To add to this, Minecraft ~~Java~~ Bedrock used to ship their code with all the debug symbols included, making modding easy. Although these were recently removed, much to the displeasure of the modding community. Everyone should throw a vote at this feedback issue to request them back, btw:
Hazzard
joined 2 years ago
Yeah.... to be fair, it does work, I personally don't pay for iCloud, but the way they aggressively push it and auto-enable it in so many places leaves less-technical users stuck with an unusable computer without more storage, unless they're savvy enough to know how to disable everything... which they aren't.
It's a frustrating practice, and MS is no better with the way they force OneDrive down your throat.
Shocking that anyone would believe, let alone publish that headline. It comes across as obviously false given the ultra-subjective and human nature of poetry.
Also, I ended up reading about six more blog posts, lol. You're excellent at piecing together many disparate pieces into a cohesive whole, which is well supported by facts. I particularly liked your piece on "capture platforms", and your whole blog was a good reminder regarding the power of the abstractions we make as developers. It's easy to forget the importance of what we do and how it has real effects on the world.
It's an exaggeration of the expression "down bad" which means to be very attracted to someone.
I assume "down bad" originates from being "down" to do something. I.E.
"You want to get something to eat?"
"Yeah, I'm down."
True, the more I look, the more details I see that were redrawn, that just happened to be the one that jumped at me first, due to the obvious shift in speed lines. It's more than just a colouring, it's almost a full reinterpretation.
The downward arc does have a certain energy to it, so I can see the appeal.
Why'd the stab angle change? It looks almost like he's stabbing him in the wrist now, rather than in the heart like he is in the uncoloured version.
Perfect answer. For most people, no. I actually did make the jump to a 4k TV and sit close enough to it that I can visibly see the difference. About 8 feet from a 65" TV, still barely in the "Ultra HD Worth It" category.
It truly is ridiculously large for the space, everyone who visits us comments on it. My wife likes to joke when we watch Make Some Noise that the people are "life size". If you don't have a small living room and aren't planning at least a 65" or larger TV, than it's almost certainly not worthwhile.
Crazy to me that most AAA console games push 4k as the standard at the expense of 60FPS, given these realities.
Fair point! I actually love this suggestion, rethinking more ways to make the game easier without breaking the core experience.
I don't think From Soft is totally languishing in this department, the games include an increasing amount of ways to make the game easier, such as Elden Ring introducing summons, an open world you can tackle in any order (although this falls off post-Morgott, as does the game overall imo).
But you're right, I'd love to see them potentially dabble with things like dynamic difficulty to create something that simultaneously better challenges experienced veterans and eases the ride for newer players. Or at least something to keep bosses you missed in the open world format somewhat interesting when you find them later. I don't think they're done iterating here, and I expect them to continue to improve at accommodating more players, without violating their other design goals.
I also agree there's some worrying trends in the design, as From Soft struggles to find ways to challenge their most diehard fans. Malenia's waterfowl dance, for example, which requires odd specific movement to dodge that's impractical to learn organically. Or her moves where she simply cannot be staggered, breaking expectations in a confusing way. In general as well, the games have trended towards being faster and requiring more "reactionary" play, and I do miss the more methodical combat of DS1, when the game was much less twitchy and more about carefully planning your moves.
I'm not sure I agree that From Soft has stopped being experimental though, Sekiro was a complete departure right before Elden Ring, as was returning to Armored Core for the first time in a decade right after. Elden Ring also dabbles in an interesting blend of mechanics. Transitioning to an Open World is a massive and obvious one, but I'm also happy to see powerstancing back, interesting new weapon arts, the physick flask is a great new system, horseback combat on Torrent, and stuff like charged attacks and posture similar to Sekiro. Not perfect, by any means, I actually find the balancing of this wealth of mechanics and build options to be pretty shaky, but it's far from a boring +1 iteration that doesn't try anything.
Let's clarify a little bit here, because I actually am curious. How much easier would you actually want the game to be? Howlongtobeat puts Sekiro's main story at 30 hours. Asking a friend who's very experienced at Sekiro and has played it dozens of times, he takes ~10 hours to beat it on a replay. So even if the game was dead easy, and had nothing to teach you, and you had no reason to explore or look around, you'd only save a maximum of 2/3rds of that time. More realistically, it would probably take 15 hours to complete if we factor in the exploration, even if the game was straightforward enough that you could kill each boss in only a few attempts.
So what would you have liked this easy mode to look like, in order to save you that time? And what value would you have gotten from that, in what amount of time, compared to setting aside 30 hours, or watching someone else play it?
To say that an option for an easy mode, on the screen, when you start, that you do not have to select, would damage your experience, is wild. That is very, very, weird. You are adamant the idea that someone could have a variant in preferences, that affect you in no way, would damage your experience because what? Because you had to see the option on the screen? Because people you deem lesser gamers would have played it? Is this some weird ideological axiom? Because people are simply doing something different than you? What is it that bothers you so much about other people having a different choice, you donβt need to make, or experience?
I mean... quick recap here. You said the way I was behaving was "very, very weird". You claimed I was offended solely "because I had to see an option on the screen". You claimed my reasoning was about "lesser gamers being able to play it", clearly insinuating that I simply have a superiority complex as a "weird ideological axiom", as if it's the foundation of the way I think. You also basically stated that I'm deeply bothered by anyone having a different opinion or experience.
Don't try to gaslight me about this being insulting. I've never expressed any anger here at disagreement, nor have I brought up anything about superiority or inferiority. You're bringing baggage into this from other people you've argued with before, and then insulting my character over a strawman version of my argument.
Also, when you clearly associate a behaviour with a person, insulting that behaviour is insulting the person. You can't claim you didn't associate the two when you chose to write "YOU" in all caps several times while describing the behaviour you were insulting.
It's also not at all ridiculous to assume the "What is it that bothers you so much about other people having a different choice, you donβt need to make, or experience?" at the end of that rant was rhetorical like the questions preceding it, again, don't try to gaslight me into thinking that quote was purely "laying down an array of possibilities, and then asking what yours was", and that I'm being "sensitive".
If you actually didn't mean offence, then I'd encourage you in future to skip the "array of possibilities", especially when those possibilities are exclusively descriptions of assholes.
That aside, thank you, I actually do appreciate you recognizing that you can't just "double your health and damage" and get a good easy mode. That's an argument I frequently come across while having this discussion, that they could "just scale everything down" in an hour or so, it's become what I tend to assume people mean when they say "just add an easy mode". You're also a very different person than what I usually end up having this argument with, in that you have actually played Souls, and understand the value of the more challenging default, but still wanted an easy mode. In that sense, I'd have no issue if you had played an easy mode. There's lots of mods to do so, for example, and I wouldn't have any problem if you had gone and played one. Frankly, I wouldn't have issue with anyone installing a mod to play an easier version. The option is literally there, just not on console, unfortunately, but I blame the console manufacturers for that, not From Software. I like the clarity in installing a mod that you aren't playing the game as intended and getting the full experience, which means it doesn't "segment the user base" or potentially cause people to miss out by thinking they've experienced everything From Soft intended.
The argument I generally take issue with is that From Software have some kind of "moral responsibility" or are "stupid and losing business" for not adding an explicit easy mode. A half-baked easy mode would do more harm than good, in terms of review scores and giving many players a worse experience. And a well-made easy mode is not an insignificant amount of work. Balance is one of the hardest things to get right, From Soft is literally still doing balance patches on the base game of Elden Ring, and easy mode would essentially double the amount of situations where things have to be balanced. It would also double QA work, as every scenario needs to be tested in both difficulties. And just... loading different things conditionally into a space isn't always easy either, look at all the struggles and weird bugs id have experienced with DOOM Eternal's Master Levels, and they're a team lauded for their technical prowess. One of From Soft's best attributes is that they iterate very quickly. A team of ~400 people have made Dark Souls 1, 2, 3, Bloodborne and Sekiro and Elden Ring in 11 years. That's more than a game every 2 years, not even counting DLC and other projects, in an era where game development is trending towards 5+ years as the norm. I've already asserted that I don't feel an easy mode would be nearly the same quality of game as the main entry, so I'll come out and outright say that I don't think an easy mode would be worth the months of effort that properly balancing and tweaking such a mode to make it good would add to development. But that's totally subjective, and you're more than welcome to do that math differently.
If From Soft release their next title with an easy mode, then great. I won't go picket their office or anything, I'm not pathetic. But if they do, then I really hope it's good, and I really hope the people who finally "get" to play will give the intended difficulty a chance.
Ok, hang on. I replied to this initially while annoyed, and blew past some of the key points. But I do actually want to talk about the whole "participating in the zeitgeist" thing.
A large part of the reasons Dark Souls doesn't have difficulties is to create that social element. Gonna stick with Elden Ring for my examples here, because I missed most of the online discussion around Sekiro. But from what I saw, the majority of the discussion online was about how hard certain bosses were, shared experiences like getting your ass kicked by Tree Sentinel, or Margit "putting your foolish ambitions to rest". If Elden Ring really did have an easy mode, that was easy enough for someone to beat the game without "learning the attack patterns of the monsters", and to keep up with the diehard playerbase while working 70+ hour work weeks, would they really have felt included in those conversations? Would they have been able to share the excitement at beating a boss that they struggled with for hours, without actually struggling for that time? There's an intentional design decision here. To quote Miyazaki from when Sekiro released:
We want everyone to feel that sense of accomplishment. We want everyone to feel elated and to join that discussion on the same level. We feel if there's different difficulties, that's going to segment and fragment the user base. People will have different experiences based on that [differing difficulty level]. This is something we take to heart when we design games. It's been the same way for previous titles and it's very much the same with Sekiro.
If all you really wanted was to just... experience the art and story, and see the cool enemy designs, you could always watch a youtube let's play or something as well. The ultimate easy mode, with a defined length of how long it will take. But if you wanted to commiserate about tough challenges and the experience you went through, then you kinda need to actually have that experience.
I'll also add, that stuff doesn't go away. I was excited by the hype around Elden Ring too. It's what pushed me to start Dark Souls 1, and then play 2, 3, Sekiro, and finally Elden Ring. I missed the initial hype around all of those games, but that cultural stuff is still there. I built up a youtube playlist while playing each game and once I finished them I would catch up on Illusory Wall, Zullie the Witch, Vaati, and challenge runs and Lockout Bingos from the likes of Lil' Aggy or Ymfah. My friends were also excited to see me play the games. I may not have experienced the Anor Londo archers until years after they did, but it was still fun to talk to them about it, and they were excited to reminisce and replay the game alongside me.
I eventually did get to participate in the fun that was Shadow of the Erdtree releasing soon after I beat Elden Ring. And that was great, and special. It was fun to see that final boss get nerfed soon after I beat it, for example. I do feel sorry that you missed the moment of Sekiro releasing. But ultimately I don't think your anecdotal experience is more important than say, my friend who always picked easy and didn't realize how much he loved a tough challenge. Or any of the "Dark Souls saved my life" people, who might've picked easy if it was offered and not had that experience. Or the designers at From Software who worked hard to create something special and have the right to not offer a way to half-ass it and "fragment the user base".
Haha, dang it. Seems I got confused, turns out that was just a bedrock thing. Could've noticed that if I'd looked more closely at my own link π