The Open Thread is a place for open discussion among my readers. Post anything you feel like sharing! From now on, the Open Thread will no longer be monthly. Instead, there will be a new Open Thread whenever it is adequate. The stage is yours. Go ahead!
The latest Open Thread is made ‘sticky’ to improve access.
Please consider throwing a few coins into the tip jar, and buy my books! They are great. Your support is greatly appreciated.
The original ending of Metal Gear Solid 2 got restored, which was originally modified due to 9/11 and Konami not wanting to upset US sensibilities:
I just learned that the commercial disaster Unknown 9: Awakening was supposed to kick off an entire media franchise with games, novels, comics, podcasts, and “more”, whatever that may have been. The delusion of these people is far greater than we assumed. As a reminder, this game peaked at about 250 concurrent players on Steam, despite the publisher handing out vouchers as part of a promotion with AMD. It may have sold only between one and two thousand copies. Bandai Namco has recently laid off a lot of people so it seems there will have to lay off some more.
Hahaha, good Lord, that’s some next-level delusion! 😀 A trilogy of novels already on the go… I can only imagine the amount of effort and money sunk into this black hole.
Rule 1 of the crack commandments: never get high on your own supply.
Ubisoft recently attempted to reboot Prince of Persia. Of course, the game had to be woke, with an urban gentleman as the main character. Unfortunately, this game did not sell well, just like basically every other release of this studio in recent times.
https://archive.ph/mpToC
The Empire lost the Mandate of Heaven in 2024. 2020-2022 was the apogee. The implosion of woke media is only one of the secondary effects.
I remember the old games on PS2 being pretty fun. They were like the template for what would become early Ass Creed games, which were kind of just like a sandbox version of PoP. It makes little sense to reboot the series since, even though the gameplay is much more condensed and arguably more enjoyable, most consumers probably aren’t interested in it. It would probably more logical to just re-release the original games.
Dark Souls update: Started a new game as a warrior class. I get the sense that most classes end up rounding out however you want to build them with enough levels, but I’m having a lot more fun now that I know the game pretty well and can fight more offensively/aggressively.
I’m on the fence about starting DS2 because the community seems to almost unanimously abhor it. I think most of its issues came after the Scholar’s of the First Sin update which apparently fucked with the enemy placements in a terrible way, as well as there apparently being janky hit boxes. DS3 looks quite promising, however. I like the faster movement speed and increased mobility of later souls games. I believe I will play around with DS1 for a while, try out DS2 and if I don’t drop it then I’ll eventually get around to DS3 before finally getting to Sekiro. Finally, I’ll probably be invested enough to play Elden Ring by that point, which honestly looks pretty insane. Almost like they took the concept of BotW and made it a mature version of the Zelda, or The Witcher 3 and trimmed a lot the fat.
I brought up the topic of hit boxes in DS2 and then this clip popped up in my feed (player cringe reaction—recommend muted volume): https://youtube.com/shorts/6CxujxBdmdM?si=CgJaVq8YQ8GqS8Cc
This is a very interesting clip. I think what is going on has nothing to do with bad hit boxes but with hit-detection and graphics updates not being synchronized, i.e. internally, the game registered a hit but the renderer does not update the game fast enough visually. As a workaround for solving the problem of the player coordinates differing between the hit detection system and the graphics renderer not matching, the game uses the hit-detection coordinates to update the renderer, leading to the warping effect.
If the above sounds unclear, take a simpler example: in a 2D shmup the ship’s position is given by its x/y coordinates. In addition, all bullets have their own x/y coordinates. Now imagine the game checking collisions between the ship and bullets before updating the ship’s sprite. The visual effect is that the ship explodes a few frames after the hit. The closest comparison to the Dark Souls 2 example would be if your ship gets hit, the bullet flies through it, and a few frames later, when there is no longer any contact between ship and bullet, the ship explodes.
I have been wondering if Dark Souls and Demon’s Souls offer meaningfully different gameplay depending on the character class you chose, apart from the obvious magic vs non-magic user. My guess was that the differences are probably quite minimal. I have also, even when deliberately looking for it, rarely come across people who claimed to have beaten any of these games with all character classes, let alone made a case for it. Perhaps this is a missed opportunity. Also, if there is no potential to make the character classes meaningfully different there should arguably be fewer of them in the game.
Dark Souls 3 looks like a big step up over Dark Souls 2. I recall that there was a lot of hype surrounding the release of Dark Souls 2 but it died off pretty quickly. However, there are quite a few people online who claim that this game has the best gameplay of the entire series. I am still stuck in 16-bit heaven but I want to tackle the Dark Souls gamees, Sekiro, and also Resident Evil 2 at some point.
EDIT: Even if playthroughs of Dark Souls do not depend a lot on the chosen character class, there surely are big differences between the various weapons, similar to Monster Hunter. Still, this does not seem to invalidate the point I made above as I also cannot recall having come across people arguing for selecting particular weapons for their various playthroughs. Instead, they go through the various iterations the “new game plus” until they have reached the maximum difficulty.
Interesting observation!
I feel like class selection mostly aids in nudging you in a specific direction as far as parameters are concerned, so you’ll be more incentivized to keep investing in endurance and strength for a knight, for example, or intelligence for a sorcerer. Also, depending on what you pick will affect your starting gear and early item drops. The thief will even begin the game with the master key, so they can have two starting gifts. If you’re really willing to invest enough time in grinding for exp or if you’re on new game +, however, then you could focus on developing latent characteristics. With this warrior build I’m focusing a lot on endurance and dexterity right now, but eventually I’ll want to develop his faith statistic to be able to imbue his right hand weapon with magic intermittently.
My experience with traditional RPGs is quite limited, but from early ARPGs like Diablo I am familiar with the approach of character classes being so different from each other that certain builds are completely impossible. For instance, only the Sorcerer can wield the most potent spells, the Rogue should probably only use a bow, and the Warrior needs to become a “tank” as he is too slow to evade magic and too low in dexterity to wield bows effectively. These were simpler days, though. I know that for Souls-style games there are a various builds that the community recommends and which a lot of people simply blindly copy, thus removing the R in RPG to quite some extent.
Yeah, I feel like DS1 is only complicated from an RPG standpoint because there are no clear instructions. To save time and avoid a lot of trial and error regarding leveling up armor and weapons, I did default to community recommendations. There’s a longsword that has a 1% drop rate that I ended up settling for on this run.
On the topic of DS2 hit boxes again, I think I found out something pretty telling. Apparently there is a statistic in the game called adaptability that many players completely neglect. The problem arises that there is a meager amount of invincibility frames while rolling when this stat is unleveled. It also affects status resistance (like poison and toxicity), as well as agility and poise, so your character will dodge roll, block and even heal much slower. This very statistic might be why some people complain that the game is either too hard or too easy. One aspect of the game that I’ve heard about that I like the sound of is the fact that warping between all activated bonfires from the start of the game is available.
I just finished my second playthrough of Dark Souls 1 and it was much easier, btw. I even finished all the dlc this time. There is one dlc where you travel back in time and the way you access this part of the game is laughably cryptic. The game is definitely much more enjoyable the second time through, but that’s hardly a good sell to your average CoD enjoyer.
On that note, youtube has been blessing me with Elden Ring shorts and I have to say that the gameplay sometimes looks like an episode of Dragon Ball Z or something: https://youtube.com/shorts/O-L2BEjnVJ8?si=popftu0JhKckuNI1
I think its a hallmark of a great game that the second playthrough is as much fun, if no more, than the first one. I particularly enjoyed this approach on the SNES. The first playthrough of Super Castlevania IV took a while as there are, towards the end of the game, some pretty tricky parts. Then you play the game again and because you have learned from experience, the game may feel a lot different, primarily because you do not need to frequently retry difficult parts. First, you become faster, then you try to lose fewer lives, then you may try not losing any lives at all, and perhaps you even attempt to not get hit. There is a lot of potential for progress, and all of it is only implied, not explicitly stated. Difficulty, and mastery, also contributed to games being memorable. In contrast, if a game is too easy, like most modern games, they only end up being quite forgettable. Surely, a major reason for Dark Soul becoming so highly regarded was because of the challenge it poses. With an “easy mode”, this would most definitely not have happened.
Replaying games is great, but even in the SNES era, some games were too long to frequently replay them. I think it is a wonderful experience to play through a game in one sitting, i.e. within an hour or so. It is a bit like rewatching a great movie. In contrast, I do not think that people rewatch TV shows a lot, as the time commitment is a lot higher. Even Super Mario World takes multiple sittings, if you do not engage in speedrunning.
Also, I wanted to mention how much modern Zelda has taken from Souls. I didn’t realize this as I played Zelda way before I took any Souls game seriously. To be fair, 3D Zelda is still wildly influential and the first time I remember seeing a stamina (wheel) bar was in Skyward Sword. However, it seems to me that BotW essentially took the Souls formula and slapped it into an open world with the added concept of massive freedom and just gave it a Zelda aesthetic. So, instead of a health bar you have hearts etc. Even DS2 came up with the feature of breakable weapons well before BotW came out. Though, arguably that mechanic is more fleshed out in BotW as you can carry as many equipment slots worth of weapons and shields as you have unlocked, whereas in DS2 you have to deal with weapon weight which can be a hinderance. I think a big key feature in Zelda games that set them apart are lots of fun gimmicks, and the fact that those games are extremely well tested and fine tuned.
Breakable weapons are an old concept from RPGs. I recall first encountering it in Diablo (1996), but even in JRPGs it shows up. Fire Emblem also used weapon durability. I have not played many games in that series, so I may misremember some aspects. However, I am not even sure that you could repair weapons.
I have not played BotW a lot, but my takeaway was that it is a very well-crafted sandbox and probably better than any other open-world game in that regard. In an earlier conversation, you pointed out similarities between MGS V and BotW. Both games are arguably better-realized sandboxes than any Western open-world game.
Aaron, I started DS2 and it is a mixed bag. For one, the visuals overall are a nice step up. My feeling about it right now is frustration. Enemies no longer reliably telegraph their moveset. They also changed the parry timing and apparently people bitched so much about it that they ended up changing it back in DS3. To give an example, there is this crusade-looking enemy early on that took me maybe two to three dozen attempts to successfully land the first parry. However, once you have stunned this particular enemy it is unpredictable when and how he will recover. You may get the chance to land four or so hits on him before he slowly stands up, or sometimes after merely two hits he immediately springs forward and does a quick slash, and it simply isn’t telegraphed well enough for you to know leading to you almost certainly taking damage in the latter scenario. This is a level of unpredictability that I do not appreciate. There are just too many variables to account for that lead to a feeling of unfairness, as in being too subjected to RNG. Also, in DS1 when mobs would hit your shield, your reward for expending END to block and attack would lead to like-sized enemies sort of breaking poise granting you an easy opportunity to attack. This seems to be removed, and instead enemies have way too much END and attack almost relentlessly with small meager cool downs in between, sometimes, seemingly random combos.
Also, basically all of the enemies in the area after the tutorial/hub areas are all suits of armor, minus a random dragon that one hits you. Some of them are small and swift, while the bulk of them like 12 foot tall hulking giants that you simply circle strafe around forever and whittle down their health while hoping to God that another one doesn’t join in. These enemies are not only uninspiring, but they’re extremely tough early on (high HP/DMG with low cool down). This would be all well and good except they’ve taken all the legacy skill (points above) that players acquired from Demon/Dark Souls 1 and flushed it down the toilet. And now you even have to level up a stat so you can roll effectively.
One more gripe—even though you can now warp between bonfires at will right out the gate, you can no longer simply level up at the bonfire. Now, you must warp all the way to the main hub area and converse with a female NPC. Not only that, but you have to skip through the same 4 lines of dialogue each time to get to the level up screen. This makes me not even want to bother with it as much, which puts you at great risk of losing all your souls. Oh! And I almost forgot, now you are penalized for dying in a game that expects you to die a lot by having small increments of your total health bar shaved off until you restore your humanity. Which, I might add, requires the use of a “human effigy” to restore your humanity, which is a rare item in the game. Even doing so doesn’t restore your health, but merely restores your max HP bar to normal meaning you’ll have to use a healing item immediately afterwards.
I’m seriously contemplating counting this purchase as a loss and dropping the game.
Dark Souls 2 sounds like a mess. However, I recall reading that the original release is pretty good. However, the “Scholar of the first Sin” edition, which is the only one available on Steam, completely messed up the flow of the original version and is a much worse experience. Also, there are quite a few people in the Souls community who consider this game to have the best gameplay of the entire series. I own the original version for PS3, and even got a copy of the SotfS edition for PS4. The latter I managed to buy for six euros or so, used, but like new. I have not played either of them yet.
“I’m seriously contemplating counting this purchase as a loss and dropping the game.”
While I didn’t read your preceding paragraph, if I’ve given a game at least a day’s worth of fair trial and I’m still left unimpressed/uninterested (Unless perhaps I was informed in advance that the game doesn’t truly pick up till later and I STILL decided I was interested enough to give it a go. I’ve played quite a few games/visual novels that are like this and they turned out to be great experiences. I’m not as eager as I used to be though to sink my time like that.), I’d personally drop it and save my time.
Its a video game after all, something we do for fun and leisure, and probably not something that will have any practical transference to other spheres of our lives, so it shouldn’t be something we take too seriously unless you are truly invested in whatever specific game you may have on hand for whatever reason. (in my opinion)
And now we see there is validity to pirating a game for its “trial period” that some folks opt (presuming they are honestly doing it. some don’t I’m sure) to do.
I bought Fallout New Vegas a few days ago with the fallout discount on Epic Games. A game I pirated years ago and had some of the most fun with a video game in a long while.
My only concern is if I bought it in the platform that might be more difficult to mod. the vanilla game seems to run fine on my gaming laptop. But the mods are what really makes this game great. I may tinker with it either later or tomorrow.
Fallout 3: GOTY that I got for free(got it on the Epic Games platform as well) sadly doesn’t run at all. maybe it will once I start modding it. (I’m not sure if/when I’ll get to it. New Vegas has been the better game/experience for me)
“Also, there are quite a few people in the Souls community who consider this game to have the best gameplay of the entire series.”
I get the sense that this is sort of the contrarian viewpoint. It seems most people prefer DS3 the most, followed by DS1. However, I have also heard that before the update DS2 was a much better experience. I just feel like the parry system in DS2 really breaks a lot of the flow. Instead of having a near instantaneous effect, you have to account for so many milliseconds of lag effect combined with the enemy’s timing. The parry window is too small imo, and it just comes across to me as pretentious difficulty for the sake of being difficult.
Maou, what’re the last couple of games or so you really got into?
@Pickernanny
Its really been quite awhile since I really got into a video game, but here are some of the more latest experiences I’ve had of games that really drew me in:
– Fallout New Vegas (already mentioned)
– Tsukihime: A Piece of Blue Glass Moon (A VN rather than a video game. Remakes often botch the original stories but this is most definitely one of the exceptions where the remake is much better than even the original. I’d recommend the experience to anyone who is interested in an entry into visual novels)
– Baldr Force: Standard Edition (Intriguing story with simple but fun action packed gameplay. This is one of those video game/VN hybrids though. I think one of the best things about it is Genha, one of their major villains. Absolute psychopath. We definitely have people like him existing in real life.)
– Mirror’s Edge (OG. short but pretty sweet. awesome soundtrack too. Great if you’re not looking to get invested in anything heavy, which is the mood I’m often in these days)
– Dragon Ball FighterZ (DBZ games in the old days were absolute dogshit. technological advancement in game development has been an absolute boon to the franchise)
– Melty Blood: Type Lumina (Fighting game spinoff of Tsukihime)
– Fate Grand Order (I wouldn’t really recommend this, but worth mentioning to say this: I spent more on this gacha game than on my entire Steam library. thankfully, this was put to a stop before it started becoming a real problem. Do not underestimate how well modern developers have designed their games to be addictive. FGO’s gameplay is shit, and most of the regular players will even admit to this. But it really has a way of just reeling you in. Its a shame too because the story was wonderful and it was the real thing that got me invested. Fingers crossed for a full anime adaptation one day!!)
I’m not as passionate about anime and video games as I used to be. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I spent my youth and formative years, as unflattering as it is to admit it, being mostly a shut-in whose life revolved around these things. Eventually however, I began to lose a lot of passion for these things, and wanted to experience more out of the world. I didn’t want my whole world to be limited to just these things.
Sure, a big part of the reason I wanted to lose weight is to become more attractive, but its also out of a desire to finally have the ability to explore more out of the world without my physical limitations weighing me down. (yeah, that was a pun right there, but intended. heh.)
Get into tumbling and be able to do some of the Spider-Man shit I see in Mirror’s Edge, LOL! Sure, I can do it in lucid dreams, but I want to see what it’s like doing it, at least once in real life if nothing else.
Don’t get me wrong, I have not suddenly turned into one of those “anime and video games are the devil!!!” Karens, but I wish my progression had been the other way around. I feel like your youth is the best time to explore physical pursuits and discovering what you can do/achieve with your body. Its older age when you can’t do those things anymore is when you want to get into video games and have a brand fresh route of wonderful exploration at your disposal. I’m almost certain that video games would have been a wonderful tool in helping to prevent or slow down the cognitive decay in my grandfather.
Sadly, I didn’t have that choice in my youth. Not with the absolute toxic environment and peers I was forced to put up with going to school. I hated and shied away from sports back because I was never given a chance to be a real beginner. instead of encouragement and support to get better, I was mocked for not being good at my first try, and derided by teammates.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69g3vpGeVZA
We’ve spoken a few times about what we believe is the optimal route to raising our hypothetical children into the world. Don’t introduce video games too soon, keep the smartphone away, ingrain a love of physical play and learning, etc.
But as great as these plans are, I think you can really only execute those plans to full effectiveness if you address the single biggest obstacle first; School.
If your kid goes to mainstream school, all of those preparations WILL fall apart. You want to keep away or minimize video games/social media from your kid? Tough luck, his classmates will be into those things, making it impossible to avoid. Want your kid on active self-improvement? the other kids in school will find this weird and cruelly mock him/her for it. etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nk7ConOMu8A (I only watched till 5:00, but Hamza’s got it down in those first few minutes)
If you cannot set up that ideal homeschooling apprenticeship system that Aaron and I talked about in the past, your attempts at raising your children right may well be doomed to failure. Your children’s peers have a more powerful effect on their development than even you as the parent. You want them making friends and socializing at wholesome hobby clubs rather than at school. (the socialization rules there honestly couldn’t be more different than in practical adult life.)
pardon for writing another novel. That’s why I wrote my direct answer to your question at the top. lol.
Forgot to add this writing my Novella:
“Don’t get me wrong, I have not suddenly turned into one of those “anime and video games are the devil!!!” Karens. I still am a big believer that a good story (Good Fiction) makes the world go round, although admittedly normies could use being more invested in their real life over obsessing into their fiction of choice.
I suppose if I were to name one story that I have the most investment in at the moment, it would have to be Tsukihime. Hope that sequel and its translation comes sooner rather than later!
Maou, I really like the concept and the graphics with Mirror’s Edge which I own on PS3 (my console needs a new power supply!). I couldn’t finish the game, though, because it gave me motion sickness. I learned soon after that it probably has to do with the game not having a point of reference, such as a gun centered in the middle of the screen, for example. You do have the option to turn on a little center dot to help with that. I’ve since toyed with the idea of maybe picking up the sequel.
Class means nothing in dark/demon souls besides starting class and gear
Don’t forget starting stats. Hence why I say it incentivizes your build. You could make a knight into a mage, but why would you do so from a fresh save unless you were doing so as to create some sort of artificial difficulty.
Remember to try tounge but hole
That only works on your mom!
I literally just got this reference yesterday from playing DS2.
Sony has shut down the studio behind Concord as well as another one of their live-service game studios:
https://archive.ph/R4cGr
Also, there were rumors about Concord having been a $400m dumpster fire. This figure seems correct. Kotaku mentioned that the “initial development” cost $200m alone. Sony also paid for completing the development, for the coveted Concord IP, and the studio. It does not seem implausible that the total sticker price for Sony was closer to $500m, without taking opportunity costs into account.
https://archive.ph/1Rhnx
The Concord developers have a great sense of humor. They write that they wanted to “bring the joy of multiplayer [gaming] to a larger audience”. In reality, it would have been possible to squeeze their entire player base into a bus, if you remove the seats.
https://archive.ph/n9xDB
The new Dragon Age game is out and it is extremely pozzed. I have seen a few other clips, one more cringe-worthy than the next. The game is not doing too well. It is far from a Concord-level disaster, but 70k concurrent players on release day is far from good. For instance, Dragon’s Dogma 2, which does not nearly have the name recognition Dragon Age used to have, had over 200k concurrent players at launch.
Et tu, Dragon Age… 🙁
450k players for the monster hunter beta
The success story of the Monster Hunter franchise is absolutely incredible. This series began on the PS2 as a business experiment by Capcom in the early 2000s: They made three games with the explicit goals of (1) at least one of them selling more than one million copies and (2) incorporating online elements. The other two games were Auto Modellista and Resident Evil Outbreak, by the way. (Auto Modellista was a commercial flop. Ironically, it holds up better than the other two games, due to the art style.) Yet, twenty years later, Monster Hunter is an absolute juggernaut and by far the best-selling franchise Capcom owns.