my issue with poison swamps in the souls games is that they all get solved in the same, boring way, which is "just gun it for the exist as quick as possible", and in games that heavily reward exploration having areas like that really kills the mood
Yeah that's true, personally I like the visual aesthetic of most of the swamps but it would be nice if they had a new mechanic besides health drop even faster.
if it was me designen a poison swamp, I would make it so you CAN explore it at any time (keep it like the souls swamps but toxin instead of poison, but damage only being taken while inside the water) the alternative would be to progress in another area and gain an accesory like the lava ring, that makes the health loss negligable but not 0. Most annoyance for me doesn't come from the health loss itself, but the fact that poison effect lingers for 2-3 minutes after you're already out of the poison source.
The fact that Astrea is still accepting the souls of people I think really does cut to the heart of her character. She wants to help, she really, truly does. But by becoming a demon she is only further hurtling the world to it's end. And in the context of the games two endings, for the good one you need to kill her because of that. But for the bad ending, well, the PC is already a soul hungry villain, so her pleas would naturally fall on deaf ears. So it's a really well made boss that adds a lot of nuance to the games central conflict.
My experience with PvP in Bloodborne was getting invaded in the nightmare frontier, lots of dodging and throwing of molotovs, getting lag back-stabbed and then me pancaking them into oblivion because I found that 2 handing Ludwigs Holy Blade resulted in less parries.
1:39:00 regarding demon souls, the enemies being unaffected by the swamp feels 100% intentional, considering the only thing you can do in the swamp is block and both the red phantoms in the swamp have ways to circumvent that one comfort players are given
Finally finished listening to all episodes. So I don't want to sound rude, but that's kind the issue with LPs, especially when there are 2 people talking, that you can't really properly focus on conversation while playing, since this LP has a lot moments when German Spy tries to go into some topic and it feels like Plague just ignores him or interrupts him, never letting him finish. I understand it wasn't on purpose, but I was starting to feel really bad for German Spy. But in general, because of game taking some focus away, it felt like you guys couldn't go into some topic as well as you could in normal conversation or some topics got cut short. There are 3 specific examples of it I wanted to bring up: 1. At some point Plague starts talking about windmill in Earthen Peak, but then gets distracted and forgets the topic and never goes back to it. I was really curious what he wanted to say about it. If it was about have esoteric and unclear it was that you're supposed to come to it with lighted torch and interact with it in specific place to burn it and it will drain the swap from boss room, then I wholeheartedly agree. How was anyone supposed to guess you can do that. I feel that's one of major issues I have with souls games. They kinda try to be more of immersive sims, with have certain things are more realistic than other games. Weapons rebound, your equ load mattering and affecting your movement and roll speed, your equ having durability etc. There's plenty of that, which a lot of it got simplified/removed in later games. And the same thing applies to quest lines and some weird environment interactions like invisible walls. My issue with it is that the game doesn't go hard enough with it. It only has those weird interactions sparingly in very specific places, but vast majority of the game there's really nothing like that you can do. So player isn't really taught to look out for that stuff and experiment, because most of the time when they do, there's nothing really to do. 2. The topic of Miyazaki and From in general liking to iterate on the same ideas and not always making them better comes up few times, but I feel like you never really ended up going into that topic properly with more examples. 3. Kinda related but at 1 point German Spy starts talking about how the way From tried to communicate that there's tutorial in ER kept changing and what it says about them, but I feel like he never finished that thought and I really wanted to hear the entire thing. That's something that I really dislike about souls game btw. cos they love forcing you to do those jumping puzzles, but the controls are clunky and suck ass, so whenever I had to do it I hated it, especially since 1 slipup meant dying and potentially losing my souls if I fuck up those stupid jumps again trying to get them back. But what I hate specifically in this case is that originally seeing a big hole was a clear sign "do not fall there, you'll die" and if you could survive it was at least hinted, but later they really started to like making secrets in those holes and encouraging people to jump in holes, which 9 out of 10 times will result in your dead and having to again try to collect your souls back, which honestly discourages you from experimenting, because even if you can reliably collect your souls every time, it's still a hassle. So in this case, they clearly thought that veteran players will obviously knew to try jumping into hole and will find tutorial that way, but obviously, for new players idea of jumping into hole sounds stupid. And that brings us to actually something that was discussed in this video. Bloodstain. I honestly think it's a terrible mechanic and I don't understand the point of it. At least if it's done right, maybe the way Plague was thinking about, it could make it less annoying, but I personally would just prefer to get rid of it altogether. I get that it came from idea that "you loses your souls upon death as hollow" and all that jazz and that the game is supposed to be punishing and being punished by definition isn't fun and that it encourages you to play safer and more carefully. But you know what already is punishing? Dying. Having to go through the level again to place where you died before. I'm already punished by losing my progress. I don't see point in me getting punished even more. And as Plague mentioned, all it does is put player in negative head space, which depending on player can make them bounce from the game more than encourage them to keep playing, especially when the reason you died wasn't your fault. And don't give me the crap about "game is fair, if you die it's always your fault". While for the most part most of the time when you die it's because you did something stupid or made a mistake, there's plenty of times when you die because something you couldn't predict happened or because you got bad luck at rng and got put in unavoidable situation or simply because you're not familiar with enemy/boss and don't know their moveset yet or just didn't even understand what killed you. And boss rooms are the best example of it. If all fog doors were always boss rooms, it'd be more understandable, but they're not, so you have 50:50 chance of accidently walking into boss room and if you had any decent amount of souls you can kiss them goodbye. Unless you're that good and kill boss first try, you're pretty much now locked into that boss and can't go anywhere else. You can't really go somewhere else and come back later or go farming, unless you want to risk losing those souls. And after first time, every time you go into boss room now, you need to first waste time getting your stain back and it's not always easy or safe. And the worst part is that now that you found boss, you can't even spend those souls you have, cos you need to keep going inside to retrieve them first. Honestly, I have no clue why it took them until ER to finally put stain before boss door. After I found Ring of Life Protection I always wore it when I was going through fog door or when I was caring a lot of souls and was going through area that was really dangerous and especially in DLCs I pretty much started to just wear it all the time. It let me enjoy game much more and basically fixed my issue, but I had to fix it for myself, by basically removing the mechanic altogether. POST CONTINUES IN REPLIES COS IT WAS TOO DAMN LONG
I don't mind dying in video game. I died playing video games plenty. I'm fine with having to grind boss etc. to slowly learn and understand it until I finally master it (unless there's something frustrating about it or I just don't have time to learn anything before I die). What I don't like is being punished for that. Whenever I play and have even a moderate amount of souls, it feels like I'm playing with huge weight on my shoulders. Like someone is constantly watching me. 1 stupid mistake, 1 slipup and everything is gone. Even despite you having infinite amount of lives and being able to retry as many times as you want, it feels like you can never make any mistakes, because game punishes you so harshly over just 1. The most liberating thing is finally losing all your souls for good and then you suddenly feel free and don't care anymore, because you don't carry this huge burden anymore weighing you down. You just can focus on playing the damn game. For some people it's not a issue, some can copy with it, some never cared about it in the first place, but some people will hate it and there's nothing wrong with it as it's mechanic specifically designed to make you feel pressured and if you die/lose souls, miserable and not everyone will want their game they play during their free time to put them through that and it has nothing to do with being bad at the game. The worst part about this mechanic is that what you lose is your freaking currency. You basically can't carry any amount of souls with you and are forced to just keep spending it asap, to not worry about losing your hard earned money, but that means they're not incentive to carefully weighing your options or experiment or saving money in case you'll find some new place where you can buy something, meaning now you have to go farm and go back there to buy or potentially missing that opportunity if it's a 1 time thing. That's what I did basically. I used my souls as if I was playing "floor is lava" and tried to get rid of them as soon as I could. So if someone is struggling and "can't get good" then another alternative is supposed to be increasing levels, buying better equ and evening odds that way, but because of that system, someone who constantly dies and/or have problem taking their souls back will constantly lose souls and not be able to buy better equ or increase levels, permanently leaving them in this weak state they're already struggling in and game just makes it harder to come back. Not to mention other insanely punishing mechanics like halving your health that makes coming back (and especially getting your souls back) even harder. No wonder some people just quit game if game keep kicking you when you're down. I saw people saying that you aren't supposed to care about souls or that souls don't matter that much anyway, in that case why it's a mechanic in the first place. Why have levels up at all, if you're supposed to just git gud and leveling up and becoming stronger by outleveling the issue is the easy way or wrong way to beat those games. Level 1 should be the only level then. And lastly even if you want to say you don't care or losing souls doesn't bother you personally, it's fine, but for many people, for me, losing souls also makes me feel that I wasted time. It might not matter in the end, but in the end, souls are the main reward in those games, the thing you're supposed to feel good about getting and accumulating big amounts. So then if you end up losing them, it just makes you feel like last however much time you spend playing and getting those souls didn't matter. Ultimately, as Plague said, at first you play carefully and respect enemies, but once you died, you end up just wanting to rush through levels and get the stain back. Instead of focusing on game and just enjoying it, all you constantly think about is your souls and trying not to die. Game actively discourages exploration, experimentation, improvisation. Why try to parry, when you risk dying, why roll when you risk dying, why use unsafe weapon when you risk dying. No wonder originally people always used shields and tried to find every possible way to cheese the game. Sorry for posting wall of text, but I apparently had a lot to get off my chest.
I actually started to play Demon's with the emulator since I've never played it and dem. It's kicking my ass. Easy to forget that older soul gamess had an extra layer of difficulty: excesive use of OSSHA violations. Myy maneater hatred burns.
Funny you mention maneater, somehow is my favorite fight in the game out of all the X-2 bosses (with tower knight right behind him). Somehow I feel Flamelurker is the hardest of the bunch. Going back to maneater, is the entire creepy journey build up towards his place from the start of the level and the tension, everything screams sweaty dangerous fight to me and even worse when the 2nd one just comes by. That feeling I get is what makes it feel the best X-2 fight and now that I think about it, probably the one of those bosses with the shortest run back. Maybe that was a plus in my eyes.
@@Sbeas19 I love 3-2, but that runback with the black phantom (I don't even have black world tendency) and the silly bridge, which wouldn't be bad if the charge from the man-eater didn't push you a kilometer away. I'm taking a break from that.
Interesting talk on the Dragon God. I'm of the opinion even without its technical flaws, it would still feel pretty boring compared to most other bosses in the game. But then it sort of reminded me of Speed Buster from No More Heroes. Very similar concept, and essentially more an extended level than an outright boss, probably not high on most people's lists, but I feel major differences are both the presentation as well as the more minute details of how the mechanics work. Getting caught in the beam has a very obvious hitbox thanks to the clear cut level design, it's not necessarily instant death but pushes you back a ways, and there's just enough player interaction and choice in deciding to take this or that path through it and risk involved in the time it takes. There's still only one solution, which is pretty silly, but very hard to miss and right near the end where you're left to wonder just how you're going to take this thing on. Whereas with the Dragon God, there's really not much to wonder about as soon as you put two and two together early on, and it just feels like a bit of a slog from that point unfortunately.
With Capra demon I went through the door and immediately stood there with my shield up. I had plenty of time to figure out that running up the stairs was a good option. Not safe exactly, but still a solid 10 seconds of being alive before I was getting pressured to move.
Plague of Greed kills the boss and immediatle decides: "Lemme run inside the baby pit to get my souls back instead of leveling up and dropping a thick load for Stockiple Thomas!" and then "Maybe this time won't go the exact same way as the last two times", risk getting overburdened and unable to pick up Garl Vinland's gigachad stick... only to die in the exact same place? Did I ever tell you the definition of insanity?
Lies of P is amazing and I enjoyed it way more than souls game for various of reasons, but one of them was how they handled the soul losing system. I don't like that it's still there and that's one of souls things they should have dropped (along with weapons rebounding, we have infinite inventory, that's one of those "realistic" things that don't really add much and all games would be better without), but at least they added options to mitigate it. First of all, if you died another time after first, every next time you only lose 1000 souls from your stack, not everything at once. To compensate they added a mechanic where if enemies hit you when you have souls to recover you lose small amount from stack, adding more challenge to just running past enemies (you can still easily do it, you just need to be more careful about it), but! if you kill a enemy that hit you, you get back everything they made you lose from attacking you. Second, they added 2 items you can find good amount during exploring and buy limited amount in shop and in late game unlimited i believe. I never had to buy them, because the amount you get for free is very generous so if you don't died too much and have to constantly use them, you won't really need to buy them. 1 makes it that for duration (which is pretty long) if you get hit when you have soul to collect, you won't lose any souls, so it basically lets you just run past enemies without worrying about taking dmg and second is just life ring for duration, which is insanely long. Also your stain appears before boss door, but since this game came after ER, I can't say for sure it was their idea, but I can easily imagine they came up with that idea on their own, considering how many QoL changes compare to souls game, LiP has. So they made mechanic much less punishing as well as gave you good options to mitigate it completely. It still says a lot that best way to make this mechanic feel better was pretty much make it irrelevant for the most part and I still personally would just remove it completely, but it definitely made experience much better. On NG+ the amount you lose increase to 2000 and I think it increase by another 1000 for each next +, which at higher NG+ runs definitely made me feel the same annoyance as souls game when I'd lose half of my souls instead of just 1000 upon second death, but it's still better than always losing all your souls.
Hey, I think I figured out a decent way to make prepared spells like DS1 more viable, cantrips. An always available, weaker spell that you just always have. One slot that you can swap out that can function as basically your melee, like a magic weapon or something.
I like swamps, I don't like the poison sludge, nobody does, the issue is not the swamp, because it can be beautiful visually, but if the floor inflicts a DoT constantly it doesn't give you time to enjoy exploring and look at the place when you are running away from the sludge areas
I played Dark Souls 1 first then demon souls, for me, both were equal in difficulty, however I did not complete demon souls blind I looked up area order, I had learnt enough from dark souls on how the mechanics worked. For me it’s about the adventure not the boss difficulty, I think through the years if you followed and played all the fromsoft games the boss difficulty is mitigated. The hardest game was shadows die twice , the rest were equally challenging, but Dark Souls and Demon Souls has the best atmosphere and adventure.
1:48:10 On this talk of magic as a resource. This is gonna be a hot take from me and I know ALOT of Dark Souls purists are gonna hate me for this. But I seriously believe we should toss the "resource" based magic system in souls games in favor of a Cooldown based system. Yes its mainstream, but somethings are main stream for a reason, because they WORK. I would extend this to weapon arts too, it would solve ALOT of the spam problems that have latched onto this series, rivers of blood, swiftslash and bloodhound step would not be NEARLY as big of a problem if they had 10-15 second intervals between uses. Some games even do stacking multiple use cool downs (Example being Tracers "Blink" ability in Overwatch), so a small spell, lets say soul arrow, you technically could have 3 consecutive casts before needing to wait for recharge, each cast having their own respective timer. I'm also just not a big fan of Mages having to allocate their healing for more casts, especially considering that magic is NOT as OP as it used to be in comparison to modern melee, oh SURE if you meta game, you can make a magic damage one-shot cannon...but you can also do that for melee TOO! you can crush anything with Lions claw AoW and an Iron Jar aromatic, just face tank literally everything the boss throws at you. Besides a cool down based system would help alleviate some of that boss nuking potential. None of that 30 second straight Comet Azur casting Dragon Ball Z nonsense. Would it be abusable and probably make range cheesing easier in certain locations? Absolutely, but who gives a shit, you can still do that in EVERY fromsoft game regardless of the resource system the game is operating under, players who want to cheese ARE GONNA CHEESE, but I dont see why we should use that as an excuse to hold back the true potential of a pure magic based playstyle.
Plague ALWAYS says that something sucks, when in reality it's all his fault for doing some idiotic stupid thing. Watching him go to the baby swamp so many times and always making the same mistakes made me tear my hair out. All he had to do was literally just use a healing item THAT HE NEVER USES so he has plenty of it. I think he overestimates the whole regen build he's using. The baby pit is literally there as a sogn to NOT GO THERE, you try it... die, and then never try it again. I think DS1 was the last time I was ever midly worried about losing my "precious irreplaceable 50k souls"...
World of Tanks isn't what it used to be but it isn't like you are describing it either, yes people use gold rounds constantly which is annoying but the stealth mechanics are still there and the game is not fast at all, people just use heavy tanks and think they are using tank destroyers. The game is just camping now.
my issue with poison swamps in the souls games is that they all get solved in the same, boring way, which is "just gun it for the exist as quick as possible", and in games that heavily reward exploration having areas like that really kills the mood
Yeah that's true, personally I like the visual aesthetic of most of the swamps but it would be nice if they had a new mechanic besides health drop even faster.
if it was me designen a poison swamp, I would make it so you CAN explore it at any time (keep it like the souls swamps but toxin instead of poison, but damage only being taken while inside the water) the alternative would be to progress in another area and gain an accesory like the lava ring, that makes the health loss negligable but not 0.
Most annoyance for me doesn't come from the health loss itself, but the fact that poison effect lingers for 2-3 minutes after you're already out of the poison source.
The fact that Astrea is still accepting the souls of people I think really does cut to the heart of her character. She wants to help, she really, truly does. But by becoming a demon she is only further hurtling the world to it's end. And in the context of the games two endings, for the good one you need to kill her because of that. But for the bad ending, well, the PC is already a soul hungry villain, so her pleas would naturally fall on deaf ears. So it's a really well made boss that adds a lot of nuance to the games central conflict.
Very nice, love the Demons and their associated respective souls
I miss Slow Souls, where shields actually work. It felt like playing a turn based rpg in real time, and i loved it.
#BringbackSlowSouls
Bro Greatshields have always been lowkey busted
My experience with PvP in Bloodborne was getting invaded in the nightmare frontier, lots of dodging and throwing of molotovs, getting lag back-stabbed and then me pancaking them into oblivion because I found that 2 handing Ludwigs Holy Blade resulted in less parries.
1:39:00 regarding demon souls, the enemies being unaffected by the swamp feels 100% intentional, considering the only thing you can do in the swamp is block and both the red phantoms in the swamp have ways to circumvent that one comfort players are given
thanks for that Miyazaki
Finally finished listening to all episodes.
So I don't want to sound rude, but that's kind the issue with LPs, especially when there are 2 people talking, that you can't really properly focus on conversation while playing, since this LP has a lot moments when German Spy tries to go into some topic and it feels like Plague just ignores him or interrupts him, never letting him finish. I understand it wasn't on purpose, but I was starting to feel really bad for German Spy. But in general, because of game taking some focus away, it felt like you guys couldn't go into some topic as well as you could in normal conversation or some topics got cut short. There are 3 specific examples of it I wanted to bring up:
1. At some point Plague starts talking about windmill in Earthen Peak, but then gets distracted and forgets the topic and never goes back to it. I was really curious what he wanted to say about it. If it was about have esoteric and unclear it was that you're supposed to come to it with lighted torch and interact with it in specific place to burn it and it will drain the swap from boss room, then I wholeheartedly agree. How was anyone supposed to guess you can do that. I feel that's one of major issues I have with souls games. They kinda try to be more of immersive sims, with have certain things are more realistic than other games. Weapons rebound, your equ load mattering and affecting your movement and roll speed, your equ having durability etc. There's plenty of that, which a lot of it got simplified/removed in later games. And the same thing applies to quest lines and some weird environment interactions like invisible walls. My issue with it is that the game doesn't go hard enough with it. It only has those weird interactions sparingly in very specific places, but vast majority of the game there's really nothing like that you can do. So player isn't really taught to look out for that stuff and experiment, because most of the time when they do, there's nothing really to do.
2. The topic of Miyazaki and From in general liking to iterate on the same ideas and not always making them better comes up few times, but I feel like you never really ended up going into that topic properly with more examples.
3. Kinda related but at 1 point German Spy starts talking about how the way From tried to communicate that there's tutorial in ER kept changing and what it says about them, but I feel like he never finished that thought and I really wanted to hear the entire thing.
That's something that I really dislike about souls game btw. cos they love forcing you to do those jumping puzzles, but the controls are clunky and suck ass, so whenever I had to do it I hated it, especially since 1 slipup meant dying and potentially losing my souls if I fuck up those stupid jumps again trying to get them back. But what I hate specifically in this case is that originally seeing a big hole was a clear sign "do not fall there, you'll die" and if you could survive it was at least hinted, but later they really started to like making secrets in those holes and encouraging people to jump in holes, which 9 out of 10 times will result in your dead and having to again try to collect your souls back, which honestly discourages you from experimenting, because even if you can reliably collect your souls every time, it's still a hassle. So in this case, they clearly thought that veteran players will obviously knew to try jumping into hole and will find tutorial that way, but obviously, for new players idea of jumping into hole sounds stupid.
And that brings us to actually something that was discussed in this video. Bloodstain. I honestly think it's a terrible mechanic and I don't understand the point of it. At least if it's done right, maybe the way Plague was thinking about, it could make it less annoying, but I personally would just prefer to get rid of it altogether. I get that it came from idea that "you loses your souls upon death as hollow" and all that jazz and that the game is supposed to be punishing and being punished by definition isn't fun and that it encourages you to play safer and more carefully. But you know what already is punishing? Dying. Having to go through the level again to place where you died before. I'm already punished by losing my progress. I don't see point in me getting punished even more. And as Plague mentioned, all it does is put player in negative head space, which depending on player can make them bounce from the game more than encourage them to keep playing, especially when the reason you died wasn't your fault. And don't give me the crap about "game is fair, if you die it's always your fault". While for the most part most of the time when you die it's because you did something stupid or made a mistake, there's plenty of times when you die because something you couldn't predict happened or because you got bad luck at rng and got put in unavoidable situation or simply because you're not familiar with enemy/boss and don't know their moveset yet or just didn't even understand what killed you.
And boss rooms are the best example of it. If all fog doors were always boss rooms, it'd be more understandable, but they're not, so you have 50:50 chance of accidently walking into boss room and if you had any decent amount of souls you can kiss them goodbye. Unless you're that good and kill boss first try, you're pretty much now locked into that boss and can't go anywhere else. You can't really go somewhere else and come back later or go farming, unless you want to risk losing those souls. And after first time, every time you go into boss room now, you need to first waste time getting your stain back and it's not always easy or safe. And the worst part is that now that you found boss, you can't even spend those souls you have, cos you need to keep going inside to retrieve them first. Honestly, I have no clue why it took them until ER to finally put stain before boss door. After I found Ring of Life Protection I always wore it when I was going through fog door or when I was caring a lot of souls and was going through area that was really dangerous and especially in DLCs I pretty much started to just wear it all the time. It let me enjoy game much more and basically fixed my issue, but I had to fix it for myself, by basically removing the mechanic altogether.
POST CONTINUES IN REPLIES COS IT WAS TOO DAMN LONG
I don't mind dying in video game. I died playing video games plenty. I'm fine with having to grind boss etc. to slowly learn and understand it until I finally master it (unless there's something frustrating about it or I just don't have time to learn anything before I die). What I don't like is being punished for that. Whenever I play and have even a moderate amount of souls, it feels like I'm playing with huge weight on my shoulders. Like someone is constantly watching me. 1 stupid mistake, 1 slipup and everything is gone. Even despite you having infinite amount of lives and being able to retry as many times as you want, it feels like you can never make any mistakes, because game punishes you so harshly over just 1. The most liberating thing is finally losing all your souls for good and then you suddenly feel free and don't care anymore, because you don't carry this huge burden anymore weighing you down. You just can focus on playing the damn game. For some people it's not a issue, some can copy with it, some never cared about it in the first place, but some people will hate it and there's nothing wrong with it as it's mechanic specifically designed to make you feel pressured and if you die/lose souls, miserable and not everyone will want their game they play during their free time to put them through that and it has nothing to do with being bad at the game.
The worst part about this mechanic is that what you lose is your freaking currency. You basically can't carry any amount of souls with you and are forced to just keep spending it asap, to not worry about losing your hard earned money, but that means they're not incentive to carefully weighing your options or experiment or saving money in case you'll find some new place where you can buy something, meaning now you have to go farm and go back there to buy or potentially missing that opportunity if it's a 1 time thing. That's what I did basically. I used my souls as if I was playing "floor is lava" and tried to get rid of them as soon as I could. So if someone is struggling and "can't get good" then another alternative is supposed to be increasing levels, buying better equ and evening odds that way, but because of that system, someone who constantly dies and/or have problem taking their souls back will constantly lose souls and not be able to buy better equ or increase levels, permanently leaving them in this weak state they're already struggling in and game just makes it harder to come back. Not to mention other insanely punishing mechanics like halving your health that makes coming back (and especially getting your souls back) even harder. No wonder some people just quit game if game keep kicking you when you're down. I saw people saying that you aren't supposed to care about souls or that souls don't matter that much anyway, in that case why it's a mechanic in the first place. Why have levels up at all, if you're supposed to just git gud and leveling up and becoming stronger by outleveling the issue is the easy way or wrong way to beat those games. Level 1 should be the only level then.
And lastly even if you want to say you don't care or losing souls doesn't bother you personally, it's fine, but for many people, for me, losing souls also makes me feel that I wasted time. It might not matter in the end, but in the end, souls are the main reward in those games, the thing you're supposed to feel good about getting and accumulating big amounts. So then if you end up losing them, it just makes you feel like last however much time you spend playing and getting those souls didn't matter. Ultimately, as Plague said, at first you play carefully and respect enemies, but once you died, you end up just wanting to rush through levels and get the stain back. Instead of focusing on game and just enjoying it, all you constantly think about is your souls and trying not to die. Game actively discourages exploration, experimentation, improvisation. Why try to parry, when you risk dying, why roll when you risk dying, why use unsafe weapon when you risk dying. No wonder originally people always used shields and tried to find every possible way to cheese the game.
Sorry for posting wall of text, but I apparently had a lot to get off my chest.
I actually started to play Demon's with the emulator since I've never played it and dem. It's kicking my ass. Easy to forget that older soul gamess had an extra layer of difficulty: excesive use of OSSHA violations. Myy maneater hatred burns.
Funny you mention maneater, somehow is my favorite fight in the game out of all the X-2 bosses (with tower knight right behind him). Somehow I feel Flamelurker is the hardest of the bunch. Going back to maneater, is the entire creepy journey build up towards his place from the start of the level and the tension, everything screams sweaty dangerous fight to me and even worse when the 2nd one just comes by.
That feeling I get is what makes it feel the best X-2 fight and now that I think about it, probably the one of those bosses with the shortest run back. Maybe that was a plus in my eyes.
@@Sbeas19 I love 3-2, but that runback with the black phantom (I don't even have black world tendency) and the silly bridge, which wouldn't be bad if the charge from the man-eater didn't push you a kilometer away. I'm taking a break from that.
43:43 THE VOLUME WAS DESTROYED
Interesting talk on the Dragon God. I'm of the opinion even without its technical flaws, it would still feel pretty boring compared to most other bosses in the game. But then it sort of reminded me of Speed Buster from No More Heroes. Very similar concept, and essentially more an extended level than an outright boss, probably not high on most people's lists, but I feel major differences are both the presentation as well as the more minute details of how the mechanics work. Getting caught in the beam has a very obvious hitbox thanks to the clear cut level design, it's not necessarily instant death but pushes you back a ways, and there's just enough player interaction and choice in deciding to take this or that path through it and risk involved in the time it takes. There's still only one solution, which is pretty silly, but very hard to miss and right near the end where you're left to wonder just how you're going to take this thing on. Whereas with the Dragon God, there's really not much to wonder about as soon as you put two and two together early on, and it just feels like a bit of a slog from that point unfortunately.
With Capra demon I went through the door and immediately stood there with my shield up. I had plenty of time to figure out that running up the stairs was a good option. Not safe exactly, but still a solid 10 seconds of being alive before I was getting pressured to move.
Plague of Greed kills the boss and immediatle decides: "Lemme run inside the baby pit to get my souls back instead of leveling up and dropping a thick load for Stockiple Thomas!" and then "Maybe this time won't go the exact same way as the last two times", risk getting overburdened and unable to pick up Garl Vinland's gigachad stick... only to die in the exact same place?
Did I ever tell you the definition of insanity?
Ahh finally. I really needed new sleep aid (Not saying you're boring just love hearing you guys talk lol)
Yeah, I'm still taken aback how little armor there is in this game. Made more sense why so many people would use the yellow turban after knowing that
Curse of the completionist aka brain sees shiny, get shiny, make happy brain juice basically 😊
But then mimics mess up your day😂
An oil swamp you say...like in the chalice dungeons?
Never change my boi, i will always stand by your side
Lies of P is amazing and I enjoyed it way more than souls game for various of reasons, but one of them was how they handled the soul losing system. I don't like that it's still there and that's one of souls things they should have dropped (along with weapons rebounding, we have infinite inventory, that's one of those "realistic" things that don't really add much and all games would be better without), but at least they added options to mitigate it. First of all, if you died another time after first, every next time you only lose 1000 souls from your stack, not everything at once. To compensate they added a mechanic where if enemies hit you when you have souls to recover you lose small amount from stack, adding more challenge to just running past enemies (you can still easily do it, you just need to be more careful about it), but! if you kill a enemy that hit you, you get back everything they made you lose from attacking you. Second, they added 2 items you can find good amount during exploring and buy limited amount in shop and in late game unlimited i believe. I never had to buy them, because the amount you get for free is very generous so if you don't died too much and have to constantly use them, you won't really need to buy them. 1 makes it that for duration (which is pretty long) if you get hit when you have soul to collect, you won't lose any souls, so it basically lets you just run past enemies without worrying about taking dmg and second is just life ring for duration, which is insanely long. Also your stain appears before boss door, but since this game came after ER, I can't say for sure it was their idea, but I can easily imagine they came up with that idea on their own, considering how many QoL changes compare to souls game, LiP has.
So they made mechanic much less punishing as well as gave you good options to mitigate it completely. It still says a lot that best way to make this mechanic feel better was pretty much make it irrelevant for the most part and I still personally would just remove it completely, but it definitely made experience much better. On NG+ the amount you lose increase to 2000 and I think it increase by another 1000 for each next +, which at higher NG+ runs definitely made me feel the same annoyance as souls game when I'd lose half of my souls instead of just 1000 upon second death, but it's still better than always losing all your souls.
My favorite brain damaged farm boy
Hey, I think I figured out a decent way to make prepared spells like DS1 more viable, cantrips. An always available, weaker spell that you just always have. One slot that you can swap out that can function as basically your melee, like a magic weapon or something.
It's also called Storm King like the one from Elden Ring.
@@chrioyuuij6450 the one in Elden ring is the serpent killing spear. DS3 has Storm King again.
I like swamps, I don't like the poison sludge, nobody does, the issue is not the swamp, because it can be beautiful visually, but if the floor inflicts a DoT constantly it doesn't give you time to enjoy exploring and look at the place when you are running away from the sludge areas
And what I like about swamp maps, is when they have good sound design
I played Dark Souls 1 first then demon souls, for me, both were equal in difficulty, however I did not complete demon souls blind I looked up area order, I had learnt enough from dark souls on how the mechanics worked. For me it’s about the adventure not the boss difficulty, I think through the years if you followed and played all the fromsoft games the boss difficulty is mitigated. The hardest game was shadows die twice , the rest were equally challenging, but Dark Souls and Demon Souls has the best atmosphere and adventure.
1:48:10
On this talk of magic as a resource.
This is gonna be a hot take from me and I know ALOT of Dark Souls purists are gonna hate me for this. But I seriously believe we should toss the "resource" based magic system in souls games in favor of a Cooldown based system. Yes its mainstream, but somethings are main stream for a reason, because they WORK. I would extend this to weapon arts too, it would solve ALOT of the spam problems that have latched onto this series, rivers of blood, swiftslash and bloodhound step would not be NEARLY as big of a problem if they had 10-15 second intervals between uses. Some games even do stacking multiple use cool downs (Example being Tracers "Blink" ability in Overwatch), so a small spell, lets say soul arrow, you technically could have 3 consecutive casts before needing to wait for recharge, each cast having their own respective timer. I'm also just not a big fan of Mages having to allocate their healing for more casts, especially considering that magic is NOT as OP as it used to be in comparison to modern melee, oh SURE if you meta game, you can make a magic damage one-shot cannon...but you can also do that for melee TOO! you can crush anything with Lions claw AoW and an Iron Jar aromatic, just face tank literally everything the boss throws at you. Besides a cool down based system would help alleviate some of that boss nuking potential. None of that 30 second straight Comet Azur casting Dragon Ball Z nonsense.
Would it be abusable and probably make range cheesing easier in certain locations? Absolutely, but who gives a shit, you can still do that in EVERY fromsoft game regardless of the resource system the game is operating under, players who want to cheese ARE GONNA CHEESE, but I dont see why we should use that as an excuse to hold back the true potential of a pure magic based playstyle.
Plague ALWAYS says that something sucks, when in reality it's all his fault for doing some idiotic stupid thing. Watching him go to the baby swamp so many times and always making the same mistakes made me tear my hair out. All he had to do was literally just use a healing item THAT HE NEVER USES so he has plenty of it. I think he overestimates the whole regen build he's using. The baby pit is literally there as a sogn to NOT GO THERE, you try it... die, and then never try it again. I think DS1 was the last time I was ever midly worried about losing my "precious irreplaceable 50k souls"...
1:33:27 I just got a primal urge to replay Megaman X 1-3 upon hearig plague say that :D
Another banger from the legend him self
Who is that absolutely DELIGHTFUL purple cat character in the thumbnail?
That is Plague of Gripes. He's the grumpy-sounding one.
World of Tanks isn't what it used to be but it isn't like you are describing it either, yes people use gold rounds constantly which is annoying but the stealth mechanics are still there and the game is not fast at all, people just use heavy tanks and think they are using tank destroyers. The game is just camping now.
Another 26 minutes of germanspy talking about (again) how hes too weak to physically make dinner and how hard the Elden Ring guide was
And then the rest is something else, it's alright.
You didn't get to see the cute Sincere Prayer Ring thing. I'll show it to you in the next stream.
😎👌
2:04 it’s all filthy lowgrade overdesigned lore breaking Primaris customization 😔