Gormongous

I'm installing it now, it's 4.5 gigs or so?

I had just preordered yesterday, after the Giant Bomb Quick Look sold me, but now there's a worrying kerfuffle on the Paradox forums because the design team couldn't agree as to how they should balance slave revolts, so they took revolts out. Slaves are now just pops that have no happiness rating themselves but decrease the happiness ratings of other pops around them. That's whatever, I don't know, but "New Paradox" is responding with a lot of "Old Paradox" disregard for fan reactions. The design lead says that slave revolts aren't needed, but promises rather dismissively to reconsider if fan feedback demands it. The AI lead says that the removal of slave revolts doesn't make slavery "terribly overpowered." The PR lead says that he hasn't noticed slavery being overpowered but suggests "house rules" for those who do. It's just... not encouraging, to see the "we know what's actually fun" philosophy, especially after the pile of crap that CK2 gradually became post-The Old Gods...

Thirding this request. I plan to buy the game day and date, so I'll be there either to sympathize with Nick Breckon or watch him fail like the space baby he is.

Yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to pass it off as the solution, just that the skill ceiling felt so much higher on everything else except Robotic. Scientific especially felt like a poor choice, despite my love of how they play, because it's hard to get the clusters of diverse resources that make them really effective. Basically, I was not doing well as any faction except Robotic because water is so scarce on that map and you need a substantial minority of it for fuel, so founding near a cluster of iron on the dry ice, transitioning from steel early on into condenser-fueled computers, and having the only fuel costs be for solitary three-stack aluminum and silicon buildings felt like a really strong strategy for lower-skill beginners (and, even then, it took me five tries to beat it once I'd pieced together a winning strategy, because I'm a dumb baby). Since you say you're experienced, I'd really like your opinion: in every skirmish that I've played so far, oxygen has been the most valuable offworld product and offworld products don't seem affected by in-game events after the seed. Is this just a weird luck of the draw on my part? Because it makes electrolysis plants and solar condensers (if there's dry ice) really strong, even though they're already fairly strong (carbon can be rare and both computer and human players often run a fuel-negative game). I mean, maybe in a more competitive game you don't have the opportunity to make a trio of either of those buildings, so you aren't just pumping out oxygen like crazy, but it seems like a valuable commodity that only gets more valuable as the game progresses and doesn't have a multi-input production gating it, like computers, chemicals, or glass.

It took me over two hours of repeated tries to beat the last practice game. The problem is mostly that, at lower skill levels, it's a puzzle that only seems to have one strong solution: go Robotic, because there's not enough water near the rich deposits of minerals to sustain the other factions; go hard into steel for the first couple of expansions and then pivot into solar collectors and computers; and try to buy claims and stocks early, before your competitors break the $30,000-per-stock mark. I really can't get more specific than that, because I got barely out-bought once and then, second try, beat the mission handily, so...

Also worth noting that "Saltatore" translates as "jumper" or "one who jumps," so.... Mario and Luigi Jumpman. Someone was very proud of their little in-joke.

The thing is, you're only ever blindsided by a Mimic once. Every time after that, it's part of the range of experience for which you steel yourself when opening a chest.

To be completely fair, I think that Rob (or perhaps his source, Tyler Sigman) mischaracterized the dynamic between designer and fan with Darkest Dungeon. Sure, there was a group of "hardcore" junkies who just wanted the devs to make the game as difficult as possible, much like the people who think the important thing about Dark Souls is that it's hard, but a large percentage of the player base in Early Access objected to many of the changes that were made at the eleventh hour to quash a small handful of semi-dominant strategies that had emerged over months of intensive play. It seemed to me, as someone with several dozen hours in the game when those changes were made, that Red Hook had a vision of the game in which all choices were difficult and they resorted to asymmetrical and unthematic mechanics to complicate the small handful of straightforward choices that existed among the (already numerous) hard ones. Corpses, heart attacks, and the broad buffing of enemy damage and HP were all claimed by Red Hook to be part of the development plan from day one, but they drastically curtailed player agency in pursuit of some nebulous aesthetic of unforgiving claustrophobia, so maybe they should have been dropped from that plan? I think a lot of the snafus on Early Access show us that, not only are fans fairly inflexible in their perception of what a game is, but that devs are as well. At some point, if the "fun" of your game lies in places that your whiteboard design didn't suggest, you have the choice of using player feedback in Early Access i) to build a game that further enhances the fun players have found or ii) to root out the sources of that fun and try to redirect players elsewhere, more along the lines of your original design. I also wonder if the public nature of Early Access means that developers feel less able to change the direction of their design mid-stream, once it becomes clear that players are cheesing the "punishing" part of your game to enable themselves to experiment with different classes, skills, and setups: nothing to be done at that point, just up the difficulty and gut any optimal strategies to ensure that there's no room for players to play the game in a way other than the way that you originally envisioned. Basically, I think that developers and fans are learning, very slowly, how to have conversations about the games that are being made, and I think that few developers are as open or experienced as Soren at keeping the conversation from becoming a lecture. Who knows where it'll go from here!

I'm similar, but what helped me to get over it is simply that the Dark Souls community is overwhelmingly patient and gracious. I can't tell you how many people I've had carefully walk me through a level, pointing out secret areas and letting me take the lead whenever possible, or how many I've had show me how to dodge the boss' specific moves and then hung back to let me beat on it. It's peer-to-peer tutorialization, oftentimes. Hence, it's unfortunate that a lot of players, maybe even the majority, try to avoid summoning friendly co-op phantoms (the white and gold signs) out of an interest (internally or externally imparted) in preserving the game's purity of experience. It means that the only way that those people experience the multiplayer is by violent, unwelcome invasions from seasoned (and often troll-like) players, which understandably turns them off from further experimentation. Part of the magic of Dark Souls is playing this isolating, stressful game and then realizing, through messages, bloodstains, and phantoms, that you're not alone, that hundreds of other people are experiencing the exact same thing as you and that you all can help each other out, if you're willing to ask for that help. You're lonely, but not alone, the way I put it.

Yeah, when Reddit users look down on the Steam forums for being uninformed, reactionary loudmouths, we've got a bad situation on our hands...

It's definitely the annoying reality of the digital age, that any streaming service getting too successful prompts content owners to pull their stuff off that service and launch their own instead. We're probably going to need another five years, at least, before all the UPlays and Origins and HBO Gos either die out or stabilize into broadly attractive business models...

I'm sad that Snooglebum's not active anymore, because Chris' matter-of-fact "Smoke weed every day" is remix gold.

I've summoned for at least three other bosses and never had this issue. It feels really weird for them all to come at once, and not to occur with the few white phantoms I summoned, but...

I was going to beat the Dancer by myself, but now, twice in a row, I cleanly dodged the one-hit-kill grab and then, a half-second afterward, magically appeared in the Dancer's hand, so fuck this boss and its glitchy moveset. EDIT: Or... not? I just had six Sunbros in a row refuse to come through the fog with me. Most of them used the black crystal to leave my game, after greeting me and waiting by the fog for me to go through, but the last one just hung around outside while I was fighting the Dancer, increasing the boss' hitpoints but doing nothing to help. I beat it on my own, but this night's really soured my experience. I've never known the Dark Souls community to be like this.

That's fair. I just think that some people get way too caught up in the self-flattering fantasy that they beat the boss all by themselves and that it's a compliment to their skills that they did so. I'm not built that way and I'm glad I'm not, because the courtesy and kindness of certain summons, who've patiently shown me how to beat a boss or navigate a gauntlet, has given me a pleasure that's equal to or greater than the pleasure of popping all the blisters on a tree-man's butt.

The weird thing, and I'm not pointing to anyone in this forum as a culprit, is that people who insist that the Dark Souls series is about loneliness, isolation, and rugged individualism and therefore that it shouldn't have co-op are fine with the profusion of written messages, which is often a much more potent form of co-op, in my experience. Messages have saved me from hundreds of deaths to ill-judged drops, mimics, and dudes hidden around corners.

True, although my friend did go from the Undead Parish to Darkroot Basin and broke his own spirit there to the point that he quit the game, only to have me tell him about the Sewers and Blighttown. He thought the latter was an internet nickname for part of Darkroot.

I was in the chat and it was one commenter in particular who believed so strongly that multiplayer broke the game that he was drowning out a lot of other commenters with more subtle views. That's really the thing: I've found that people who believe that co-op is for quitters are the people who have the very narrow view of Dark Souls as a game about overcoming impossible odds through sheer determination, rather than a game about exploration or intermittent loneliness or self-discovery though incremental learning. It's disappointing that it's the former that gets preference in the conversation.

Yes, but there are other challenging games that don't cause their players to choose near-impossible paths through the content and assume that it's developer intent for them to be having such difficulty. People playing Fallout: New Vegas, to choose a bad example, don't head north, run into deathclaws from the endgame, and still keep going. They turn around. Somehow, the same sequence doesn't happen to people going into the Catacombs in the first Dark Souls. Something has been communicated about the game's difficulty, before they even start playing, that makes virtually any gameplay experience, no matter how failure-ridden, be interpreted as "normal" for the game. It's a really interesting phenomenon and doesn't deserve to be flattened down to just raw difficulty.

Yeah, that's definitely how Dark Souls has been for many people, too. A bunch of people pushes through the Catacombs and into the Tomb of Giants, even though the game was trying to tell them that they were headed in the wrong direction by upping the difficulty, because they thought the game was supposed to be that hard. It's the fault of the marketing, in that case, but in the case of Mr. Blow's game, who knows?

There's a skeleton wizard around the corner from each whom you can kill to have it break immediately, too. They wear a funny hat and don't aggro to you.

I'm not going to keep posting in this thread after this, because I haven't been participating in the rewatch itself and I'm not really in the mood to keep explicating a third party's opinions, but I think you're putting your thumb on the scale by referring to Syndrome's technical aptitude as a "superpower." In the movie itself, the depiction of such aptitude is not made with the same language that the actual superpowers are, even if the tech that it produces results in other superpower-like aptitudes. Like I said, you can finesse it to the point that I'm sure it bears no authorial intent, but the superhero family are all shown either to act responsibly with their powers or to be given the chance to correct their mistakes, making them out to be deserving, while Syndrome is shown to be irresponsible, thus undeserving. Unless I'm misremembering, Mr. Incredible never really owns up to his role in Syndrome's genesis and his unwitting assistance in Syndrome's plans, beyond his initial shock of discovery, and at the end he's still disgusted that Syndrome's using his tech to "pretend" to be a superhero. There's definitely a double standard there, although it's arguably a natural consequence of telling a story with good and evil people in it, and it's wholly unsurprising to me that, for some viewers, it drowns out the themes of family and responsibility. Not for me, like I said, but I know at least one.

I have seen skeleton hits unravel the bridge.

If the anime's good, the character of the Best Girl embodies everything that's interesting and exceptional about it. If it's bad, she either embodies the parts that could have been good or is a repudiation of what makes it bad. I wrote a blog post about this in Working!! over a year ago: https://thecrabflowerclub.wordpress.com/2014/07/17/best-girl-yamada/ I would argue that there's no Best Boy for the same reason that it's "feminism" and not "humanism." There's not quite the same tendency in anime for the majority of male characters to be caricatured piles of useless garbage, to the point that enjoyable ones need to be celebrated, although there could probably be a spin-off meme, Best Potato, for harem anime...

I'm not particularly overleveled, I don't think, and I still destroyed that boss. He apparently has a second set of moves once his health dropped below half, but he didn't last long once I got him on the ropes, so he didn't really distinguish himself as a boss from other, similar mini-bosses that I'd already fought. Honestly, I had a harder time with the greatsword asshole in the basement.