anomalouslymandatory

anomalous

@anomalouslymandatory

  • he/him

Kind of just do stuff, tend to like stuff like Touhou and Doom and Terraria and Serious Sam and things
25
R-18 stuff over at @mandatoryanomaly

Basically everywhere else, Discord, Tumblr, Bluesky, Twitter, Steam, Fediverse, etc. I still go by "anomalouslymandatory" if possible

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anomalouslymandatory
@anomalouslymandatory
armormodekeeg
@armormodekeeg
bruno
@bruno

I think Dark Souls might have ruined the metroidvania genre by making every metroidvania think it has to be "like Dark Souls," ie, pointlessly challenging with an overbearing parry system

bruno
@bruno

It was a very funny self-own for me to make this post and then immediately try out Grime, a game that tutorializes the parry before it tutorializes attacking

bruno
@bruno

I am tired of the 'good combat' industrial complex I am tired of parrying I am tired of games making me invest time in learning boss patterns before they've done the work of proving they're worth my time

armormodekeeg
@armormodekeeg

the problem with parries is that they are binary. you either get the parry or you don't. in a game where combat is centered around parries, everything is boiled down to reaction and rote pattern recognition. positioning? crowd control? unique strategies? all are gone. just hit the button at the right time, and hear the loud sound effect, or don't and die.

this is why parries are so popular, of course. what you did right is instantly rewarded, and what you did wrong is instantly clear. none of that frustrating vagueness of dying because you let a group of enemies take control of the screen and overwhelm you, or because the attack you tried to punish a whiffed attack missed. just hit every parry and win!

of course, that "frustrating vagueness" frequently comes from depth. higher-level strategic management of situations, knowledge of all of the players tools' and their unique properties... it's what makes action games of many types truly rewarding to explore in the long term.

it also makes it easier to ease players into games, because they don't immediately have to master everything that will help them win. if the sole factor to winning is correctly timing all your parries or dodges, then the player is directly forced into that dichotomy and if they can't reach a specific level of competence, well, tough shit for them I guess. the only ways to modulate the difficulty of parry-focused combat are to adjust the punishment, adjust the enemy's timings, or adjust the timing windows, and none of those are that accommodating, IMO.

leave the timing tests to the rhythm games, where they belong. join the anti-parry movement today.

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in reply to @bruno's post:

love
@love

At least we're not in the alternate universe where everything is exactly the same but "like Dark Souls" means that the Varia Suit has to be a completely inexplicable and unremarked on equippable ring that you find with zero fanfare that indicates you just opened up half the map

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in reply to @bruno's post:

NireBryce
@NireBryce

I'd be more ok with parry mechanics if either the telegraphing was more obvious and the parry windows were slightly longer,

or my health bar and resources were in the center of my monitor so I could actually watch the boss when I most need to be parrying, or not miss a parry and Instantly Die.

I get that on some level UI decisions are for adding stress and making checking health harder, but Who Cares.

It's what kept me off bayonetta too. I can learn these things, but even once learned it's like getting punished for having less peripheral vision or eye speed than most people, or getting punished because I keep thinking the wrong swing animation is telegraphing the parry window I'm thinking for.

Guild Wars 2 was even worse about this since you have to see the telegraphed stuff through spell effects to know when to dodge!

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Mightfo
@Mightfo

i think in guild wars 2 it varies based on how old the boss is, unless i misunderstand what you mean. launch game bosses had like annoying animation watching you had to do and stuff. stuff from the last... 6? years is a lot more FFXIV-ish you could say- relatively clear and relatively consistent visual design language for attacks incoming that doesnt involve "he's doing a funky pose with his leg do i need to roll'

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vectorpoem
@vectorpoem

i'm in such an advanced stage of "tired of combat" that not only is combat no longer inherently interesting to me, its abstract existence in a game is a point against my checking it out (to be redeemed, possibly, by other reasons to care).

not that this leaves me without anything interesting to play, but i would say it has completely fucked up my ability to be interested in any of the same stuff other people are interested in.

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bruno
@bruno

I unironically want a revival of 'bad,' simplistic, easy combat that acts as a pacing mechanism in between other modes of interaction. Which used to be super common but has gone basically extinct now that everyone thinks they have to be like Dark Souls or like God of War or like Devil May Cry.

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vectorpoem
@vectorpoem

definitely yeah, there's this sense that combat is so unquestionably mandatory and that all Souls etc brought to the table is that the fashion of what makes "good combat" has shifted a bit. whereas the one remaining game where i absolutely enjoy combat is Doom, where on HMP it's usually just some pleasant twitchy junk food to crunch on as you slug through different spaces and figure out your way through the labyrinth. combat can mean so many things and it's a bummer that the market constantly narrows creators' senses of what to do with it!

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secrets
@secrets

Kinda a pain in the ass that combat (and, specifically, combat in the style of the one or two most popular games at the moment) is so pervasive that even most of the otherwise possibly novel stuff out there has some zombie-fighting mechanic or whatever tacked on that quickly displaces everything actually interesting else the game does.

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