Okay, more Undertale. I played through the 'true pacifist' route. I had to backtrack after meeting Sans look up the wiki on how to progress beyond Papyrus story-wise, and it took me forever to find Undyne's house.

I enjoyed it more overall. I was probably in less of a "I am critical of everything phase", but I also found out how to make the text move faster (I skipped the frogs, remember), so conversations felt less exhausting. While I didn't like the interactions with Papyrus, the rest of the content elevated my impressions of the game. Undyne's personality I found pretty pleasant, and her home visit provided the only section of the game so far where I felt genuine enjoyment. The lab section felt like a bit of a drag, and I don't really like how text-heavy the game delivers its narrative, but it made the story more engaging.

The end was a lot stronger than the neutral one (neutral sparing the king, at least, if it means anything), although I still didn't feel that dying had a meaningful consequence, which disappoints me. The game seemed to hint otherwise though, but I'm not entirely sold. It made me slightly upset that it didn't seem like I could save Asriel at the expense of everyone else, purely because he looked cute, but it probably wouldn't be very in character for the run. Maybe the massacre run will give me an opportunity, but I'm skeptical.

I'm still not sold on the narrative as a whole. I feel like it's trying to make the meta-play a part of the story itself, but it still doesn't fully make sense. There's also the end of the game where Sans judges you, which just seems incredibly jarring and inelegant. Asriel's character also didn't make sense to me. If I got it right, then the two goats had a son, which became friends with a character whose name ends up being the name you chose at the start (why is that a thing?), then the human died and he got sad. Somewhere along the way, his soul got implanted into a flower (idk if he was dying to justify this). And now he wants to keep fighting the MC forever because that's his only source of entertainment, and he was also doing it for my sake somehow but I forgot his justification...? Whatever. I must say I don't like how the game makes characters that seem really trivial, incredibly important, but at least befriending people gives the flower some narrative weight. Maybe murdering everyone will give me insight into Sans.

So Overwatch has just done their first nuke from orbit nerfs.

Great to see mildly overpowered characters become ****. Really feels like a Blizzard game now.

I hope that's parody, and not your genuine response to the balance changes.

Has anyone tried the MtG: Arena of the Planeswalker board game? I saw it at wallmart the other day, the box seemed surprisingly heavy. Wondering if I should get it.

Heroscape is pretty well-regarded, but it doesn't sound like something I would enjoy. I'd probably get Summoner Wars instead if I wanted something to that style, but I'm far from the audience.

We have a Board Game thread around here.

Undertale update, I'm at Sans. Might take a while. Genocide experience has not impressed me.

The Overwatch nerfs basically raised the skill cap of Mccree or Widowmaker by a lot but didn't fix the main problems behind either hero. So if you are playing the game professionally, very little is going to change for you. But if you are bad at the game then most of the reason to play those heroes has gone away. And if you are average then you are in the spot where they are going to still be really frustrating and op to play against, but only sometimes.

Does not sound like a good nerf to me.

Sorry but no.

Mcree now does 270 damage with fan fire down from 420. This means it can still kill everyone except tanks in a single burst. And it now begins reloading twice as fast.

Widowmaker does the exact same headshot damage. And the sniper scope has a fraction more scope time. So the sniping character has more emphasis on actually being a sniper.

Those aren't bad changes. Those are great changes. Those are examples of how to tone things down without totally ruining things.

I don't think you read my post.

The nerfs did too much and absolutely nothing at the same time. If you are at a skill level where the nerfs affected you, then it's very rare that they were needed. If you are at a skill level where the nerfs were needed, then you weren't affected anywhere near enough. That is the worst of both worlds without a permanent fix to the "problem". Very bad changes. They balanced around high level play without actually fixing the main problems with the high level play.

The stated reason for nerfing Mccree is that stun -> fan -> roll -> fan could kill tanks too easily. Now... you need better accuracy to still have the same effect on tanks. Except Roadhog. You also need to headshot him at least once out of the 12 shots. At the level where Mccree was a real problem... you kind of expect people to be able to hit a tank's hitbox at point blank range. That's not really "fixed".

At a basic level, they didn't make the character more interactive. They just made him less forgiving. This only fixes the issue at the lower ends of the skill pool.


The Widowmaker nerf..... basically there's no way she's not going to get another round of nerfs. There just isn't. The actual laundry list of reasons she needed a nerf hasn't even been severely dented yet. They haven't made a real dent in her damage or survivability, and until they do one or the other the character is just a bit too good. And yes, I expect people at the ranks where widow is a problem to be getting consistent headshots.

I read your post. These are incredibly mild changes. Fine tuning without going at them with a hatchet.

And if the bulk of your complaints can be condensed as 'They're balancing around high level / competitive play, not casual noob levels!' Well.....I'm glad you're just a complainer, and not someone who makes decisions.

Additional fun fact: You're acting like an expert leveling your wisdom from on high, but you don't even know you cant headshot with that Mcree ability. This is a big warning sign of why I don't consider your feedback about balance tweaks to be worthwhile.

@ Mown and Undertale: I think I already said this, but I do feel like by and large, those who liked the game inflated some aspects too much. Like, if you were under the impression that dying yourself was supposed to have some actual weight to it, then you were led astray.

I still find myself taking the opposite stance of you on many aspects, especially about the meta-narrative. The metatextual nature of Undertale goes far deeper than you're probably aware of.

Not that it seems anyone would care, but Dark Souls has been ruining my life the last few weeks. God is it a magnificently designed game.

Dark Souls is not poorly designed but it's not well designed either. Like, it's not a bad game, but from any standpoint except the core gameplay the game is really poorly balanced and has a ton of issues.

My first reaction is to ask for you to point said issues out. But let me rephrase.

Dark Souls has magnificent level design.

The player direction is non-existent, and most of the important lore is so easy to miss that most people don't ever learn even a fraction of the game's story. In fact, to this day the SoulsBorne story relies on people googling it to make sense to the average person. They've started half **** things planning on it.

The difficulty pacing is crappy. Blighttown is the epitomy of this. It's probably the 2nd or 3rd hardest area in the game, placed well before the halfway point, before players can be reasonably expected to have the damage to not have a massive slog through the upper area. Followed by one of the easiest bosses in the game and much easier areas in terms of geography (I realize that you don't actually go to those until 2/3 of the way into the game but that just makes it worse).

Blighttown is also the perfect example in poor planning when it comes to rendering. The entire area is laggy as **** because they are mapping out the entire thing no matter where you are in it. It's basically one big open cavern where everything is already there, but that's way too much for a ps3 to handle. PC was barely any better back in the day and still isn't that great in that area.

The game is also grindy as **** if you don't want to deal with the worst of the artificial difficulty. The game seems to expect you to be able to easily deal 600 by the time you get to Blighttown and Sen's Fortress but there isn't really any areas leading up to those where that is even close to needed.

In fact, there's a ton of artificial difficulty and not much real challenge in a lot of the areas. Once you know what the gimmick is for each area, the game is remarkably easy. Too easy in fact. I have to artificially challenge myself to have any trouble with it anymore. The game is now basically a boss rush where it's too easy to get used to each dude's tricks. I only have trouble with Manus and Kalameet anymore, and those are only at sl 1 where the inherent problems of "can't take a hit and boss has massive health pool" mean my reflexes hit a hard wall I don't care to mess with.

Oh and for all the gear variety, most of it is completely worthless. A couple shields, armor sets, and weapons are way too good compared to the rest of the roster. The pvp for the game back in the day was one of the worst kinds of repetitive.

I expected dying to reset the boss-encounter, but it seemed to continue to progress. I don't know if it gave up on me eventually or something, because it seemed to reset initially. idk, but I don't want to be babied through the final encounter, and I felt like that happening both in the neutral and pacifist route.

Its probably a thing I couldn't feasibly see myself liking. When taken seriously, it just seems jarring to me, possibly unless there's something that makes it incredibly obvious within the setting it exists in. In Undertale, it just doesn't grab me. I don't really care how deep it is if it's never presented to me. I do actually like that going out of your way to look into things reveals aspects of the world, but it shouldn't be a necessity in order to explore its primary themes. It could also be that I just didn't grab things, either because I didn't care enough to pay attention, or because I tend to be rather stupid when it comes to these things. I won't rule it out.

Anyway, I played through Genocide, kind of. I got to Sans, and then watched the rest, because I just don't care for pattern recognition and muscle memory. Unlike Bastion, the gameplay isn't compelling enough for me to get through with challenging content. Anyway, I would say that Genocide was massively disappointing. It is extremely boring save for exactly two fights, which are disproportionately more difficult than everything else, and the predominant nature of the content is actually the absence of content (and I don't mean half of Hotlands being gone). It starts off kind of nice, and the feeling of empowerment is kind of nice, but it peters off quickly, and then does something I find incredibly obnoxious, which is that it robs you of agency over your character. For some reason, the game doesn't allow you to do the (admittedly rather simplistic) puzzles. I thought the game told me the puzzles were a defence mechanism against humans. They also make me question why I can't ignore Papyrus' puzzles in the other runs. It seems to culminate in the final moments when the game doesn't even enable me to save Asriel. Why not? It's presented as something that makes sense in the narrative. In the end, Genocide was slightly interesting, but ultimately a boring grind that seemed to even bring me dismay over the original content in retrospect. I've uninstalled the game now and probably won't get back to it, so if there's something you feel like sharing that is spoilery, feel free.

i played dark souls for a while and i haven't beaten the game yet but i found the difficulty curve has been enjoyable, although I didn't know anything about the game going in so i probably played it in an unusual sequence, which included running back and forth between random areas and maybe getting stronger than i otherwise would have been as a result.

I don't know how artificial the difficulty is. Its true that i feel like whenever i got stuck on a part most of my time was spent running back to it and then spending however many seconds it takes before i die learning the mechanics of the encounter, and once i know how it actually works it doesn't take nearly as long to play it through without making a mistake, but i do find interacting with the patterns to be mildly difficult and enjoyable.

i mostly liked the game because it was so open and it was fun running around and exploring areas way stronger than me. it reminded me of playing drakan as a kid

The "in order" sequence is:

Undead Asylum -> Undead Burg -> Undead Parish -> Lower Undead Burg -> The Depths -> Upper Blighttown -> Blighttown Swamp -> Valley of the Drakes -> Sens' Fortress -> Anor Londo -> go get the 4 great souls -> kiln of the first flame

The smartest order imo is:

Undead Asylum -> Undead Parish via Darkroot Garden via Darkroot Basin via Valley of the drakes -> Blighttown Swamp via Valley of the Drakes -> Sen's Fortress -> Anor Londo -> Demon Ruins -> Lost Izalith -> Darkroot Garden -> New Londo Ruins -> Duke's Archives -> Catacombs -> Tomb of the Giants -> Kiln of the First Flame.

Neither of those includes optional areas.

If you grind or come back later, a lot of those areas are a lot easier.

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A lot of the enemies in Upper Blighttown have about 3 to 4 times as much health as the enemies in the Depths, without much warning or a real way for the player's damage to be expected to go up in between areas. This is artificially making the game harder, and not a "well - designed" leap in a very large number of opinions. The main problem is that there's not really a way to get a better weapon before coming here unless you "skip" the area and come back later towards the end of the game, you grind for Large titanite shards in the depths, you got really lucky and have a black knight sword lying around, you grind levels the old fashioned way, or you grind out your pyromancy glove to a much higher level than reasonable at that point in the game.

Effectively put, the enemies have massively inflated health pools while still doing a ton of damage, and there's not a "reasonable" way for the players to be able to kill them quickly at the point where you are expected to encounter the area. This is also the area with the "hardest" environmental traps in the game, so it's basically just tons of artificial difficulty all around.


If you get hit by the boulder in the undead asylum and die, then you know it is there the second time around and shouldn't get hit by it. Most of Dark Souls is like this. Areas are drastically easier the second time around versus the first time around. This too is an example of artificial difficulty since it can be stated with some reasonable opinion that most of what will kill you "by surprise" will actually be a surprise.

The biggest balance problem with Dark Souls is probably the Ascended Pyromancy Flame + 5. Anyone can use it without a severe penalty, and it does more damage with Great Combustion (available early) and even Combustion than most of the other things in the game. This item, if you grind, is available after you've reached the Depths for the first time. The main obstacle to obtaining it at that point is either A) you don't have the Master Key (shame on you) or B) you don't want to grind out some 300K suuls to pay for the upgrades, which only takes 3 or 4 hours tbh. But the option is always there and always makes the game easy mode. It effectively trivializes all of the bosses in the game until NG+. Even on NG+ it's got the ability to be major staple of anyone's arsenal unless they are abusing hyper mode with sorcery.

Hyper Mode is also bollocks. I'm just going to put that out there.

Not necessarily a bad thing. Especially when a majority of modern games either have a strictly linear progression path or hold your hand to tell you exactly where to go when, this can be a draw for some (which includes myself).


I'd call that a double-edged sword, then, because I would argue half the reason FNAF got so popular was the sense of mystery around the lore wherein finding out the whole story for yourself was basically impossible (let's ignore for the moment the lackluster and contradictory nature of the FNAF lore). Besides that, I would also argue not having the lore spoon-fed to the player whether they like it or not is a good thing, because it means it's there for those who want to read or listen but not in the way for those who just want to play for the "fun" of it. I mean, Mown was just complaining about how text-heavy Undertale's narrative is (not that I completely agree with that sentiment).


I've been playing with Durante's fix for PC, so while Blighttown hasn't been unplayable, it has been chugging at points and I will agree that is an unacceptable "known shippable". Especially since there would have been several easy fixes, such as just adding a bit of fog (I mean, especially since it's supposed to be a swamp down there, it would have fit environmentally).

However, while I would not ignore this as a fault of the game, it's also not something I factor in when I'm thinking of level design. I'm paying more attention to the geography, enemy placement, breadcrumbing, etc.


As someone who is dealing 600 damage by the time I got to lower Blighttown and Sen's Funhouse, I am going to massively disagree with you here. One of the major things Dark Souls tries to teach its players is to be slow, methodical, and not panic. Watching a friend in the meat be fast, chaotic, and flighty, though, is also showing me how Dark Souls allows for a variety of play styles.

Back to my point, however, I have only had to grind once, when I was stuck at the Taurus Demon, though I have chosen to grind three or four times for various reasons. Keep in mind I've only just recently gotten to Sen's Funhouse though, so I haven't yet had any experience beyond that point, though as far as I am aware I have been to everywhere I can up to this point, including Ash Lake and Hell (what I prefer to call Demon Ruins). Even when I was grinding for the Taurus Demon, though, I was mostly putting points into Resistance (like the noob I am), so in retrospect I don't know how much that helped. I feel if you think you need to be dealing X damage by certain points, you've probably taken the wrong lessons from the game.


This is a borrowed feature of RPGs in general, which I think Dark Souls is. I am not going to argue your point here, because it's fairly objectively provable, however I would not count this as a factor of level design.


I have as yet only played through the pacifist ending once, and managed to not die at all during that final encounter, so I'm not sure about that one. However, the final boss of the neutral ending (which you only actually face once per True Reset, btw), has... I guess 7 stages, and it basically saves at the end of each of those stages, probably so that you don't have to replay it from the beginning each time when it's crashing the game every time you die. As someone who has grown frustrated with large or final bosses in other games, I appreciated the fact that I didn't have to start from scratch when I died, especially since I had been trying to get the Pacifist ending the first time around and faced him with only 20 life. I realize that's a subjective opinion between the two of us, though, and isn't necessarily a good or bad point for the game.


I wouldn't say that you have to go out of your way to explore the primary themes of Undertale. Undertale basically has one central, simple theme that permeates almost every aspect of its gameplay: Hope. Well, hope as in nothing is unforgivable and everyone can change their ways. Most of the meta-narrative is in service to that theme, really.


First:


Congratulations. You came to the right conclusion for the wrong reasons. The genocide run is supposed to give you the exact feelings you outlined.

Second: I don't blame you at all for not wanting to beat Sans yourself. I've heard of several people who spent days and weeks and hundreds of attempts trying to beat him, so if that's not your thing, then I can completely understand wanting to drop it there. Personally, I found it stressful but not incredibly difficult -- I grew up on platformers and that's basically what that battle is, and it only took me 13.5 tries to beat him.

Third: The first thing that jumps out to me as something I want to share is that the meta-narrative extends down into the game's code and into the internet. There is a character you're likely not aware of, Gaster, that erased himself from existence after creating the Core, and now you can only find them by messing with the game's code, but there are actually files and in-game interactions that fill you in on some of that story.


I actually recently re-watched Yahtzee's review of the game and he compared it to Symphony of the Night, which I didn't play but if it did have that "oh, I'm stuck here, I might as well go explore some of these other areas I didn't scour" effect, then I understand why people like it. Personally I love the feeling of metroidvania that Dark Souls has.


See, I read that list and feel you missed out on the point of Dark Souls being open to the player. There is neither a strict order nor nothing strictly keeping them from, say, ringing the lower bell before the upper bell. Unlike a traditional RPG that would have level-capped areas that you absolutely cannot pass through unless you're properly leveled, Dark Souls allows you multiple ways to go through, whether through slow elimination, quick reflexes, grinding, or other methods I can't think of.


If I'm completely honest with you, I started laughing here. I have to start wondering what you consider organic difficulty.

In my mind, you keep approaching this from a very traditional JRPG frame of mind, and not in the way Dark Souls has been teaching you. If I ever faced more than 2 enemies at a time, I considered that a failing on my part. I wasn't even using pyromancy until I started carrying 15 Estus Flasks+3 as a standard. There are several options on luring a single enemy at a time and getting backstabs or executions or kicking/tricking them off the edge or even sniping from above. Gameplay isn't supposed to be one-and-done, it's supposed to be slow and carefully planned.


Seriously, what do you consider organic difficulty then if you are considering most of what Dark Souls does artificial? Learning the game's tricks, both past and future, is the soul of the game's difficulty, and 90% of said tricks can be seen coming with slow and careful observation. I'd even wager the other 10% can be seen coming by context, like when I got ambushed by four grubs in Hell -- I knew it was coming, I just had no environmental indication as to what it was or how large.



EDIT: Fixed my formatting error

I think that a game should have a difficulty curve and not a bunch of random spikes. It also shouldn't be the hardest at the exact middle of the game, where everything after that feels easy. This ruins the experience a bit. It should also not rely on the element of surprise for over half it's difficulty, and an rpg shouldn't be easily finishable in under 3 hours once you've done it a couple times.

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If you had 600 damage in one hit the first time you went to Blighttown, you were way overpowered for that area. No ifs, ands, or buts. The area was much much easier for you than the average person.

^ In fact I'm now sort of curious what you were using. What was your main weapon and how was it upgraded?

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The "main" path for Dark Souls is the one they expected players to do first. Yes, you have the ability to go to Blighttown before the Undead Parish, but then you miss out on a large number of experiences you were supposed to have and you probably won't know to do that until your second playthrough or later. The "main" path is the one most people follow, since the odds are much higher you are naturally funneled through the Depths than that you try to go in the "wrong" way with the Master Key.

^ This particular thing was not really a commentary on the game's difficulty so much as a response to the post above it. Thus the ---------- between it and the rest of the post.

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For all of it's open world, Dark Souls doesn't harbor that much new or that many surprises once you've beaten it and been to most of the areas. About halfway through the 3rd playthrough (assuming you do NG+) the game starts to get a bit boring because it's too easy and the only difficulty comes from doing stupid challenge runs that are really you hog-tying yourself because the developers didn't balance the thing properly.

It's VERY good the first time through, but it's not well designed.