Re: Old & Aging Game Discussion
Posted: Sun Aug 19, 2012 7:00 am
Well, I've killed some more dudes in Demon's Souls (with most recent being the Dragon God), so I think I'm around 1/3 through the game or so right now (maybe a bit less, depending on how large the giant zone is whenever it opens).
The AI in this game really is not that good. We've established this. We've also established that drop rates suck. Well, as it turns out, the way souls scale after a certain point is so ludicrously out of proportion that drops become a null issue because you can farm a place in secret shadowman zone and buy a fuckton of consumables.
This means that Demon's Souls fell for the exact same problem that all the Blizzard games fell for - numbers. I wager the reason why drops are so bad, and why I had such a hard time as a result, is because all the numbers are balanced for you getting the way higher income of souls you get after clearing some bosses. Until then, the cost for stuff is impossibly high without suicide farming shadowmen for an hour. Thus, trying to clear alternate zones from 1-* results in much anguish because there's no healing.
Another fun thing Bill made me aware of is that the glowing harry potter jizz salamanders that drop resources have limited spawns. Something I discovered on my own is that the sack guys in the mine also seem to have limited spawns. So, as far as the "I've got an easy way to get basic mats" goes, I was dead wrong. There's only a single farmable mob and it's in low quantity. I discover this after burning a lot of my mats trying to make alternate weapons, and then reading that these weapons can't get those upgrades I wanted. I became mishappy.
I've also encountered some gayery with world tendency. Notably, my decision to stick to non-networked games means my world tendency remains fairly static unless I die in human form. So, there's some stuff that is white tendency only (that I had to read up on) that I can't conceivably get. At all. Because all the bosses and phantoms in that zone are already dead. Fantastic.
Beyond the hideously broken AI, the hideously broken physics, the strange stat scaling and extremely rough start I had, the necessity to grind until you get a stable income, Demon's Souls biggest problem is that you need to look on the internet to learn anything. A game shouldn't hold your hand, especially through something as complex as crafting, but the crafting in this game is often an all-in kind of deal. Some mats you're only going to get once, if ever. The demon souls can only be used for specific weapons and they all have different upgrade requirements to expose them. This all could have been easily hinted at in the dialogue. You get nothing. At all.
From what bill explains, a lot of these issues evaporate in Dark Souls. I wouldn't say that this game is super bad, just woefully untested. Tons of things would never have survived a single playtest, including the fact that recovering your bloodstain results in this screen-covering message that cannot be quickly skipped. All of the balancing issues and bugs would have been caught in a single playtest. If I found them, anyone would.
I like that the game has kept me playing this long despite the fact I've gotten more mad in it than I have gotten in any game yet, and there's still a lot of content for me to see. This was the first title that's been worth my money on a console for an extremely long time.
The AI in this game really is not that good. We've established this. We've also established that drop rates suck. Well, as it turns out, the way souls scale after a certain point is so ludicrously out of proportion that drops become a null issue because you can farm a place in secret shadowman zone and buy a fuckton of consumables.
This means that Demon's Souls fell for the exact same problem that all the Blizzard games fell for - numbers. I wager the reason why drops are so bad, and why I had such a hard time as a result, is because all the numbers are balanced for you getting the way higher income of souls you get after clearing some bosses. Until then, the cost for stuff is impossibly high without suicide farming shadowmen for an hour. Thus, trying to clear alternate zones from 1-* results in much anguish because there's no healing.
Another fun thing Bill made me aware of is that the glowing harry potter jizz salamanders that drop resources have limited spawns. Something I discovered on my own is that the sack guys in the mine also seem to have limited spawns. So, as far as the "I've got an easy way to get basic mats" goes, I was dead wrong. There's only a single farmable mob and it's in low quantity. I discover this after burning a lot of my mats trying to make alternate weapons, and then reading that these weapons can't get those upgrades I wanted. I became mishappy.
I've also encountered some gayery with world tendency. Notably, my decision to stick to non-networked games means my world tendency remains fairly static unless I die in human form. So, there's some stuff that is white tendency only (that I had to read up on) that I can't conceivably get. At all. Because all the bosses and phantoms in that zone are already dead. Fantastic.
Beyond the hideously broken AI, the hideously broken physics, the strange stat scaling and extremely rough start I had, the necessity to grind until you get a stable income, Demon's Souls biggest problem is that you need to look on the internet to learn anything. A game shouldn't hold your hand, especially through something as complex as crafting, but the crafting in this game is often an all-in kind of deal. Some mats you're only going to get once, if ever. The demon souls can only be used for specific weapons and they all have different upgrade requirements to expose them. This all could have been easily hinted at in the dialogue. You get nothing. At all.
From what bill explains, a lot of these issues evaporate in Dark Souls. I wouldn't say that this game is super bad, just woefully untested. Tons of things would never have survived a single playtest, including the fact that recovering your bloodstain results in this screen-covering message that cannot be quickly skipped. All of the balancing issues and bugs would have been caught in a single playtest. If I found them, anyone would.
I like that the game has kept me playing this long despite the fact I've gotten more mad in it than I have gotten in any game yet, and there's still a lot of content for me to see. This was the first title that's been worth my money on a console for an extremely long time.