Jake

Idle Thumbs 290: The Sad Story of a Modern Idiot

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Idle Thumbs 290:

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The Sad Story of a Modern Idiot
Join us on a grand circle tour of massive-scale architecture, both real and imagined. In Planet Coaster we step through the mouth of Dot Gobbler himself, crossing the threshold into Thumbsland, the park that never closes, the park whose rides never end (because they are incomplete). Did you hear that? It's the sound of San Francisco, California, without a bus or train in sight. Sounds like someone needs to fire up Cities in Motion and get to work.  The last leg of our journey will take us along the rim of the Grand Canyon, care of  Google and Alphabet Incorporated. Please remain standing so we don't have to stream in the canyon floor at high detail.

 

Also, Nick played Dark Souls. Happy Thanksgiving!

 

Discussed: Planet Coaster, Cities in Motion, Dark Souls, Google Earth VR


 

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Just wanted to say that EVERYONE gets stuck on the Capra Demon, Nick, so that's not really a part you 'should have found easy'. The problem with that fight is that it's a long run to what is essentially a pass/fail boss fight, where you either get your initial dodge past the dogs right, kill them, and have a fairly easy time dealing with the demon himself -- or, more often, you don't. I've often run into particular trouble here since I favor heavy weapons, which makes getting the initial attacks off to kill the dogs particularly troublesome. Somewhat counter-intuitively, if you run to the right around the demon it usually works out better than running directly to the stairs, since the dog on the stairs is, of course, placed in exactly the right spot to fuck you over on that initial dash.

 

The run through the depths was a combination of luck and unexpected observational skill. I suspect that very few players notice the fall traps in the water, and yet you easily noticed and jumped over them. That said, you also ran directly into confrontations which could have not only gotten you killed but gotten you killed THE BAD WAY. If you get cursed, you're stuck at 50% hp until you can get the curse removed. This is, incidentally, why we had you buy the purging stone from Oswald before YOU STABBED HIM.

 

I think most of the friction you're having with the game comes down to the very different way that Dark Souls 3 handled rolling and estus. Rolling is very spammable in Dark Souls 3, costs almost no stamina to use, stuns humanoid enemies, and has a lot of invincibility, while estus is quick to use and lets you move while you use it. Due to certain decisions they made about how quickly and relentlessly enemies attack, they had to make these changes to still make the game fair, but it unfortunately results in an overall system where the consequences of your discrete choices as a player matter less, which kind of undermines the whole Souls game approach. Combat in Dark Souls 3 often comes down to a series of twitch reactions rather than tactical decisions about positioning, estus use, and angle of approach.

 

I'll be curious to see how you like Dark Souls 2 when you get to it, since most of the layer of polish that makes 3 a smoother experience was introduced there, but it is the most conservative the series has ever been when it comes to the power of rolls and estus, offering very little invincibility and slower healing over time respectively.

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Yeah, Dark Souls 2 is probably the game most prone to cause frustrations with the controls. It's the only Souls game I've ever been frustrated with. What you said about the rolls and consequences of your actions in Dark Souls 3 though I think applies doubly to Bloodborne. It's a fun game, I love playing it, but it lacks that aspect of having to be super deliberate about every action you take.

 

Regarding Capra, I think it's fine to call him a bit bullshit, but I also think some people struggle with him just because of the sensory overload that happens as soon as you walk through that fog door. It's even worse if you don't have any poise at that point. If Nick had been sober, and maybe had a shield, I think he would've done a lot better. There's actually an easy trick if you get past the dogs, which is to stand in the top right corner of the room and just block. That will cause Capra to fall off, and you can just drop attack him repeatedly. Anyway, I think there are several bosses that rank higher on the bullshit-o-meter *cough* Ancient Dragon *cough*.

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Quote

If the system breaks or your program doesn't load,

you're just given a prompt where you can start entering code.

- Jake Rodkin, Unintentional Poet @ 1:05:19

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5 hours ago, eot said:

Yeah, Dark Souls 2 is probably the game most prone to cause frustrations with the controls.

Hm, that's interesting, I wouldn't have described it that way. What frustrated you about them? I actually like them the best of the series, since I think rolling making you invincible is kind of stupid.

 

I think putting the Capra battle in an enclosed space is fair and giving him a couple of helpers is fine, but the camera issues in that room are egregious. If they placed him a bit further back in the room to start with so he couldn't just instantly jump attack at you and removed the foliage blocking your view it would be harsh but fair. I wonder if at some point in development he was a mini-boss with no fog wall but they decided that was too easy to exploit.

Ancient Dragon is just a bad boss fight though -- but at least completely optional, and also fairly easy to exploit (I one-shot it when I stacked fire defense and just ate all its attacks). Though, honestly, I think my least favorite ever was the stupid ancient wyvern fight in DS3.

 

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Planet Coaster reminds me of Frontier's previous game from a few years ago named Coaster Crazy Deluxe which is on Wii U. Has Nick or Chris ever tried that? It's originally an iOS game, but Braben's team ported it to Wii U in 2013. It's like a lite version prequel of Planet Coaster as it focuses on just building roller coasters and there's no park management in it. It  was a 7€ release in the WIi U eShop, so they always meant it to be a small release.

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It isn't necessarily at the scale/detail you all talked about in the Pod, but Parkitect (a rival Theme Park Video Game that leans more towards classic RCT) has some degree of Logistics to the management of the park. Each shop in the park has a back door and needs to be supplied with their ingredients and merchandise, hauled by a worker. It's a much smaller team and is still in alpha (albeit playable) but it's neat to have multiple games of this type out there trying things out! There's a good look at some of their stuff on the devlog

http://themeparkitect.tumblr.com/post/149337502002/devlog-update-111

 

A previous update also talks about larger scale garbage and delivery facilities

 

http://themeparkitect.tumblr.com/post/148987129097/devlog-update-110

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20 hours ago, Problem Machine said:

Hm, that's interesting, I wouldn't have described it that way. What frustrated you about them? I actually like them the best of the series, since I think rolling making you invincible is kind of stupid.

One of the things that annoyed me was how a lot of the attack animations, at least on the weapons I used, seem to take slightly longer than they should. I see my character having followed through with her swing, but I still can't dodge away for a few hundred ms because the animation is still playing, which makes the character feel unresponsive. Then there's adaptability, which I'm not a fan of. You say you don't like i-frames, but I think they're a necessity (especially with the problematic hitboxes). I played as deprived in both of my runs through the game, and there you really feel the low adaptability (well, all the way through on SL1). If you don't know the details of the mechanics it can easily feel like you're getting hit by a ton of stuff that you shouldn't be. There's that staggering mechanic when you run out of stamina and block (if I recall correctly) that leaves you out of control of your character for quite a while. Especially at the start of the game, before you get used to all that stuff, I think it can be frustrating. Also, the free aim on the greatswords can really throw you for a loop. Personally I thought everything felt a little off for the entirety of my time with the game.

 

Regarding Ancient Dragon, I think the run up to the boss is actually the worst part heh.

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1 hour ago, eot said:

One of the things that annoyed me was how a lot of the attack animations, at least on the weapons I used, seem to take slightly longer than they should. I see my character having followed through with her swing, but I still can't dodge away for a few hundred ms because the animation is still playing, which makes the character feel unresponsive. Then there's adaptability, which I'm not a fan of. You say you don't like i-frames, but I think they're a necessity (especially with the problematic hitboxes). I played as deprived in both of my runs through the game, and there you really feel the low adaptability (well, all the way through on SL1). If you don't know the details of the mechanics it can easily feel like you're getting hit by a ton of stuff that you shouldn't be. There's that staggering mechanic when you run out of stamina and block (if I recall correctly) that leaves you out of control of your character for quite a while.

Hm. I think some of that may stem from the reduced/removed move buffering, where doing a roll before you're out of the animation doesn't result in the roll immediately happening after but just an ignored input. I think I tend to prefer this approach, since it really sucks getting screwed over by an input that was a good idea a half second ago but is now suicidal, but either choice tends to result in some suboptimal situations.

I've heard a lot of complaints about the hitboxes in DS2 but they've never bothered me much. Maybe I'll try doing a SL1 run sometime to see if that makes me hate the rolls.

Is there anything different/new about the staggering mechanic? I think maybe the animation lasts longer but it seems like it's still basically the same system as in other games -- with the exception that it doesn't get you crit like it does in DS3.

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2 hours ago, Problem Machine said:

Is there anything different/new about the staggering mechanic? I think maybe the animation lasts longer but it seems like it's still basically the same system as in other games -- with the exception that it doesn't get you crit like it does in DS3.

 

I believe that, in addition to reducing poise values across the board, DS2 added a mechanic that used poise to calculate a hidden pool of "hyper-armor" that enabled the player to ignore staggering from a set amount of damage taken character animations. What made this system frustrating to many, myself included, was that "damage" to that pool was i) modified by available stamina, which meant that it was very difficult to know how much hyper-armor you had left if you didn't have all or none of your stamina, and ii) the pool was not automatically refilled after it had been emptied and the player staggered, instead being a fixed interval after last enemy attack and/or non-movement character action, with the rate of replenishment again based on a function of poise and current stamina. All of that basically meant that, unless you knew the system already and went all-in on maximizing hyper-armor, there was no way of knowing if an attack was going to stagger you, no matter how many times you'd faced a given enemy. You just had to assume that any attack could stagger you if your poise and stamina were low, which meant in practice never getting hit and avoiding the ambiguity altogether. It wasn't very good (not that DS3's implementation of poise and hyper-armor is any better, in my opinion).

 

I also had a lot of problems with enemies getting implausible hits on me in DS2, between the very generous hitbox on the player character and the implementation of 360-degree tracking on certain attacks. I remember, there was a fight with the Ruin Sentinels where one of them pivoted completely about-face, as I rolled past him, and caught me on my heel... That was my rage-quit for the week...

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Crying out to be Thumbsland rides:

- The Great Gatling-gunsby (Buzz Lightyear's Space Ranger Spin, but you're shooting up 1920s New York)

- Twenty-Year-Old Weird House (The Haunted Mansion/Gone Home mashup)

- Nineties Cockpit Freakout (Dark roller coaster a la Space Mountain)

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Surprised nobody talked about Choice Chamber in regards to the game having a built-in interaction between the streamer and the chat.

 

Well, basically, this is a game that is pretty much just all about that.

 

This works by having the game add a bot into the Twitch chat for the stream that the player speifies in the game settings. The bot listens to what people write there and sends the data back into the game. The game itself is a platformer, where the player goes from left to right through the series of challenging rooms. Once they encounter a treasure chest the chat votes for what they would get from the chest. The very first vote is about the type of weapon the player would get (hammer / sword / bow, iirc). There's also voting to upgrade thier jump (double jump or pogo jump, etc). And when the player encounters very difficult situations, there's some sort of command that the viewers can spam to have an oversized fist appear in the game and smash through the monsters.

 

I think it's also playable in single player, but there's not much point.

 

Also this game was part of the Sigil ARG, like the Firewatch, so I thought you would know about it.

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Since sending in an email a while ago about twitch integration, I've realized there are actually a lot of games with it. Clustertruck also has some pretty deeply ingrained chat-based functionality for instance (I would love to see a Clustertruck stream.)

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On 11/25/2016 at 2:05 AM, Problem Machine said:

Just wanted to say that EVERYONE gets stuck on the Capra Demon, Nick, so that's not really a part you 'should have found easy'. The problem with that fight is that it's a long run to what is essentially a pass/fail boss fight, where you either get your initial dodge past the dogs right, kill them, and have a fairly easy time dealing with the demon himself -- or, more often, you don't. I've often run into particular trouble here since I favor heavy weapons, which makes getting the initial attacks off to kill the dogs particularly troublesome. Somewhat counter-intuitively, if you run to the right around the demon it usually works out better than running directly to the stairs, since the dog on the stairs is, of course, placed in exactly the right spot to fuck you over on that initial dash.

 

 

I found that boss fight so hard that I went all the way around the back door into Blight Town and never even did the depths until 2/3rds of the way through the game.

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