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Idle Weekend April 15, 2016: The Dark Souls Of...

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Idle Weekend April 16, 2016:

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The Dark Souls Of...

Inspired by Danielle's Dark Souls misery and Rob's experience with hardcore sims, the Weekenders ponder the costs and the pleasures of high investment games. Is it really worth dozens of hours of your busy life to defeat an imaginary dragon, or to land a phantom plane on a digital aircraft carrier? Do the highest highs always have to be accompanied by the lowest lows? And is "get good" ever an appropriate response to whining about difficult games? No. The answer to that is no.

Discussed: Dark Souls III, Demon's Souls, The Witcher 3, Silent Hunter 3, Billions, W/ Bob and David

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That ad read was painful to me, haha. I couldn't tell if they were joking or not... So good job, I guess?

 

Anyone else notice there's like, an entire minute of dead space at 35:57 on the iTunes version of the podcast? The audio goes completely dead. Nothing's missing, but the audio doesn't come back in until 37:15. 

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That ad read was painful to me, haha. I couldn't tell if they were joking or not... So good job, I guess?

Oh man. They were definitely joking. It's sort of concerning that someone thought they might not be, haha. I hope not very many people got that impression.

As for that silence: Crap! I'm fixing it now.

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omg that tampon ad read was amazing

I pretty much died, it was hilarious.

 

Also the rest of the episode was good! You two get better week by week. I'm loving it.

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I like the fact that Rob apparently had similar experiences with early flight sims as I remember having. (My flight sim was the Amiga version of F19 Stealth Fighter, and I don't think that I ever managed to actually successfully land a plane at the end of a mission, ever. I don't think I ever managed to dock in a space station in Elite 2: Frontier, either.) There's something to be said for the possibility that this just means that this type of game "isn't for me" (and I haven't bought a "proper flight sim" since, so maybe I learned my lesson), but I think during the period, a lot of the "inherent difficulty" was, essentially, justified due to lack of effective competition (both between games, and also for my time, as someone who was at school, and thus could afford to spend a lot of time failing to land virtual planes)  I had nothing better to do than fail at stuff. 

The issue of this is when the game is just too difficult to ever get to the bit where you get the "reward" - I never managed to get a reward for landing a plane, so all I have is just the frustration of not being able to. (And in the end, I just ended up ejecting and ditching the plane at the end of missions, which really did kill my mission progression...)

 

[ironically, "high difficulty" really just pushed me towards cheat codes in games, which is presumably not the intended result?]

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I loved the Silent Hunter 3 talk.  I loved that game, it still sits on my wish list not for lack of money, but if I want to go down that rabbit hole again.  But yeah, stalking convoys was really fun.  

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The thing with Dark Souls is that it's a very elegant machine for converting frustration and time into elation. The other thing with Dark Souls is that it's not for everyone. When I think about what I don't like about those games, and how I would fix what I don't like, I realize that those fixes would make the games less special to those who love them. For example, as a narrative-driven person, I find the purposeful obscurity of the series to be maddening. I see the lovely art design and evocative spaces and I think to myself, "too bad there's nothing to do here but kill (nearly) everything that moves." Yet, isolation and confusion are deeply embedded thematic elements of the series, and they go hand in hand with the satisfaction of finding your way and making the place your own.

I've made peace with the fact that a lot of people love something that I find more intriguing in the abstract than in actual practice. I think I understand, though, if people are frustrated with the way the series has dominated the last few years of conversation around mainstream AAA gaming, as the discussion can often give the impression to those on the outside that the best gaming experiences are necessarily exclusive and inaccessible. This is unfortunate because Dark Souls is a game in which you are meant to ask for help. It's also I think untrue. Dark Souls isn't great because it's more pure, or keeps bad players away. It's great because for those who do undertake its journey and succeed, the experience changes them--teaching them patience, perseverance, observation and showing them what they can achieve by pushing themselves to their limit. Given that, it's to be expected that people are very passionate about it.

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nthing that the ad reads were incredible.

 

Also I'm glad I'm not the only one bothered by ~*~*~git gud~*~*~ discourse around difficult games!

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I've never had an issue with the difficulty of the Dark Souls series. I tend to find the rituals of progressing from the starting point to the boss area as a meditative exercise rather than an exercise in frustration. That being said I am feeling uncharitable towards Dark Souls 3. It is starting to feel overly familiar, and I'm definitely feeling what is the point of all this? Still playing for now in the hopes that the game gets better as I progress, but so far this is my least favorite game in the series. Even for people that crave difficulty, I feel like the Souls series is starting to hit the limits of what it has to offer.

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Rob mentioned this but it bears expanding that Dark Souls is not just a "difficult" game. It's different from games like Super Meat Boy and apparently Hyper Light Drifter that have a tight retry loop on each challenge. Dark Souls is a fantasy game and the experience it's trying to deliver is of really being a medieval adventurer and the tropes that come with it, including dastardly traps and ambushes. If you were really an adventurer who blunders into an ambush of molotov cocktails then your experience should be dire. The fact that the game simply punishes you by dropping your souls than actually just ending the game is a compromise for the sake of the player. (Roguelikes like Spelunky actually do just kill you but make other design concessions so it doesn't feel too bad.) But the punishment has to be there so you'd be as fearful and cautious of danger as you should be if you were really there. In more mainstream games you'd most likely only see these kinds of things in cutscenes where the hero automatically evades the trap (or with a few quick-time prompts) giving you that sensation vicariously but not really experientially. That distinction is what makes the Souls games special as an experience and in terms of game design.

 

Also while it may be the case that there are some Souls players who have an elitist attitude about people who enjoy the game, I don't think it's fair to paint us all with that broad brush. I think it's more often the case that Souls fans are just enthusiastic about the games and want to explain why we enjoy it even when it can be a painful experience at times. 

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I think you're right in that it's not so much the difficulty of Dark Souls which causes division, but the amount of content you have to work through to get back to where you were after a failure. 

I know that I find games with more "loss" on failure to be more frustrating - with the flight sim example, the issue isn't so much that landing is hard, as landing is hard, and you tend to only do it at the end of a hour or two long mission.

Personally, I've definitely had more time, and invested more total effort, in games with tight retry loops, just because they let me easily practise the stuff I'm bad at (and, in Super Meat Boy's case, at least, as there's little consequence to loss, in most areas, it's also safe to work through a tilt by just playing through it).

 

(I also actually find the "leaving your stuff there to pick up, but only if you get it the next time" mechanic to actually make this more, not less frustrating - it annoyed me in Shovel Knight, because it adds extra stress and investment in "getting things right" on the first retry. I'd rather you just lost stuff entirely than had this carrot dangled in front of you.)

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I think the latest Idle Thumbs stream is a wonderful demonstration of both what's to love and what's to hate about Souls games. Nick's elation on beating bosses is just amazing.

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I highly encourage people to try the Souls games, because there isn't (or at least wasn't) anything quite like the first couple and Demon's Souls, Dark Souls and Bloodborne are all masterworks in atmosphere, ambient storytelling, worldbuilding and so on, and there's potentially a lot to appreciate about their systems as well. (Dark Souls II, from what I've seen, never quite understands what made those earlier games work and is much blander as a result. Don't have III and haven't watched any yet.) But if they don't work for you, there's no shame in that. They're a very specific, confident design that is just plain not for everyone. Including me, as it turns out. I got through 1-1 and 1-2 and 2-1 in Demon's Souls and at least poked at the other zones I could access, but ultimately I didn't have the persistence, skills or willingness to invest the time it was demanding of me to delve any deeper. And Dark Souls, by dint of making you defeat that first boss before you can even do much to specialize, pretty much stopped me immediately. (The preliminary boss in Demon's Souls can actually be killed in the opening, btw, and you get an item for doing it. But that's not the expected new player experience.) But that's me. I'm not great at action gameplay of whatever stripe and I'm easily frustrated by repeating content, especially when it can still kill me even after I've managed to pass it previously. I can appreciate the hell out of these games from a distance (specifically, the distance of watching someone else play them, either in my abode or on Youtube), but there are so many other games on my plate that work better for my schedule and abilities that after Dark Souls I accepted I wasn't going to get into the franchise myself.

 

I really do find progression elements important to my enjoyment of games, though. It's a pacing thing as much as anything else: if I'm doing the same things at the start of the game as I am at the end, I'm bored. If you expand my opposition without giving me new tools, I'm bored and frustrated. Secondarily, it's also an important incentive to doing side content and especially anything repetitive or dry otherwise, but of course the latter are things that are ideally avoided rather than merely given a progression hook. That's not to say that I like grind, because I really don't particularly. But I like unlocks and making build choices and such.

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I think the latest Idle Thumbs stream is a wonderful demonstration of both what's to love and what's to hate about Souls games. Nick's elation on beating bosses is just amazing.

 

Oh shit I just caught the end on youtube after having had to check out of the stream early.

he actually did it!

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I understand the trepidation of dying in a Souls game and the idea that it doesn't respect your time. But I have the opposite reaction, that other games don't respect my intelligence.

 

Demon's Souls took off because it came out in a period where the triple-A video game on consoles hit a wall. By 2009 the costs had risen so exponentially, team sizes hitting the multi-hundreds, and all the big hits of '05-'07 became annualized. Death was inconsequential, lengthy tutorials dominated the opening sections, and everything was designed with a big neon GO HERE sign because no developer could afford to create content the player wouldn't see.

 

Demon's Souls was a rejection of that. It's a game that holds your hand for the length of its tutorial then rips off the floaties and tosses you in the deep end. It's not a hard game in the same way as Meat Boy or even Crushing Uncharted. It's completely uncaring about mistakes. There are some unfair moments, the devs can't catch them all, but when people say "when you die it's your fault" holds true at least 90% of the time as nearly every death is a result of me getting cocky, experimenting when I shouldn't, or rushing an enemy. Sometimes you have to run away but modern design has hammered that out of us. 

 

I do agree some of the community can be mean and impenetrable. It's difficult to criticize this game as it stands alone in what it does but it isn't helped by responding to every criticism with "git gud."

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I understand the trepidation of dying in a Souls game and the idea that it doesn't respect your time. But I have the opposite reaction, that other games don't respect my intelligence.

 

This is an interesting point, because I feel like when I fail at a game, I often have no idea if I am failing because of a poor plan or decision-making (lack of intelligence) or just a failure to execute well enough.

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This is an interesting point, because I feel like when I fail at a game, I often have no idea if I am failing because of a poor plan or decision-making (lack of intelligence) or just a failure to execute well enough.

 

Also, I think that a lot of games, maybe even the vast majority of games, are designed with the assumption that the player ought never to fail while playing them. In most games, if you die, you're unceremoniously reset back to the previous stage with no acknowledgment of failure, like a newbie DM rolling back a game of Dungeons & Dragons after accidentally killing their players' characters. Whatever else you think about the Souls games, they are definitely designed with a set of mechanisms to recognize failure and make up for it: progress lost upon death remains in the world and can be regained, the world state can be reset at will, the cooperative multiplayer is designed to let players both tutor others and experiment themselves, and the fact that the game is perfectly beatable (in terms of narrative progress) without any mechanical progress (leveling up, equipment, upgrades, etc).

 

I have no investment whatsoever in other games copying the supposed difficulty of the Souls games. That's not why I've put double-digit hours into every single one of them. I want more games to copy how the Souls games reject the conventional structure and pacing of low-level gameplay in order to better conform to how players actually build and express competency when playing epic-scale action-adventure games.

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I like the fact that Rob apparently had similar experiences with early flight sims as I remember having. (My flight sim was the Amiga version of F19 Stealth Fighter, and I don't think that I ever managed to actually successfully land a plane at the end of a mission, ever. I don't think I ever managed to dock in a space station in Elite 2: Frontier, either.) There's something to be said for the possibility that this just means that this type of game "isn't for me" (and I haven't bought a "proper flight sim" since, so maybe I learned my lesson), but I think during the period, a lot of the "inherent difficulty" was, essentially, justified due to lack of effective competition (both between games, and also for my time, as someone who was at school, and thus could afford to spend a lot of time failing to land virtual planes)  I had nothing better to do than fail at stuff. 

The issue of this is when the game is just too difficult to ever get to the bit where you get the "reward" - I never managed to get a reward for landing a plane, so all I have is just the frustration of not being able to. (And in the end, I just ended up ejecting and ditching the plane at the end of missions, which really did kill my mission progression...)

 

[ironically, "high difficulty" really just pushed me towards cheat codes in games, which is presumably not the intended result?]

 

Yeah I remember the days post-college and pre-family when I could actually spend an afternoon practicing carrier landings in F/A-18 Korea. These days, I'd love to learn DCS A-10 but I already have a job.

 

I think of some of the heavy sim games, and maybe some of the more involved Lords Managements, have the same relationship to general PC gaming that ASL does to board wargaming. They're related, and people who like ASL almost certainly would like other games, but they don't need them; the game is a hobby by itself.

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I think the latest Idle Thumbs stream is a wonderful demonstration of both what's to love and what's to hate about Souls games. Nick's elation on beating bosses is just amazing.

 

Yeah, the stream was excellent and I find the series really fascinating, but watching Nick and Chris play reinforced my view that I should never ever buy these games. There are simply too many systems in place that are guaranteed to make me first frustrated and then infuriated at the game (whether the game "deserves" it or not) every time I pick up the controller. I don't want to feel those feelings, even if that means that I do not get to experience the elation of finally having beaten a boss after... what... an hour or so either.

 

I really hope that Nick and Chris will stream the entirety of Dark Souls 3. I already watched Polygon Bloodborne longplay, and enjoyed it quite a bit.  

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the cooperative multiplayer is designed to let players both tutor others and experiment themselves

 

That's a key point that often gets lost in the general discussion of the Souls games. Part of it is the negative stigma associated with summoning help (Nick refused to do it after someone said it was for "quitters"). But if you actually use that system it totally transforms the game experience into something much more accessible. When I get to a new boss I usually try putting down my summon sign before attempting it myself. (One thing I don't like about DS3 vs DS2 is that you don't refill your Estus on a successful boss kill). I would like to see what a reviewer would think of the game if they tried to do co-op as much as possible.

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That's a key point that often gets lost in the general discussion of the Souls games. Part of it is the negative stigma associated with summoning help (Nick refused to do it after someone said it was for "quitters"). But if you actually use that system it totally transforms the game experience into something much more accessible.

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.

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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 commenter 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.

 

I think there's a pretty clear indicator that coop is part of the Dark Souls experience as designed: namely, that it exists. Moreover, there are mechanics that reward it.

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Sure, but the popular perception of Dark Souls isn't, perhaps, as clear on that. I certainly remember getting the impression from conversations about both Demon's Souls and the first Dark Souls that invasion, rather than assistance, was more common - that Dark Souls games were somewhat multiplayer, certainly, but perhaps thanks to human nature, biased towards other players messing you up, rather than assisting you.

Now, I've never played any of the games, so I don't have a direct experience of this, but certainly that perception was real, and one contributing factor to my not buying into the series.

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That's definitely not the case, in my experience. You can opt-in to co-op as much as you like, and legit invasions by a human happen maybe every other area? Often I'll go quite some time only encountering scripted NPC invasions.

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