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I thought this movie did a good job of fleshing out the stakes of how "a lot of people died to get this information" alluded to in Episode 4, and basically it was satisfying as a mini-story about that. So the fact that the characters were one dimensional didn't really affect how I thought about the movie, and frankly I ended up enjoying it quite a bit more than Episode VII which felt much more disjointed and uncertain of itself.

The blood vial system was good for my play style, but inarguably worse for others (on the other hand the estrus system was kinda bad for me, but better for others, and I wish people would recognize there are trade offs involved with that system too...). The frenzy mechanic is even worse though. That was so dumb.

Also this isn't exactly the most appropriate place to post this, but I can't think of anywhere better at the moment so it'll have to do, but the phrase From Software's Jodorowsky's Dune popped into my head, and now I wish more than anything else that that was a reality.

One thing I've learned from DOTA that I think is applicable here is sometimes you counter a thing with the same thing. Enemy team wrecking you with invisibility? Buy a shadow blade. Enemy carry bought a rapier? Buy your own rapier. The same principle applies here. You want to beat Nick's new build? You know what to do: ALL STRENGTH NO GLOVES NO PANTS

Waow!

A feedback loop of madness

http://steamcommunity.com/games/289070/announcements/detail/599374259662898714 Like, I think Civ 6 is so close to being a great strategy game, but the religion and culture mechanics just don't work for me at all, and these balance changes do nothing to address it.

I think Dear Esther is a game.

Yeah, Vaati is definitely tops as far as youtubers doing Souls lore stuff. My problem is I'd rather read an article than sit around with some youtube clip playing, so stuff like the RPS article are very welcome to me even if it isn't as deep a dive as a lot of material covered by people in the Souls lore community. Because of my preference for reading, I really enjoy these blogs: http://thelorehunter.blogspot.com/ http://darksouls3lore.blogspot.com/

I think people are gonna remember 2016 the same way that people remember like 1998 or 1999. It is just extraordinary how many strong games were released this year. Games that were barely mentioned that in another year would dominate conversations. But this was also the year where people got a lot more pessimistic about the economic logistics of indie games. Also, with a few notable exceptions, I think the real standout games this year were from the big studios. I think a lot of that has to do with a useful change in tone. We're in a post-Bioshock Infinite world where developers realized the self-serious tone of so many games was just unsustainable in the face of the outrageousness of their mechanics and settings. Hitman, Doom, and Overwatch all stand out to me as excellent examples of this new direction forward. All these games leaned into their goofiness and owned what they were rather than try to deflect some shittiness with irony. More of that, please. I don't even know how to pick a game this year, I'm not really sure what criteria would make sense to use. I do know that I played an awful lot of Hitman, XCOM 2, and Imbroglio this year. So I think those are all worthy contenders. I also think that new Super Mario game for the iphones is quite good. The shorter games that left the biggest impact on me were Thumper, Inside, Hyper Light Drifter, and Quadrilateral Cowboy. I also liked Dishonored 2 a lot, and I'm finally warming up to Dark Souls 3 after initially thinking it was the worst game From Software has made yet. I still haven't played that new Deus Ex game. I was quite high on Civ 6 when it came out, but cooled on it after about 2 weeks. Reading the balance changes for it last night was quite disappointing. Still not as disappointing as Stellaris though.

This is some good games writing: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/12/20/why-dark-souls-3s-aldrich-is-2016s-best-boss/

While it is great to see Twitch take active steps to try and improve chat moderation tools, I definitely think it is really unfortunate that user's don't have more granular control over each of those categories. Like, I want bigotry and hate speech to be rigorously filtered out, but I don't really care if people use bad language or make sex jokes, but you can't make that distinction with the set of choices offered. It's not personally important for me since I only stream to like 2 or 3 people, but I think for a tool set like that to be useful more granularity is needed. Also I will try to stream more as like a new year's resolution or something.

Wasn't trying to suggest Nick was a noob in my comment, and you're right, he didn't have too much difficulty with that boss. My issue was that I was basically a noob because of an unfamiliar playstyle, and it took me a ton of tries to beat that boss even after I figured out how to approach the fight because any time I made a mistake I died which seems shitty for an early game boss. Maybe I was underleveled, but I don't run pass enemies and play pretty cautiously in terms of trying not to lose souls after dying so that seems like it would be a weird problem. Mostly though it is just a boss with a boring move set in a dark room.

I don't think the Lost Sinner is an easy fight at all for people new to the series. DS2 was my first time playing a sword & board build, but I didn't really understand a lot of stuff about how to build my character and Lost Sinner punished that in a really unforgiving way. Her moveset isn't complicated, but I would often get one or two shotted, and I didn't do much damage to her so it made the fight extremely tedious (plus the route to the fight sucks). I think it took me over 50 tries, and that was when I started to really dislike DS2.

Once they tweak the UI a bit, and fix the stability of the thing (I thankfully haven't been getting dropped frames and game crashes in the middle of a match like a lot of people, but the game does consistently crash at the conclusion of a match for me) I'll be pretty happy. I doubt it is well balanced at all, but I like Dota when it is really chaotic, and this patch definitely makes the game more chaotic and exciting.

To be fair though, he did beat the game with the calamity ring on, so I'm pretty sure the rest of you are babies :-p

I'll cop to not having replayed any of the Souls games. That's why build variety isn't too important to me, and why some of your other criticisms, though perfectly reasonable criticisms that I would imagine a lot of people agree with, don't really affect my feelings for the game. I agree that most of the items you pickup in Bloodborne aren't particularly exciting for the most part... I went through most of the game just using the Hunter Axe, and occasionally I would switch out armor for aesthetics, but mostly it was just like picking up consumables. That being said I did really like the gem system in Bloodborne, and I wish that system had made it into DS3. I really like the modular approach to weapon design in Bloodborne. But I think From really upped their game in terms of environmental storytelling compared to the Souls games, and that was enough for me to keep playing through the game and fighting all these optional bosses (and also because the bosses were fun to fight). Also this is just personal preference, but I found the story a little easier to parse and more interesting compared to Dark Souls which has always seemed kind of cool but I generally find I end up only half paying attention to it. P.S. Finished Bloodborne last night. Those were some great fights, and the ending was creepy and unsettling in a good way!

Yeah I'm also not in favor of that covenant pickup. It's one thing to put on the double damage ring in the late game when you have an OP character. It's another to make the early to mid game that much more challenging.

That was an exquisite stream.

I'm having that experience with DS3 right now. When I put the game down last I thought I was done with the Souls series, and I thought DS3 was the worst one yet. I dipped my toe back in recently though because Bloodborne revived my love for the series, and while I don't like DS3 as much as Bloodborne, I'm having a much better time with DS3 than in my first run. I'm also discovering the routes I took in my first run probably made things way harder than they needed to be, go figure.

I'll second Bloodborne as a game I think Nick would get along with better. There's only one really viable build for Bloodborne (strength and HP all the way, with some points in skill depending on your weapon), but it is a super fun way to play the game. With the exception of frenzy, I didn't find the game really had any bullshit mechanics, and all the boss fights felt fair to me (although I think I was probably over-leveled by the time I fought Ebrietas to be fair). The DLC for Bloodborne is incredible too, although it means you'll get access to weapons that make certain parts of the game trivially easy.

DS2 bosses gave me the most trouble out of any of the games, and I never finished it. But I don't know if my experience is typical or not. I agree that DS1 bosses aren't too difficult with a couple of notable exceptions. Getting better at these games is definitely a thing though.

Watching him stream last night it became pretty clear that for Nick the Souls games are just like an exercise in contemplating the absurdity of existence rather than something you might actually play for fun.

I think it is cool that some people have had great experiences with the co-op in Souls games, but I think the much more common experience is that some really difficult boss suddenly becomes trivially easy since the boss doesn't have any good way to handle aggro'ing 2+ opponents, and that isn't really a satisfying resolution. And I think what is cool about Souls boss fights is how they are this pure expression of fighting game mechanics that someone like me, who doesn't have great reflexes, can reasonably tap into thanks to the less frenetic pacing of the game. So while the "git gud" contingent of people can take a hike because the difficulty of Souls games is definitely the least interesting aspect of the series, I am sympathetic to people that feel like the co-op experience isn't great, and prefer to solo boss fights.

I haven't played the Uncharted games, but having watched my wife play the whole series my only partially-informed opinion is that the gameplay looked the same in all the games.