Comment on Anon fixes Super Mario Bros
Adm_Drummer@lemmy.world 4 weeks agoI mean, that’s RPGs for you. Level up, buy equipment, wear armour and cast spells.
Any part of the equation is the solution. Just depends on how you want to play. The story is what you make of it along the way.
lime@feddit.nu 4 weeks ago
with king’s quest progression i meant that the game is designed around players getting stuck, possibly without them knowing.
RPGs center around the story and the role you play, and the mechanics are built to aid that. you play for the story. in most RPGs, failure still progresses the story because failure is interesting. getting stuck is not interesting. having the mechanics without a story to reinforce would just be going through the motions.
someone else said that the fromsoft games are made to feel like videogames, and that resonated with me. that explained the disconnect i see in the mechanics and the world.
Adm_Drummer@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
I think you have a bad impression of how souls games work and I’m not sure how to address that.
Did you ever play Rogue or Thief back in the day? Maybe the Binding of Isaac, Enter the Gungeon, Cuphead or Balatro? Loss is part of the game but it still progresses the story. You’re never “stuck” as you say. Dying, making mistakes and retrying is part of the game.
Old RPGs that just gave you nothing sucked because they were directionless. Which is not a word I would ever use to describe a souls game. Sure, they’re difficult but there’s certainly a flow to them. I think a lot of people get hung up on the mechanics of the games and drop them immediately.
As you said, RPGs are centred around the story and role you play, mechanics are built to aid that. Once you get into a souls game, that is made abundantly clear. They just don’t hand it to you in the first 30 seconds and they expect you to be able to figure some things out as you play because the game does a good job at that.
And yes, fromsoft/soulsborne games most definitely feel like a videogame and they should. This Harkins to the story elements where you play as a literal nobody, worthless undying but you somehow ascend to godhood despite the odds and it breaks the world over and over again. We, the player, are the god. But the characters don’t know this. It’s unfathomable to them that something greater than they, exists. To us it’s a videogame but to the characters it’s the end of the world. Over and over and over again. No matter how insurmountable the odds, we get infinite chances to topple pantheons and change everything.
lime@feddit.nu 4 weeks ago
thief sticks out to me in that list. all the others are run-based with metaprogression (except the original rogue of course) which means there is never a time where you get stuck. you die, you restart, you get an entirely new experience. thief is not only linear and slow, it is almost entirely devoid of combat and encourages savescumming because that was the style at the time. by thief 3 that was mitigated.
souls games, in contrast, are not run-based, heavy on combat, and not liberal with the opportunity to save. in addition there’s the retrieval mechanic which means that when you fail, your only option is to redo the run that you just failed but with higher difficulty.
and with “plays like a video game”, my main gripe is the dissonance between the world and what you do. the story is interesting, but it’s like the game itself doesn’t care about it. the developers do, and the player is supposed to, but the game doesn’t.