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Hey it's Drake, 35yo trans pan otherkin goddess hedgederg who will eat your whole universe X3. Mainly playing ffxiv or writing, or chattin folks up.

A pretty 50/50 switch who loves her darling girlfriend @HedgehogGoddess so so much. <3

animated avatar by @ConstellationArtGallery , awesome job! <3

Main character on XIV is Drake Silvos on Coeurl.

AD account: @drakeofthelewdaxe

I'm also drakesilvos on discord.


Kayin
@Kayin

As usual, feel free to read the original here

"We got to the point where Metroidvanias were "Ah yes, I got the GREEN COLORED DASH, which will break GREEN BLOCKS, and I can find all the spots I missed by checking my map. It's an ATTACK and a MOVEMENT OPTION--" and like idk at that point the genre was cooked for like a decade."

As usual, with these posts, I start by going off on twitter, this time about Metroidvania, and as usual it's time to salvage a messy thread from a dying platform.

Animal Well is apparently good and with that, comes the think pieces and opinions on what the nebulous and poorly named genre of Metroidvanias is and how they should be, mechanically.

This is a familiar cycle. Game design in general always has a problem with looking at the last hit and copying the wrong things. Copying without understanding, "refining" mechanics to solve self made design problems. In Metroidvanias, a genre where the difference between a "good" and a "great" entry feels like a chasm, this problem is magnified.

In the early 2000s we copied, but in early 2010s, we tried to "refine". What if we took Super Metroid and sanded it down a little, reduced the pain points, streamlined things a little. In this era, while we thought we were trying to make great games, many of us were simply trying to not make a bad one. How do we remove the bad part of games, and replace them with better things? Each new feature, each "Quality of Life" design decision would get copied by the next game. "We know better, now."

The green dash breaks the green blocks. You'll know when to use every ability, and we'll put color coded labels on your map so you know where all the green walls you missed are! We'll give you fast travel! Nobody like's backtracking, right? Much like the last ten years of Ubisoft's output, we managed to take a genre about discovery exploration, and turn it into a checklist. Even with warps, backtracking feels like more of a chore. Rote, mindless, call-and-response design.

What's the alternative? Make the player bomb every square of the map like an animal? Bombing every surface is definitely a pain point of early Metroids, so making it easier for players to figure out which blocks break would make a better Metroidvanias, right?

... Sure. But only if you look at Metroid as a game about breaking blocks.

We immerse ourselves so deep in genre that it's easy to assume some things are essential. Bombing up random blocks, going from lava land to ice world, even lock and Key game design. We internalize genre so much that it can be hard to remember that it's just an abstraction. The design of super metroid isn't to serve the secret energy tank hidden in an unmarked block. That E-Tank is a crude tool that helps reach a goal -- delivering a sense of discovery and exploration.

... If bombing random walls to find secrets seems too tedious, you don't need to systemize your way around the problem, you can simply not do it.

Why do you want bombable blocks and breakable walls? Hell, why do you want lock and Key progression? Because that's what metroidvanias do? How about you? What do you want? What's your goals, for your game?

Dark Souls isn't reaaaaally a Metroidvania but talking about it as one is Important

It's 2011. People are saying shit like "Shadow Complex is a good metroidvania" and you probably haven't heard anyone mention that game in over a decade. The real sickos are talking about Aliens Infestation, a game you might not even know exists. Other M killed Metroid. Castlevania might as well be dead. We're between the experimental wave of late 2000s doujin and TIGsource metroidvanias and the commercial indie second wave... but that wave is already in development. It can't be changed by what's coming next.

Dark Souls hit everyone pretty hard, but for those of us who had been banging the Super Metroid drum on internet forums, arguing with more reasonable and easily satisfied people about nitpicky details, it hit in a very specific way.

... Is this a Metroidvania? My brain says no, but the heart says yes.

The point was to explore by unlocking new abilities, right...? And while Metroidvania's could have simple keys, that was considered The Bad Way to do things. You need interesting, multipurpose, metaphoric keys! Yet somehow, that mysterious key you found carried a shocking amount of weight. Maybe Lock and Key wasn't the point? Half of us would freestyle our ways through Super Metroid and SOTN anyways and the original Metroid had a shockingly open structure...

Instead, maybe it was about the world and how you moved through it. The feelings that'd invoke. The tradeoffs you'd make regarding backtracking... A return to an era where you weren't playing for "100% items found", where secrets were actually secrets, and you had no way to know what you were missing.

Dark Souls isn't a Metroidvania, not because it can't be viewed through the -vania lens, but because it's many other things first.

It shares the same goals, though. Encouraging deep exploration by constructing an interconnected world that gives the space you occupy meaning. Because it isn't a metroidvania it didn't risk falling into the traps of metroidvanias. Dark Souls was a moment of clarity to ask... what do we actually want out of these games?

I Know I Overuse "Cargo Cult", but Seriously, We’re waving Palm Leafs at Airplanes over here

The fate of the Souls-like is so much like the Metroidvania. I'll be honest with you, Souls games don't have the best combat mechanics, sitting between Zelda and a bad monster hunter clone. They don't need to, because again, that's not the goal. When it is, the goal, they do things much differently. Metroid isn't about blowing up secret boxes, and Souls games aren't about the combat. One merely has to play King's Field to understand the combat is a means to an end, creating the struggle you need to reinforce themes and tone of their games.

Part of this is why so many "Soulslikes" fall flat. Dodge-Roll combat isn't that exciting. Can you craft a world as compelling as Fromsoft? No? Well, then you better be juicing that combat up. When you look at Nioh and Lies of P, the copying is very superficial, invoking aspects of Souls games to try and trick fans into enjoying new experiences that put their combat much more in focus. Nioh doesn't have the vibes, but it knows what purpose its systems serve.

Other games will invoke ideas like losing "souls" and strange multiplayer systems. While these things are cool design spaces to explore, they are often copied almost blindly, as if they were DS1's secret good-juice. But these are mechanics Fromsoft doesn't need, and their games forgoing them regularly. They're tools, used when appropriate.

Blind copying can only get you so far. Rare famously elevated and killed the "Collectathon" in one console generation, copying Mario 64 without getting why. Adding more types of pickups, more variety... people LOVED getting 120 stars right? Well they'll love getting 300 Bleepblorgs and 30 skoon tokens and... well, this worked for a game or two. But Mario 64 wasn't about collecting stars. Stars were a tool to make you move through fun environments and inspiring play. Their "enhancements" of the formula slowly made the whole genre worse, missing the heart of what made Mario 64 fun and turning it, again, into a checklist.

The Dark Souls of Collectathons is Tony Hawk Pro Skater, a game that understands that isn't about collecting tapes, but exploring cool maps while doing neat tricks. The Tool facilitates the Goal.

Hollow Knight coming out was almost a relief. It wears it's Souls influences on it's sleeve, but it had a long time to understand it's influences and come up with ways to achieve it's own goals under it's own terms. Even my own initial response to Hollow Knight came with a lot negativity, due to internalized assumptions about metroidvanias. Oh I'm not getting lost because the map is bad, I'm getting lost because that's the goal. It knew how to use it's tools to achieve it's goals. We no longer needed Dark Souls to be a metroidvania. We could point at Hollow Knight and go "You know, like that".

... Of course now people think you make a Metroidvania by making your game look like this. Like Dark Souls, Game Design is about ever repeating, inescapable cycles.


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in reply to @Kayin's post:

if animal well introduces a new paradigm, i think it would be people remembering there were metroidvanias before hollow knight. which is a bit unfortunate because i think there's a few lessons that go with your point on picking and choosing what works:

  1. i like how short the bosses are since they're gimmicky. they only feature one phase instead of multiple phases, so there was never a point i felt like grinding against a boss that i found boring. simply memorize the pattern and win

  2. there are multiple ways to break difficult puzzles into something simpler and trivial. you can choose to engage the game as a true platformer or play it as a problem-solving puzzle game. it allows many styles with the tools you get.

  3. the layers in theory are very interesting in concept. it allows people to drop off the game if they don't want to experience everything. of course, it's a bit counterintuitive for completionists like me, but i think it's an interesting idea worth reiterating.

so i've been profoundly alienated from how people are talking about the game as if it's discovered multi-purpose tools or something lol.

God a trend that has gotten me in Metroidvanias lately in general is bosses. Like every boss has to be a cool skill check with 3 forms, when reall just a short, gimmicky fight is great. Even going back in time to Kraid busting out of the ground and looks cool but melts with any sort of effort". Like in games about exploring, the bosses can easily serve just as added flavor and that's okay!! 😭

Having bounced off of some of the old school monster hunter games but then falling in love with world and sinking hundreds of hours into it, then getting bored of rise, I think there's a certain amount of quality of life that helps, but of course if you take it to an extreme, it sands off a lot of the good bits. Probably hard to tell where the right click stops are

I think the important thing though is to realize there are very few true "QoL" changes. You just have design changes and they might be good or necessary but you gotta look at what they enable and what they take away.

Yeah, that's definitely right. The one that is most memorable to me in monhun is how in the earlier games you had to buy or farm for whetstones, but in world they were unlimited. What did it take away not having to farm that? Nothing. But it freed me up to have a better relationship with the push and pull of combat.

And in rise they took away a lot of the monster tracking, which messed up the feel of navigating the world actually hunting something.

odd take: i feel like Hollow Knight would have been a better game without its DLC???

like Hollow Knight wears its Dark Souls inspirations on its sleeve but when you drill down into the DLC it feels a lot like the takeaway they got from Dark Souls was "more hard = more good" and the end result is a lot of cheap, frustrating fights which break the unspoken contract of "one hit = one damage point taken off, no more, no less"

Nightmare King Grimm is a fight that feels like it punishes you just for attempting it, and it was nearly my breaking point with my second playthrough attempt (in the end i just...skipped it, and finished the game)

the Radiance gets a pass on that because it's the final boss, as do the higher tiers of the Dream Zote fight because there's not really anything meaningful locked behind them, but the net effect overall was that i walked away from Hollow Knight with a sour taste in my mouth because i felt like the devs had something really incredible and then took the ball and spiked it into the wrong endzone - and did a victory dance afterwards

on this subject: Blasphemous is another game best described as a heavily Dark Souls-inspired Metroidvania, and I loved it front to back

the later content updates unquestionably improved the game, adding in an interesting "give-and-take" approach to upgrading your healing kit (you trade extra charges for more potent charges) in addition to challenging (but not cheap!) additional bosses

the only part i'd describe as overly frustrating would be the Bloodstained crossover content, which consists of really unforgiving (and entirely optional) timed platforming challenges

it was really good at launch and great when i gave it a replay after its last major update hit

Yeah I played Hollow Knight right when Grimm Trope came out, did some of it, tried the last boss and was like "eh" and never loaded it up to try the other DLC. It felt... unnecessary.

I personally loved the Grimm fight, but I didn't bother with the Godhome dlc because it makes you fight all the minibosses that just stall by hiding or flying out of reach a bunch before you get to the new stuff, and if you fail you have to do it again.

The things hitting for more than one health I kind of agree with. It didn't bother me that much, but it feels like a result of adding so much stuff that they have to start devaluing it towards the end. It feels like they should've just cut themselves off earlier and saved some of that for the sequel.

when i worked in mobile you'd literally have a "reference game." i've seen projects criticised and cancelled for "using too much innovation budget" or being "new new." trying to be original in too many vectors.
but even when copying a successful game, it was often superficial because the approval was money people. who were very much "analytics show planes love runways"
but i'm glad i'm free now. making vampire survivors clones and a deckbuilder.

this really strikes home... it's funny, this is the kind of thing that was so, so rife within the RPG Maker scene years ago (and might still be now). Design thoughts were like, "ah, I'm making an RPG... it should have a Fishing Minigame, and an Alchemy System, and at least ten Sidequests... people were frequently unable to explain WHY they wanted these systems outside of "they're cool" and "i like this other game, so..."

the major difference being that a ton of people making those choices were brand new to gamedev and overwhelmingly hobbyists! like, of course that's what happened, they were thinking "i want to make Chrono Trigger but..." and making minigames were what was motivating them at the time!

...but ideally as you make and play more, you think deeper about why a game works, and you slowly learn games are more than individual component mechanics and systems! at least hopefully. it's so strange, then... there are these really beautiful, polished works built with tons of love and time and money, but the design never gets past "I want to make Metroid, but..."

anyway, you're right... the feeling of "exploration" and "discovery" are exciting, and it's so funny how often games dilute that by following standards and rules. like, i'm playing a game, i want to be surprised, y'know??

imo everyone who wants to make a Metroidvania should do a blind playthrough of Toki Tori 2+ (Wii U > Steam > Switch) to broaden their horizons of what “keys” can be. it’s like a deconstructive essay in video game form. i wish i knew more examples like it to give to people…

This kind of thing has been on my mind a lot lately, as someone who's working on some sort of metroidvania. I worry about falling too hard into the extremely easy to fall into trap of thinking of my game in terms of what genre it is. Am I limiting myself too much? Am I adding mechanics because I think they add something to the game or am I just doing it because Hollow Knight did something similar? I feel like it's kind of tricky to reflect on.

if you do a little press and hold on mobile they should pop up. Kinda weird for the one that's a link(which is just me saying "don't worry, I'll rehash it all here:") but the rest should be fine

edit: OH I'm dumb, you can use the actual kayin.moe version to get them working on mobile

I'll always remember the time I saw a kickstarter for an MMO open with the line "our vendors will sell green items". It's an easy trap to just minorly tweak existing mechanics to make them "better" instead of thinking about the role that mechanics play in games.