Hey everyone, Josh is playing Dark Souls 2 for the very first time right now. Watch it now on Twitch.
I missed the end of the stream, right when JPH showed up and was about to do some co-op with Josh. Someone tell me how it ended!
Anyway. Fun times. Gorgeous game. Looks hard. Thanks for watching.
Link (YouTube) |
Ah, the joys of doing a show unrehearsed, unplanned, and un… sane. This is one of those moments we couldn’t have achieved if we wanted to. It just had to happen on its own. I’d love to hear some theories on what the other player was doing. He seemed to swing wildly from super-tryhard to self-destruction. I assume there was some sort of plan here, but I can’t even guess at what it was.
I’m really glad we waited until George was on the show before we covered this game. This whole section was that much more exciting with his commentary.
References:
The pot-smashing reminded me of this little gem. The random nonsense names that we were calling out during the invasion were from Mystery Science Theater 3000: Space Mutiny. I already linked it yesterday, but since we mentioned it again he’s another link to the SBH Critical Close-Up of Dark Souls. And as Josh said, we’ll be doing a live broadcast of Josh playing Dark Souls 2 tomorrow.
Link (YouTube) |
Right off the bat, George asks who Reginald Cuftbert is, so now might be a good time to bring newcomers up to speed. To ruin the joke by way of explaining itWhich is far better than you later ruining the joke yourself by discovering it isn’t very funny I’m going to need to do an exposition dump on you:
The Reginald Cuftbert joke(?) began back in 2010 during our Fallout 3 let’s play. (Yes, Spoiler Warning has been doing Let’s Plays since long before other, funnier people popularized the format.) It was an attempt to come up with the most lore-inappropriate name for our character. Since then we’ve continued the tradition of using the name in whatever form the game allows, which is usually “barely”. We now have about sixteen thousand times more memoryNot an exaggeration, assuming typical memory today is about 8GB and was 512k in 1990., but game designers are still using the 1990 approach to character names, where they don’t want to give you more than 10 bytes lest you run out of memory and crash to DOS.
We typically play Reginald as chaotic stupid. Partly for comedy, but also because it lets us see rarely experienced content and bugs.
Here is the SuperBunnyHop critical close-up of Dark Souls that we talked about in the show.
So my column this week was actually prompted by the fact that Resident Evil 4 recently got an HD re-release, and SuperBunnyHop did a retrospective on it.
But more importantly it’s prompted by the endless needling I get from Various Parties when I fail to like things. Or if I don’t like them enough. Or for the right reasons.
“It’s your own fault you’re bad at the game.”
Which doesn’t change that fact that some people really want to know how demanding a game is, and how punishing it is.
“It’s your own fault for not knowing the lore.”
Actually, it’s the storytellers job to make the story interesting for the audience. In any case, “This story is bad for newcomers” is valuable information for newcomers.
“You shouldn’t have played the game if you don’t like QTEs / morality systems / romance subplots / grinding.”
So what parts of the game is the critic allowed to critique? Using this logic, a game can only be reviewed by people who are already fans of it, and are only consumed by people who already know what they’re getting. Which means the fanboy is using reviews as as way of reinforcing their opinions, and basically declaring artistic reviews and consumer advice as invalid. Moreover, if I was supposed to know better than to play a game with [feature], how am I supposed to find out about [feature]? You’ve already said it’s wrong for critics to bring it up!
This is all a waste of time, of course. Fans will be fans. In fact, I predict reflexive defense of RE4 in response to my article about how reflexively defending things is terrible. There’s no cure.
Still, I can always hope to make a few converts.
Thanks so much to special guest George Weidman of SuperBunnyHop for joining in. He’s also going to be part of Spoiler Warning this week. If you’re going to check out his channel (which you should totally do) I highly recommend his video on Quiet Time in games, and if you’re obsessed with VR like I am then you’ll want to see his fairly thorough VR report from GDC.
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Hosts: Josh, Rutskarn, Chris, Mumbles, George Weidman (SuperBunnyHop), and Shamus.
Show notes:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #54: Witcher, HOT MEN, Wildstar”
It’s Dark Souls week on Spoiler Warning, and we’re going to have a hangout this Friday for the PC launch of Dark Souls II! It’ll be fun, bring your friends, watch me die to mooks and bottomless pits.
We’ll be having it on Friday, April 25th, at 3 PM Pacific/6 Eastern/11 Britain. You can catch it at the usual Twitch page. Shamus will be there. Jarenth says he’ll be there. Justin might be there. And our very special guest on the Diecast and Spoiler Warning this week might even show up. So tune in for literally hours of painful gameplay where I learn the true meaning of “death.”
Link (YouTube) |
So, I’m not completely clear on what happened here, and I’m not going to play through this bit myself. But as far as I can tell:
All your gear is taken away and you’re shoved into a situation where most of the mechanics are basically disabled. No fighting, sneaking, pickpocketing, or magic. Then you’re put into a contrived situation and given one incredibly obvious way to deal with it, which boils down to walking back and forth taking to a couple of NPC’s for a bit. You bribe the guy to cause a distraction (using brandy that’s never actually removed from your inventory when you “give” it to him?) so you can slip into the back. At that point you’re given all your equipment and basically forced to fight. You can’t speechcraft your way through, and no degree of lore or situational awareness will allow you to avoid the combat. Then there’s supposedly a thing where you can disguise yourself, but it doesn’t make any sense. You can’t disguise yourself using the robes on hand, but only by wearing stuff the other Thalmor aren’t wearing. I realize it wouldn’t make sense for our cat-man to disguise himself as a Thalmor, but I’m pretty sure it works the same no matter who you are.
It’s just that all of this could have been so much better. This could have been a moment for the game to shine, and instead it manages to be less interesting than usual. In a mirror universe, Skyrim was made by Obsidian and this part of the game was great. There were four different ways to get in the front door, three different ways of dealing with the guards, and everyone at the party had interesting things to say that explained why they came to these parties and what they thought of the Thalmor, hinting at subtle political divides within the various factions. Meanwhile, the bread-and-butter combat mechanics were shallow and awful and [more] broken. But every time someone complains about how shallow the game is, there’s always a fan that brings up the embassy mission and how much fun it was.
To be fair, we would have bitched about it either way.
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