Not that I'm wanting to challenge this statement, because I can totally understand where you're coming from when you say it, but I'm honestly curious why this should be the case? Like, people speedrun all sorts of games all the time, unless your point is that the amount of replays until one gets good at Dark Souls is too low for an RPG?


First, let me say that the 600 damage I was doing was not with a light attack, but with a quick two-handed heavy jump attack, so it's not like I was one-shotting everything. A well-placed backstab would usually take out one of the big dudes, though. When I first entered, actually, I was using a zweihander one-handed, though by the time I got to the bottom bonfire I managed to put those last few points into DEX that I needed in order to wield my Black Knight Greatsword. I have done very little upgrading because my usual pool of weapons encompassed about 18 different handheld items.

Off the top of my head from that period:
Right hand: Zweihander, Black Knight Greatsword, Greataxe, Divine Spear (maybe Divine Spear +2 or something) for the Catacombs, Winged Spear, Jagged Ghost Blade from and for New Londo Ruins, two-handing Black Knight Greataxe,
Left hand: Grass Crest Shield (always on), Longbow, Light Crossbow, Heavy Crossbow, Skull Lantern, Pyromancy Flame+...3? +4? it wasn't much


Okay, point taken. yeah, I can see how the game kind of leads you through several areas via doors, bosses, and level caps. Less a "main" path and more an "intended" path. My bad on that point.


Personally, I do not equate "low replay value" with "well balanced". Again, most of the point of Dark Souls is you as a player learning its tricks. It's actually extremely old-school in its level design -- like NES-era level design, in more ways than one. And really, very, very few games are balanced beyond the first playthrough, and even less beyond that; most games with NG+ only increase the numbers involved in the game to actually artificially inflate the difficulty for people who want additional challenge.

I don't know if I mentioned here, but I find Sen's Funhouse the easiest to point out the fantastic level design, at least as far as I have gotten into it, and I noticed it because of how old-school the design sense was for the area.

I feel I should also mention at this point that I both agree with Yahtzee's sentiment that it feels they designed the world first and the game second as well loving that aspect of it. The level of environmental storytelling in Dark Souls is super refreshing and extremely enjoyable.

i am in blight town right now and i'm using an astora's straight sword +2 and a crossbow +5 i think, i deal about 150 damage a hit which seems like more than enough to handle the enemies. I keep falling off cliffs though.

I did explore a little of blight town from the other end before fighting the taurus demon by using the master key and i cleared everything there but couldn't find a way forward

I don't find the game too easy, although its not terribly hard either. I imagine If i read anything about the game and knew what the best strategies were, that it would be closer to a cakewalk.

When you say you never died against Asriel I feel really incompetent.
Anyway, I didn't actually think you could die against Flowey in the neutral route. I mean, if you actually can, then I guess that's nice, but I felt like I played it really poorly and wasn't punished nearly enough for it, so about 20% into the fight I just concluded that I couldn't die because my life total didn't move in a way that made sense to me. Which took me really out of the experience.


Is that so.
Murdering everyone seemed pretty unforgivable tbqh.


Supposed to give me what feelings? I don't play games to be bored or dismayed. If you want to convey an emotion through poor design, then fine, I guess you can do it. But I'm not going to think any better of the experience because of it. Just give me a written note instead of wasting my time. I'm not opposed to games as art, but "you feel bad because the game is bad" isn't how I see its future.
I probably could have killed Sans if I wanted to, although not in as few tries, but well. I guess you could say I wasn't determined enough. I don't really mind that he was difficult (well, to some extent, I mind that he specifically was difficult, and not a character that was presented to me as more meaningful), but I do mind the disproportionate difficulty curve between him and everything else but Undyne. It just doesn't make sense to me. Like, why?

As an aside, I forgot to mention, but the "nobody appeared" messages became really annoying after a while. I got it the first time, thanks.

When I ruler of the world opinions will be abolished.

Overwatch has removed the "Prefer" and "Avoid" player features. <- People were abusing it to avoid people who were better than them at the game, and it was ruining their matchmaking.

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Overwatch just released their competitive mode on a public test realm, and at the very least people don't seem happy? The problem with the mode is how does one decide a tie? A developer gave a statistic that in their own testing a little over a third of their games went to tiebreakers, and in reality if two teams were decently balanced isn't it the goal for the games to be that close?

Well the ways for deciding ties on non king of the hill maps suck.

The first option is to play a single round on king of the hill..... they tried that in beta and people "hated" it because it "overly rewarded" teams that focused on being good at king of the hill. Because if so many games go to tiebreaker, then the tiebreaker is overly valuable to be good at if it's always the same thing. Also people wanted to finish ties on the original map...

The second option is stopwatch. Basically if you aren't on king of the hill (which that mode doesn't have the problem tbh), you play one round for both sides and if there is a tie whoever captured the last objective the fastest wins. The argument against this..... it basically encourages cheese while pushing some team compositions out of the meta artificially. It's also boring as **** for the audience to watch (although tbh everyone would rather play Overwatch than watch it...) in the second match because instead of games ending on overtime games basically end in the most anticlimactic fashion possible. Especially if the first team on offense won in like 4 minutes or something similar.

The third option, and the one currently on the public test realm according to people on the internet? (grain of salt) is that Blizzard is having people play a 3rd game on the same map but only play until the first objective (second on gibraltar) is complete. Which..... massively favors attackers and if true (again internet grain of salt) already has people up in arms.

^ Tons of fun.

Why are you doing that?

Too lazy to mess with autofill settings. <- Vary by computer.

Why not just use your account, no one here cares.

Also I have really mixed feelings on the avoid system removal.
When matchmaking fails (lets be honest, more often than it should), you can get placed in some awful matchups. Its not unreasonable to mark a player out of your league, to avoid. People have had such a kneejerk reaction to the idea of 'avoiding players because they beat you' that they've forgotten that matches where you may as well go AFK due to skill variance. 'Skill difference' has been an option in avoid menus for a long time.


Edit: Forgot to mention smurfing. You know, when players who should always be super high ranked get themselves new accounts, or intentionally sabotage their ranking, for the purpose of sidestepping matchmaking and ruining the experience of new/lower skilled players. For funsies.

Because I'm lazy and no one cares.

Overwatch prioritizes ping over everything else, so the pool of people you are playing with is actually small enough sometimes that people will regularly run into the same groups. <- This meant that some people at higher elos were regularly taking forever to get into a match, after which they would almost always be placed against people at a lower mmr that shouldn't have been playing against them. This was a frequent enough occurence that it was causing more harm than good as far as matchmaking is concerned.

I believe that since the entire goal of the system is to match you based on skill (after ping), avoiding everyone who is better than you is not something people should be allowed to do. Every once in a while might be fine, but that wasn't what people were doing. I understand that sometimes people get unlucky but that doesn't mean they shouldn't ever have to play against good players (or Widowmaker) ever (which was a REALLY BIG problem with the avoid system; some people were just avoiding every single person who played one champ they didn't like). This was easily allowing people to artificially manipulate their win rates, and would have been a big problem in competitive if it had been allowed to continue. It was also unfairly punishing some people who were simply good at the game and had done nothing wrong (albeit a rare case).

I have not played any other games that have "they are better at the game than me" in the avoid menus, so I'll have to take your word for it. The closest thing I remember is "too low skill" in LOL, which imo was more of a bad joke than a good idea based on how that community is. The games I remember having such a thing almost always had it go hand in hand with a report button, along with penalties for false reporting if you got caught.

Going to try to summarize a bit better.

The problem, as defined by Blizzard, is that people were using their matchmaking system in a way that they considered to be an abuse. Due to how their matchmaking works, people were able to artificially affect their mmr by doing this, while at the same time some high elo players were having trouble getting into "Fair" games. The specific example given when this removal was announced was an unnamed Widowmaker player a lot of people believe to be some guy named Reaver due to circumstancial evidence. The system, as is, was probably not working in the way one would want for a competitive video game. Blizzard at least considered this to be a huge problem.

The two "good" solutions were probably what they did, or changing how their mmr works. They really don't seem to want to change how their mmr works, because they've tried multiple systems and they like this one the best. Dude sums it up better in one of his talks.

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Most games I have played only have a report feature. I do not remember playing anything except LOL where avoiding players was not hand in hand with it, and LOL only had the "bad player" option. So I have at least been conditioned to feel that you can't avoid hard opponents in a ladder environment. This whole thing reminds me of people who want to ban a class in Hearthstone. <- Very different but my closest point of comparison from personal experience.

Developer on Sudden Death:

http://us.battle.net/forums/en/overwatc ... 0745604460

Interesting read.

Yeah but I mean you posted from your main account, deleted it, then reposted. So its not a laziness thing, because you're taking additional effort to maintain this thing you're doing.

Also 2 core issues I have with the talk about the avoid system...

I don't believe everyone is the worst they can be, so I don't believe the notion that everyone (or significant portions) are just pressing avoid on anyone better than them. I believe people are avoiding those who are a being improperly matched against them.

Which is because the overwatch matchmaking is focused on creating a 50% winrate, and will not hesitate to throw you against people well above your elo if you're exceeding that. Or throw you against people well below your skill level, to allow it to be attained. Both directions are completely failed matchmaking processes which are pitting players who should not be encountering each other, so yes, people are going to want to press avoid.

The real answer is to have avoid work as a preferential system, and not a banlist. The system should make an effort to keep you away people you've avoided, but if another matchmaking correct match cannot be found, then it happens.

Basically the core of the problem isn't that the avoid system exists, or is broken. Its that the matchmaking is complete turds that will happily serve up massacres to ensure its terrible algorithm of winrates, rather than elo.

Really? That conspiracy theory?

It is statistically likely that a large number of people, except the best and worst, will stabilize at a 50% winrate. <- This is the goal of ladder systems, and what they are designed to do. If you are matched based on mmr, you are supposed to eventually find the place you belong and win half of your games.

A quote from Jeff Kaplan: "We are not trying to drive your win/loss percentage toward a certain number (although the fact that so many people are at 50% win rates makes us extremely happy). All the system does when it comes to matching on skill is attempt to match you with people of a similar number". So either he's lying, or they aren't trying to force you towards a 50% win rate. If you want to insist he is lying well then.... I can't really say any more than that and the above.

The entire thing can be found here: http://us.battle.net/forums/en/overwatc ... 371#post-3

Also talks a little bit about the avoid thing.

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None of the above means the matchmaking wasn't or isn't broken. There is still room for discussion there.

So when I suggest a flaw with the matchmaking, which is commonly articulated, its a conspiracy theory. Yet you are selling the idea that everyone is just pressing avoid on any player better than them and that's that. Okay.

I'm not saying he's lying. But literally anywhere its talked about, the community consensus is that he's lying. Which is a pretty common PR thing. You don't admit, point out, or call attention to the type of flaw that cant be definitely proved. If you think company PR mouthpieces don't regularly lie to their audiences, I don't really know what to tell you?

The difference between people abusing the **** out of the avoid system and matchmaking being rigged is that a lot of people have admitted to doing the former and even gone so far as to say they should be able to do it. Thus, statements pertaining to this "problem" are more credible than if there weren't a large number of people admitting to doing it.

The developer who made this statement, and also talked about matchmaking as a whole, has at least made efforts at transparency, which means he has earned at least SOME level of credibility. He is not an established credible source, and his word is not gospel, but there is more reason to believe that he is telling the truth than that he is outright lying. So "of course a developer in this situation would lie about it" won't convince me.

Matchmaking rigging, on the other hand, does not have that credible body of proof or any real established credibility (on average). Instead, we have the same sort of people who claim this kind of thing about every game doing it to this one too. It's very hard to take people seriously when there are threads where they are talking about Blizzard modifying their damage numbers to force a 50% win rate, Blizzard rigging their matchmaking so they get way too many hard opponents, and so on.... when the only real "proof" is circumstancial and the exact kind of thing you would expect from a conspiracy theory. With a lot of circumstancial evidence that contradicts the theory, including most of my own experiences in-game. And... I'm just not prone to buy into these things in the first place, so I'm going to be harder to convince than someone who wants to believe for some reason that their win rate is forced "down" (it's usually down, not up, that people complain about) to 50%.

So at least, if you do not agree with me on this, this is why I believe the former was happening but the latter is not. I also understand that the latter is a lot harder to prove one way or the other, and that is why I will try to stay open to the idea in the future. But with a very skeptical eye, and I'm not convinced right now.

2 things I really don't like about Overwatch matchmaking:

1) We are apparently playing with so small of a pool of opponents that the developer claims the prefer/avoid system was able to "wreak havoc" with their mmr based matchmaking. <- This feels like a problem to me. I am personally of the opinion that prefer/avoid shouldn't have had to have been removed because we shouldn't actually be playing in a system where prefer/avoid can affect your win rate and other people's abilities to find opponents. But that is what they would have us believe was the problem.

2) They have admitted that some of their matchmaking priorities lead to imbalanced games. Fundamentally, after a certain point getting you into any game is more important than getting you into a fair game. <- I feel like, at least in my personal experience, this happens way more often than it should. Might be observation bias or bad luck. But I feel like it's something derivative of 1) where a couple issues are compounding each other.

Mirror's Edge Catalyst had it's price dropped at Gamestop to about $40. <- Not a good sign this soon after release, but I wanted to play it so I bought it earlier in the week for that price.

There are a few things that stand out:

1) The open world is probably a detriment more than a plus. This is most evidence when dealing with Textures and Collectibles.

2) Runner Vision is artificially turned off to make the game harder. But only temporarily if the player can't get the puzzle done in a certain amount of time. <- My biggest complaint is that this is COMPLETELY immersion breaking. My second biggest complaint is that I'm playing hide and seek with objectives in a game where that kind of ruins the pacing.

3) Movement is not as fluid as in the first game. It feels like every action you do causes you to lose momentum, and keeping it up is very hard.

4) They've also locked a lot of the more important upgrades you started out with in the first game behind an exp system that I am convinced shouldn't even exist in the first place since it's responsible for most of my problems with the game's combat and I don't actually think anything in it shouldn't be in the default character abilities (other than damage and health upgrades which I wish the game had just balanced better instead of combat being a massive chore until you have them).

I finished Mirror's Edge Catalyst. I've now done all the story missions, all the side quests, an annoying amount of the other quests and collectibles, and frankly enough that I'm probably going to put the game down and not pick it up again. What I've got left to do involves getting the rest of the collectibles (bleh) and replaying content I didn't really enjoy doing the first time.

By the end of the experience, the game was becoming a chore to play. It feels like it does everything just a little bit wrong. The open world doesn't feel like it adds much to the game, compared to the problems it causes. The combat is horrendous. Like..... they took a semi-decent combat system from the first game and instead of improving it they ripped most of the cool things about it out and put the rest of it behind an upgrade system that makes combat freaking unbearable to deal with unless you heavily invest in it. But since movement is crappy unless you heavily invest in that, well that's a shame isn't it? It's like the upgrade tree, instead of adding things to the game, just took a bunch of things away and is making you pay to have them back.

Movement also feels........ it just doesn't feel responsive. By the time I had all the movement upgrades I at least felt like I could finally build some momentum, but the game just lacks a lot of polish. It's really easy to get stuck on the environment (which sucks in a parkour game tbh), and the jumping doesn't feel as responsive as it should. Going down ladders and poles is also now the bane of my existence, versus going up them which feels fine and not at all like a dead stop. They also use runner vision as a heavy crutch for environments that frankly aren't that fun to play with when runner vision is turned off. ... Which they keep doing for artificial difficulty. .... But only temporarily. In fact I've had multiple scenarios where I was going fast as I could and doing everything mostly right and the darn thing still came back. <- Really need to make up their minds. Again, feels like this wasn't fully tested and polished.

^ I think the biggest offense here is that on some jumps, the spacing is just downright wrong compared to what it feels like the player should do. The biggest biggest offender is the multitude of points where a running L1 sends you to your death, so you have to stop completely and nudge yourself over the edge so you can try to grab some other edge and OH MY WORD THIS IS SO BORING. No um..... there are a lot of jumps in the game where I think the intended path is very obvious but kills you instead of moving forward. Like the developers intended this to be the intended path even, and you still die if you don't do something unintuitive because they messed it up.

The online features are a resounding "meh". Theoretically it's infinte fun and replay value because players can make challenges for each other. ... In reality after playing through the game I've run through most of the more popular environments enough times that I want no part of doing the same thing but on a time trial.

The story is awful. And it has the worst credits screen of any video game I've played on ps4. Which took for freaking ever for credits I couldn't even make out because of the awful background.

Oh and I frequently had problems with bugs and glitches. Such as input not registering. In the menus. Oh and in the open world too.

Overall....... it's not like it's a bad game. IBut it's not like it's a great one either. It's definitely not as good as the first one. t feels like they took a lot of risks and if it had paid off they would have been geniuses but someone got a bit lazy somewhere and messed with some systems they shouldn't have because the game has to have a forced progression system and we have to have an open world because that's... don't know where to go with it after that. Now that I've finished the main story and the game has ended on a resounding "meh" I don't really want to go back and try to do the rest of the things. Not sure if it was worth my money or not. Maybe I'll get bored and play it again at some point? Would not recommend buying it for More than $30.

I've hit the 20 hour mark in Faeria. The game is snowbally as ****.

Decks can get 1 to 4 extra mana per turn (up to 7 total) if they have board control. Ever try to come back on a board where you don't have creatures and your opponent does and they have 5-7 mana every turn to your 3? Leads snowball very hard in this game.