codexarcanum
@codexarcanum@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong Sparks Debate About Difficulty and Boss Runbacks 3 days ago:
I’m pretty early into the game as well, so I almost didn’t say anything. But even if theres a charm that adds HP bars later, I would be annoyed about it. Why wait so long? I’m over 10 hours in. Why take a slot with it? I get similar annoyances about the compass, but at least that one I can understand because maybe some people like the challenge of landmark navigation using just the maps. There is a skill there, and it is part of the skillset of Exploration (a major pillar of design in any metroidvania).
The yellow tools, in general, I’m iffy about the design of. So far I only have 3: compass, more shards, and auto-collect beads. Of these, auto-beads is the most obviously useful. You need many beads, and they get lost pretty easy. Shards are super common and don’t have many uses. But none of these are essential, and all of them get less useful the later into the game you get. The tradeoff is only meaningful early game, and seems to encourage a balance between memorizing the levels and grinding, neither are amazing activities.
Having the compass charm tied to ALL map markers would certainly up the utility of it, though it’s gating another feature behind both a purchase and a charm. I’ve also only found 1 semi useful trap\red-charm so far. Maybe having more traps and skills that required shell bits would put more pressure on needing them and make the charm that gives extras more appeal for a trap-heavy play style?
Again, I grant that maybe I’m too early in the game yet, but I feel like these systems should be coming together and cohering more after a half-dozen bosses and 10 hours of play.
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong Sparks Debate About Difficulty and Boss Runbacks 3 days ago:
The runbacks don’t bother me too much so far. I do think there’s some skills in the runback, but it relies heavily on the level designer as well. An ideal runback:
- is relatively short, you should have time to reflect on the boss, but not get sidetracked
- has enemies that drop currency, so repeated runs slowly build you up (assuming you always collect your shade)
- has enemies that train you on the bosses timings or counters (if the boss is parry heavy, put a tricky-to-parry enemy enroute back)
- has a “speed route” that let’s you bypass most or all of the run once you’ve figured it out
These factors make a run both interesting game play and still a form of progression. A badly designed run lacks these factors, being just a slow slog to get back into the boss fight.
My biggest complaint so far is the double damage. Every boss and so many common enemies do nothing but double damage. Why even have 5 HP instead of 3? And it being 5 (and bind healing 3) have compounding effects with this problem. Taking a single hit on the way to a boss actually costs you an entire “boss hit” so runbacks are worse all around. Trying to heal mid boss only gets you “one and a half” hits back which takes a lot of silk to build up and probably is a worse deal for you than just using the silk to power more attacks.
Double damage would suck a lot less (and be a better mechanic) if you had 6 HP to start, or if you healed 4 at a time, or if bosses didnt always do 2 damage. There’s no tension to avoiding punishing hits because every move is equally punishing. It makes fights feel very conservative which is maybe intentionally meant to evoke Hornet as a careful hunter, using traps and plans to take down big foes.
I find the opposite though, she feels fragile and reactive. I wish starting damage was higher too. I had this issue in Hollow Knight as well, everything takes too many hits. Common enemies are spongy, bosses take at least 33% too long across the board. Especially it gets annoying since a lot of bosses so far get spammier and faster towards their final phases, so you spend so much time dodging the same attacks and looking for openings to chip hits in. Skills and traps don’t do enough damage to feel especially useful either.
I also hate, and this is another compounding factor, the complete lack of enemy HP bars. On regular enemies this is annoying (gotta count my hits) but on bosses it feels negligent. Bosses have multiple phases and take so long to kill, it would be nice to know if my last run was just a hit or 2 away from the end or if I still had a 3rd phase to plan for. It adds to the poor perception of skills and traps as well. Sting Shard and Thread Storm both seem to hit several times, around a half-dozen, but neither seems to do much more damage than a couple of regular hits.
Overall I’m really loving Silksong, the art and music are top notch. The DLC for HK convinced me that Team Cherry and I disagree about some fundamental ideas in game design, and HKSS bears that out.
- Comment on Something we all can agree on 1 week ago:
Incorrect! Some of them are CIA ops who do it for love of the game!
- Comment on Applies to many things. Not just religion 1 week ago:
“Science” doesn’t do or advocate anything, it’s just a method. It’s like pitting Religion against Object Oriented Programming (They’re the same picture)
Anyway, great shitpost
- Comment on Make America Consoom Again 3 weeks ago:
I’ve been replaying cruelty squad, and the second mission has you take out a CEO addicted to FunkoPops. Anyway, this image reminded me of that. Be nice if someone brought a real “CEO mindset” to a meeting with him.
- Comment on sponsored by raycon 3 weeks ago:
A friend and I played the whole campaign in co-op when it came out and both cracked up so bad after that cutscene. I think we had to restart the mission because we were laughing too hard still to actually start playing (plus we got to watch the briefing again!)
- Comment on Anon is Banished 4 weeks ago:
Yep, in The Eyes of the Overworld, we meet Cugel the Clever, literally the prototypical D&D rogue/thief. He steals from a wizard and is banished very far away for it. He eventually gets back to take revenge on the wizard and steps on a trap or something that banishes him even farther away the second time. His journey picks back up in Cugel’s Saga, a sequel novel, where he goes on more zany adventures and eventually makes it back again as I recall.
- Comment on Deep dish thought 4 weeks ago:
Ooh damn, I think you’re really cooking on this “anti-calzone” idea! Two slices, back to back, bread in the middle surround by toppings on both sides. Basically impossible to eat cleanly or set down once assembled. It’s an open-face-and-ass sandwich. A sloppy ho.
- Comment on Anon crunches some numbers 5 weeks ago:
If there’s one hard lesson of history I keep relearning, it’s that almost nothing ever happens until it materially is required to happen. Language and agriculture waited until population density was high enough. The industrial revolution didn’t happen until the logistics and population sizes again necessitated massive changes, even though the steam engine was hundreds of years old. Revolutions don’t happen until the population is starving.
If anything in history is impressive it’s the rare individuals and societies that change before they’re forced to by material necessity (and those cases are often debatable). Really dampens the notion of idealism being viable.
- Comment on Something to think about 5 weeks ago:
Seems I’ve been dup’d
- Comment on Something to think about 1 month ago:
Slowly sliding a switch labeled “Dubstep” towards on and checking the crowd reaction at each step like a DJ at a corporate event.
- Comment on Bird 1 month ago:
And now folks, realize that this is true of every single thing that humans think about.
You put a duck and a sparrow side by side and maybe it seems obvious that, while not the same, these two things have something deeply in common. But most people have never considered them in one thought. When you get into abstract ideas like “freedom” or “socialism” is it any surprise that most people can’t even recognize them, let alone agree on any commonalities?
You spend all day arranging dogs next to bears going “do you see how these are both canine-form mammals?” and the public is watching a tiktok while dismissing you going “Uh bears aren’t pets, what a dumbass!”
- Comment on what video game deserves to be in a museum? 1 month ago:
Alright, so here’s my case for Thief, the Looking Glass Studios game.
Thief, on its own, is a great game and basically shares the claim to originating a lot of ideas behind stealth in games along with MGS, which came out the same year.
What many don’t know is how incredibly innovative what they were doing with their engine tech was. In another timeline, id software were mildly successful action game makers while LGS became the industry defining mega success. The Dark Engine refines a lot of ideas present in Ultima Underworld and marries them to tech that was decades ahead of its time.
Check out the opening and closing of this long talk: youtu.be/wo84LFzx5nI
Thief had, probably, the first ECS in gaming. They also had their own rendering technique using “portals” that was a bit slower than id’s BSP trees but allowed for insane geometry. They also had an incredible system for events called stimulus-response that was doing things like Breath of the Wild’s “chemistry engine” again, decades before it would be rediscovered.
They weren’t just making games, these were really simulations of a limited world with complex interactions. If the rest of the industry had caught onto their good practices, who knows what the landscape would look like today!
- Comment on what video game deserves to be in a museum? 1 month ago:
Doom
I could write an essay significantly larger than the game itself and it wouldn’t be as powerful of an argument as just saying the name with the weight of legacy it commands.
- Comment on Hot birds in your area iykyk 1 month ago:
- Comment on 1 month ago:
Meh! Call me a wet blanket but I’ve been on the internet since before 4chan, so I’m pretty familiar with the Nazi bar problem and I’m long past accepting “just jokes.”
- Comment on How it started... 1 month ago:
- Comment on Actually I see something completely different 1 month ago:
- Comment on Its like losing your identity 1 month ago:
Voyager for Android doesn’t show them, so I have no idea what any of you look like anyway!
- Comment on It's the truth 1 month ago:
Stern Asian Grandma is most displeased with how spicy my dish was yet again, and demands i add a heaping spoonful of chilli crunch to fix it!
- Comment on The Astronomer CEO's Coldplay Concert Fiasco Is Emblematic of Our Social Media Surveillance Dystopia | 404 Media 1 month ago:
Fair cop, I didn’t check source I just saw it mentioned elsewhere. His company being valued at just over a billlion probably confused people.
I grant that there’s a difference of degrees here, but him being “just” an unethical millionaire doesn’t substantially change my views on the situation.
Someone in another thread mentioned polyamory which I find a personally interesting angle as well, since I practice relationship anarchy. This situation would just never happen to me because all my paramours know each other and know about the activies we do together. It makes me suspicious of these stories because while I also enjoy laughing at a rich guy getting caught, I don’t like that it culturally reinforces this idea of monogamy as a core value and that breaking the trust of such monogamy should have public consequences.
Obviously the last thing I want is society-wide condemnation of the wrong aspect of this situation. It isnt the having a side-piece that’s the problem, it’s the lying to your primary partner (and everyone else) that actually creates the trouble.
- Comment on The Astronomer CEO's Coldplay Concert Fiasco Is Emblematic of Our Social Media Surveillance Dystopia | 404 Media 1 month ago:
Their reaction is what set it all off too. Even the singer immediately speculates that they’re having an affair because of how they acted. So yeah, even if he wasn’t a billionaire, somebody probably would have doxxed him anyway because there are tons of people that like drama and know they can make money off it. That he is a billionaire and doing something deeply unethical is what makes the story go viral all over social media. Lots and lots of people there want to make money and clout by exploiting any avenue for drama and engagement.
Perhaps the problems this exposes are not just our grim and omnipresent surveillance apparatus, but the attached system of gig-economy content creators all racing to the lowest common denominator for scraps of engagement and ad revenue? We’ve created a society of unempathetic monsters.
- Comment on Some stephen king type shit idk 1 month ago:
There’s a few actual versions of the pin pulling games now. I liked this one for Android called “How to Loot”, pretty fun little time waster.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
Crisps? Chips.
Fries? Chips.
Chips? Chips.
Hashbrowns? Chips
Latkes? Chips.
- Comment on Deserved honestly 1 month ago:
I love 😬 that we’re now at the point where “is this real?” is ambiguous between:
- did the story factually occur in our shared reality?
- was this story actually posted to 4chan?
- did a human even make this image?
And at this juncture with the common addition of “chat, is this real?” we can further add:
- does the audience exist?
- does the person sharing the image exist?
- do I exist?
- Comment on Gourmet chocolate 1 month ago:
- Comment on how did he do that? 1 month ago:
Is this gain?
- Comment on 1 month ago:
The spoken language of the native people of the Philippines; still one of the country’s official languages and spoken by a majority of the population.
- Comment on [DJ Khaled voice] Anotha one 1 month ago:
Ive never seen these before and I’m enthralled! The music and visual style reminds me a lot of Cruelty Squad. Is there an accepted name for this “genre”? It’s almost like pre-AI slop but with a pedal-to-the-floor surrealism that elevates it tremendously.
- Comment on UwU brat mathematician behavior 1 month ago:
It gets worse actually. You can define a number system using any power of 2 amount of i-like units in a similar relationship to quaternions using the Cayley-Dickson construction
Fascinatingly, you lose some property of the algebra at each step. Quaternions aren’t commutative: ABC != CBA. Octonians aren’t associative: (AB)C != A(BC). Once you get into 16 i’s with subscripts, it really gets crazy.
