thebackalleys

Anyone plan on playing it?

no


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i plan on playing the first one soon

I haven't even played the first one, but then again I do sometimes skip titles for it's newer installments so maybe.

Quote from: Bamyasi on April  6, 2016 07:10 AM
Anyone plan on playing it?

no

I only ask because it's being released concurrently on consoles and PC.

Quote from: Stu4U on April  6, 2016 08:04 PM
no

Quote from: soup on April  6, 2016 09:24 PM
no

Sarcastic

Quote from: BluPhoenix on April  6, 2016 08:13 PM
i plan on playing the first one soon

Do you mean Dark Souls I or Demon's Souls? They're both good imo. I'm not the biggest fan of the series though.

I will remember both mostly for their god-tier menu music:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPK2oskj06E (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPK2oskj06E)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3nckWeT-m0 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3nckWeT-m0)

The art too I guess.

There are a great many things that appeal to me in these games (Demons Souls / Dark Souls / Bloodborne), which unfortunately doesn't include the gameplay. I'm also a sucker for beating game series chronologically, so if I do bully myself into completing them, it will likely take me a very long time because I own the first Dark Souls but haven't gotten very far.

Well gee uhh.

What don't you like about the mechanics?

They're pretty straightforward.

Quote from: Unless on April 13, 2016 06:18 PM
I'm also a sucker for beating game series chronologically

Also this is me.

Not that it's mechanically unchallenging, but a lot of the difficulty comes artificially in sparse checkpoints and knowledge on how to avoid death based on prior death experiences. It becomes less an entertaining challenge of how good you are at playing games and more a patience challenge on how much time you're willing to invest. I know that some people love to impose these challenges on themselves and feel accomplished after completing them, and good for them I guess? I just don't think proving to myself that I'm willing to sink soul-draining hours into a game in order to reach the end would leave me feeling satisfied at all. Really, most people could do it if they sunk in enough hours. I think the most efficient way to beat that game is not convincing yourself you should have to play it just to make a statement of some sort.

But the theme and art and music and monster designs are great. Bloodborne particularly. I'd have been more easily talked into playing Bloodborne, if only it hadn't not come out on the PC.

Quote from: Unless on April 14, 2016 06:57 AM
It becomes less an entertaining challenge of how good you are at playing games and more a patience challenge on how much time you're willing to invest.

I'd say the two are mutually inclusive. There's definitely trial and error involved in DS but it gets much easier once you level up a bit and realize the entire game is submerged in molasses and your only job is to watch for attack telegraphs.

I also wouldn't call its difficulty artificial. People throw around "fake difficulty" a lot and I've never really understood it. The infrequent archstones/bonfires just hearken back to the classic era, like trying to complete an arcade game with one credit. (http://insomnia.ac/commentary/arcade_culture/)

If you like everything else about the games I'd say it's well worth your time to try getting past the learning curve. I actually would recommend starting with Demon's Souls because of the way it's structured (with a hub world) makes it much harder to wander into certain death.

I'll also admit to having spiritual epiphanies playing these games that I doubt would have happened had the checkpoints been more frequent. Pretty much everything about adult life is Sisyphean, why should our games be different? Probably not much of a sell but understanding what I think Miyazaki and his team were trying to communicate helped me appreciate these products a lot more than I did originally.

Also yes people who wear completion of these games like a badge of honor are far more annoying than anything you'll encounter in the games themselves.

It's not that people boasting about their having beaten the game with a SNES controller and a blindfold is my actual main experience of the series, but these seem generally to be the people most actively trying to get me to play the game for some reason. It's like if the only people who were trying to get me to play Pokémon were the ones with 100% completed Pokédexes and an abundance of IV-bred shiny Blazikens. It sort of gives the impression that you'd need to have that attitude to enjoy it, but I know that that isn't the case. I will probably play it through at some point, but it won't be for those reasons.

For the time being, I don't own a Playstation or money or the desire to spend money on a Playstation, so Demons Souls and Bloodborne are off the table I'm afraid.

I guess I'm using 'artificial difficulty' here to mean greater punishments for the same things, as opposed to increasing the difficulty in more traditional ways. The term is a bit silly I guess. Any increase in difficulty is still an increase in difficulty of course, and you can play around them all the same. I just always found it dumb where you reach the end of arcade mode in Tekken, and then instead of fighting a bot that's especially good at playing the game in the way that the game is played, you're pitted against a bot which just deals extra damage for the same attacks as always. It's just stronger in dumb ways as opposed to actually being better at the game.

The best way to learn about a monster's attack pattern is to see it attack, and when you don't know what to expect it will often leave you being hurt by it. Only from then on in does it become a challenge that isn't based on educated guesswork. Taking damage in order to learn how to not take damage in future just doesn't pair well with sparse checkpoints.
You wouldn't expect to beat an arcade game with a single entry unless you already knew the ins and outs of the game, and if you did manage despite being new to it then you probably just got lucky.

Unless the argument is that the skill lies in being able to accurately predict every monster's attacks and patterns based on their wind-up telegraphs before ever seeing them, which no.

No, I'm not saying that at all. Dark Souls is actually way easier than faster paced action games like Ninja Gaiden, Devil May Cry, Bayonetta (on Infinity Climax), etc. because the its a lot slower, so your reflexes can be more relaxed. The only overlap, really, is that it requires a bit of patience to master.

Obviously you won't have an enemy's moveset memorized before encountering them, but you'll be armed with everything you've learned kinesthetically, from interacting with the system, as well as better weapons, armor, and stats. To coin a cliche, you will have leveled up along with your character, to the point most of the late-game bosses seem a lot less threatening than the early ones, but that's sort of what the game is about. Once you've failed and died enough times, death and failure are just part of life, as natural as joy and pleasure and wallpaper and bathmats and taxes.

In that way, the difficulty scaling in DS is as traditional as it gets. Enemies dealing more damage with the same attacks is really just a means of developers compensating for limitations in AI, so yes, it's literally stronger in dumb ways. In Tekken's case, it just means you have to be better at the game than the developers can actually program for. To someone really good at fighting games, this must feel better than sex, not that they're likely to know.

Quote from: Unless on April 14, 2016 08:01 AM
The best way to learn about a monster's attack pattern is to see it attack, and when you don't know what to expect it will often leave you being hurt by it. Only from then on in does it become a challenge that isn't based on educated guesswork. Taking damage in order to learn how to not take damage in future just doesn't pair well with sparse checkpoints.

This is where blocking/dodging/buffing come in. Especially if you play with a basic strength-based melee character your first time, which I recommend, you'll learn to block whenever you aren't attacking, and timing when to raise and lower your shield really becomes the game proper. That's the beauty of it. People who say it's super hard(core) are stupid idiots who fell for the marketing. It's really just about maneuvering your little tank and alternating between three buttons. That's it. There aren't even combos (if you play with a strength character, it gets more interesting when you graduate to other classes).

Quote from: Unless on April 14, 2016 08:01 AM
You wouldn't expect to beat an arcade game with a single entry unless you already knew the ins and outs of the game, and if you did manage despite being new to it then you probably just got lucky.

Yeah, that's what the post was about. Not beating a game with one credit the first time, but persisting through dozens of attempts until you master it. That's the kind of experience that's been lost in the western home console market, which DS tried to pay homage to, catching so many grey/brown FPS players off guard.

Okay.

(https://thebackalleys.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thebackalleys.com%2Fdump%2Ffiles%2F1530%2F617iW2_1365128062573.jpg&hash=a185992b0cb79feee55b2bcdea4c48840d157b05)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zA73K-oG62U (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zA73K-oG62U)