift Step (dash), the game became quite doable. Luckily you get dash a lot faster than in the original game, although I would say, in Silksong it's more a necessity. I went through Hunter's March without abilities and initially I hated the diagonal pogo jumps. It took a night's sleep…

Most of the pogos don't require the full diagonal range, you can just trigger the attack when you're really close to the target, which makes it almost a regular downwards jump.

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#148

Post by taneq »

TriangleEdge wrote: post #83
furyofantares wrote: post #81

> 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. They are meant to delight with their whimsy. Sometimes, yes, they are meant to be challenging. But that challenge is in service of fun. Games, more than any other form of entertainment, offer skill challenges. As they've become more popular they've gotten better ab…

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.

This is making me want to go back and try again to beat Hollow Knight (I got up to the Mantis Lords and that... teleporting warlock guy... looked it up, I'm thinking of Soul Master.) I'm pretty sure I remember things of this sort of difficulty level in it, too. The fights were brutally hard, but still felt fair.

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#149

Post by taneq »

hinkley wrote: post #69
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #49

> 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…

I played Hollow Knight. I don’t recall if I defeated a single boss. I must have done a couple but several of the first you were meant to defeat remained unchallenged. There are non boss fights that get more elaborate as you go, and let you pick up some new skills and abilities. Another one like this that shouldn’t have been was Orie and the blind forest. If you play it on story mode, which I did because it was great…

I was just wondering about control setup and latency as a major factor in a game with very strict timing requirements. Last time I played was on a TV (over HDMI in game mode though), with a wireless Xbox controller. I wonder how much easier I'd have found it on a 240Hz monitor with a wired controller?

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#150

Post by SyrupThinker »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #122
SyrupThinker wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> You arguably shouldn't be grinding a boss for several hours.

I agree, unfortunately I'm not even grinding the boss, I am grinding the path to the boss.

> Learning to identify this as a sign to step away is a very good life skill.

Which is why I stopped playing the game instead of letting it waste my time, like many others :)

> Take a 15 min break, either go somewhere else in game or better still, in real life. It really makes a world of difference.

It it is not like I, or every other person struggling with playing the game, have been continuously doing the same boss, for extensively long game sessions. I only have 8 hours evenly spread across the last 5 days.

I've also explored up to Graymoor at this point and picked up a few of the upgrades there, I don't think that is actually the issue here.

Unfortunately basically every encounter up to this point has the same runback tedium to it. So unless one one-tries a boss, which at least did happen twice to me, there seems to be no real way to avoid this tedium because of progression locks.

For comparison, I've played Elden Ring and the DLC, I've never had this much frustration there, because for the most part the struggle was with the bosses, not the perceived busy work of getting to them.

But it doesn't really matter, a good chunk of the players seem to enjoy it, the game doesn't need to appeal to everyone.

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