Mastodawn

"Story? who the fuck cares about story? We put peoples balls into a vicegrip, and they asked for more. repeatedly."

If you gain joy out of souls-likes, that's fine. No judgement. But for me, the payoff isn't there.

You spend your time smashing your face into a wall to learn a boss' patterns, just to get a disjointed fragment of a story. 3/4ths of the story isn't revealed to you in the game through any means, requires reading a wiki, and watching a 3 hour youtube video essay to make any-fucking-sense of it.

The only attraction is the difficulty, and I'm not enough of a try-hard to put in the effort.

@da_667 absolute same. I've never understood why people feel justified to decide what is fun for others.

You enjoy crushing mechanics with precision physics, perma-death mods and scaled fights? That's awesome...good for you. I turned "Auto-fishing" on in Cult of the Lamb because I disliked the mechanic and was able to.

I've never understood why there are "sides" to entertainment, you know? I get not liking something because you don't like it. But why hate on others because they do?

@jackryder exactly. It's not my cup, I explained why. But if you do enjoy it, don't let me stop you :)

@da_667 heck, depending on the game... I might even !

Smash is fun, to watch. I have zero interest in the game type/style/etc. and as a kid I hated playing them too.

Emelia/Emi 1d ago

@da_667 Honestly this is why I prefer "automation" games. And modded minecraft. Even if they're grindy AF some times, they're usually very much a "take it at your own pace" kind of grind, and it usually exists to push players into building larger and more complete automation setups to counteract that grind.

Need 50k steel for a thing? Why wait for 5 furnaces to do that, even if you can overclock them, when you can instead just automate building furnaces and scale up to 500?

@becomethewaifu heh, I have a minecraft server running all the mods right now. Minecraft is a "comes in waves" for me thing. When I want to play it, nothing else satifies, but when I'm done, I'll leave it alone for a while.

Emelia/Emi 1d ago

@da_667 Same here. I set down GTNH for well over a year, but then jumped right back in and spent three days straight overhauling my power generation to fully utilize all the light oil fractions as fuel about two weeks ago (Now that I have a good bit more EU/t from that, I really should add more blast furnaces and automate stainless production so I can replace all of the MV distillers with more towers) and then dropped it for a bit again.

@becomethewaifu last time I was playing, my obsession was with havestcraft/cooking, and getting a coffeemaker in place with a MASSIVE sprawling base. I have some fun things in place, but @krishean took things ALL THE WAY, got the ATM star and then some, so mad props to him.

Krishean Draconis 22h ago

@da_667 @becomethewaifu i built a ae2 system with lots of harvestcraft recipes in it as an experiment that i wanted you to check out, it's something you could use your farms for. i also hooked the coffee maker to it (where i found that coffee maker automation bug that will be fixed in an update) and some pneumaticcraft stuff so you can make tempura

i haven't stopped playing, i just take breaks once and awhile. the pocket dimension has sooo much more stuff in it, i think i added almost all the modern industrialization machines, and you can just make quantum upgrades automatically (although it takes like half an hour and uses an incredible amount of resources to do it)

Emelia/Emi 22h ago

@krishean @da_667 Pocket dimension reminds me that I should really make better use of my Spectre Key... Ender chests are fun and all, but GTNH makes them really unreasonable to make in my stage of the game, but I've gotten far enough to get the spectre key and stick a whole bunch of chests in the pocket dimension for offloading my adventure loot without going home.

(I've been bitten by the NBT inventory limit that corrupts your player data, hence general dislike of "backpacks" that don't store their contents "elsewhere" in a separate NBT file like ender chests do)

Krishean Draconis 22h ago

@becomethewaifu @da_667 i call it the pocket dimension because i know the way the mod implements it, but it's a soaryn compact machine where i have my main ae2 system, all my resource production/storage, and automation systems set up

Ron Bowes 1d ago

@da_667 I disagree (as a masochist gamer): Dark Souls games are for sure harder, but it's also incredibly fair. They teach you how to succeed, then test you, and it's a great feeling. They could have made it so much harder, at the expense of fun, but didn't - I think the magic is in their design.

But, that sorta game is my favorite style. I recently did no-armor challenge runs of all three Dark Souls + Elden Ring. It was so much fun!

They aren't for everyone, but I'm happy people are making games for people like me, but also others are making games for others

The story is whatever. I like the challenge, it just feels good to learn and then repeat patterns

@iagox86 @da_667 this is part of the reason why my personal ranking goes:

Bloodborne1.5. Sekiro

DS3

DS

(the second dark souls isn’t worth ranking and i haven’t finished elden ring because i hit some massive bugs at launch)

Bloodborne and Sekiro are much less about shoving (back)story into the most random-ass places and far more about meeting players where they’re at. there is still some obscure shit in both but it’s far less prevalent and i prefer their gameplay anyway. if Sekiro in particular “clicks” i don’t think it’s insanely difficult either

different strokes for different folks, though

(fuck markdown)

Ron Bowes 22h ago

@nmott @da_667 Yeah Sekiro was a lot of fun.. I considered re-playing it along with the others, but I'd played it recently enough (and no-armour isn't really a meaningful challenge the way it is in DS)

I'm playing Expedition 33 right now, and it's a nice distillation of the "learn a pattern and dance with the enemy" style. Though I feel like the balance in Expedition 33 is weird.. I'm playing on Hard, but I want more danger and less HP-sponge enemies (too many fights just feel like they go on forever and you need to play perfectly the whole time)

@iagox86 @da_667 that’s the worst kind of difficulty. reminds me why i bounced off final fantasy xii’s optional bosses; having to chunk through hundreds of thousands of hp while simultaneously running the risk of being one-shotted just doesn’t do it for me.

Ron Bowes 19h ago

@nmott @da_667 There are a lot of roguelikes and RPGs where "higher difficulty" = "bigger numbers", and it's definitely a bad way (often) to add difficulty!

Lemniscate 1d ago

@da_667 I feel very similar, I like a lot more story in my games than I found in ER (I hadn’t played any of the DS games). It did a good job at showing things that really made me want to know the story behind them, but then there just wasn’t much at all actually there.

John Cortexiphan 1d ago

@da_667 the three hour you tube video and wiki…. That are entirely made up… with no actual input from the game publisher…

@da_667 I can remember the games that had stoies I cared about.

Breath of the Wild and Age of Calamity.
Summoner (PS2 launch title) (fix the combat system and this would be a hell of a remake)
FF X
Sea of Stars (this one hit my feels the most).

Playing lots of Enshrouded and I dig the lore as it becomes more and more exposed.

Let the kids have live service and MMO slop. They'll never know ...

@infoseclogger I've heard sea of stars is a chrono-trigger-like. Was it really good? I have the demo in my steam list.

@da_667 The gameplay was solid, there are CT themes, the story and characters are outstanding. I will replay it eventually, but the story has beats that still hit heavy. It is a top 5 game for me based on story. It's a top 5 RPG for me as well.

@infoseclogger I'm a big fan of many of the games you mentioned. Chrono trigger, and Final Fantasy 6, Kingdom Hearts I and II all hold a special place in my heart.

@da_667 I did like KH1 and 2.
I've made it through FF 1-4, 7, 9, and 10. I need to get 5 and 6.

I haven't done the Chrono Trigger cycle yet. Pacing myself.