Lurker > VintageGin

LinkMarioSamus posted...

This is probably going to be the most LMS topic ever, but here goes.

Even after reading this, I still wasn't prepared

MrGreenonion posted...

A better tool would just be to track the facets of each character's identity & gameplay role, and then be able to view a breakdown of how different categories intersect, i.e., what's the breakdown of race among DPS characters, gender among elderly characters, body type among female characters, etc. The push to metricize everything is what makes this tool weird.

I'm pretty sure the simple solution here is to just have two pools of data. One that's aggregated across many different games, and one that's specifically drawing from what already exists in your game.

I think it would be useful for identifying gaps because there is a lot of unconscious bias that even a seemingly diverse team might not think about. But yes it'd be weird if this was the only deciding factor in what kind of character to make, and it definitely could lend itself to some tokenism if that was the case.

Peace___Frog posted...

You what???
I'm doing faith now too and don't know anything about this

Yeah there's a merchant note that tells you this. I think it's in Liurnia?

I don't know if I fought any revenants without using a heal to stun them after I learned that you could do that

UltimaterializerX posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/323053-elden-ring/80022234

Apparently killing Rykard deleted it. Oh well.

Weird, I definitely did that one after killing Rykard

Maybe a glitch?

what the fuck

Oh, also horse combat sucks and horse platforming sucks. Torrent was nice for getting around, but doing any sort of precision jumping or fighting anything other than trash mobs on him was not fun.

Been a few weeks since I've beaten the game, and have had some time for my thoughts to crystallize.

This is the first FromSoft game I've played all the way through. The only other game by them I've played was Dark Souls, but I played <10 hours of that.

-The combat is great, and the game does a great job of making you feel like you have options in terms of build. Kinda wish I'd played around with respecing, since I stuck with Faith/Strength all the way through. Even still, I went Sword + Shield -> Cipher Pata -> Coded Sword + Finger Seal -> Blasphemous Blade and it felt like I was getting some cool variety and progression there.

-The game is too long, or the world is too big. I haven't really decided. The game clearly wants you to explore and level up by doing that, but I was pretty tired of exploring by the time I reached Leyndell. It's also super easy to over-level by exploring too much. I think I was 140 by the time I reached Malenia and 155 or 165 by the time I finished the game, and I definitely felt overleveled and like I was brute forcing my way through all the content in the endgame.

-Exploring felt amazing early on, but really started to feel pointless quickly. Usually any rewards I got out of exploring were not useful or appealing to me in the least, so I was exploring for the sake of exploring. But I didn't feel like I got much satisfaction out of that after the first third of the game, as the game really does not change things up in any significant way. The only content you discover is usually more combat (because that's what the game excels at), and anything else like puzzles or quests are underdeveloped and barely worth noting. And that might have been fine if the combat itself was varied enough, but instead you get sent into catacombs and caves over and over with the same enemies and same bosses.

-Specifically on caves and catacombs, I feel like they had maybe 10 good ideas for interesting caves/catacombs, and yet there's over 50 in the game.

-The UI/UX is bad, and I feel a little bad for the people who were on the receiving end of an angry internet mob for saying so (regardless of the games they had worked on).

-The first dragon fight felt amazing and honestly they should've left it at that or had maybe two more. Not counting Magma Wyrms who feel like their own thing...but there's also too many of those.

-The upgrade/weapon system is really weird to me. You need way more regular smithing stones than somber smithing stones to upgrade normal weapons, so it feels harder to upgrade those. And yet...it's going to be for a less flashy weapon than the named weapons generally. Which lead me to using named weapons most of the game, but because of that I feel like I missed out on customizing ashes of war, which feels like a fun/interesting component of the game that I just sidestepped entirely.

-I think the upgrading also discouraged experimentation-- is this weapon good? Well hard to compare against my +7 weapon, so let me upgrade to match...and nope, I actually prefer the weapon I had. Well, there go my smithing stones!

-Already touched upon by many, but the quest design and general interaction with NPCs was not very good. Somehow the open world made it feel especially flat/gamey.

Despite all my complaints, the game did take over my life for a bit and I think it's great overall. But probably not an all-time great for me personally. I'm very interested to see what FromSoftware does next.

ChaosTonyV4 posted...

Griftlands?

Oh shit, I think that's it.

Thank you!

Perhaps I'm just imagining this game, but I've searched and cannot find anything. I only remember the vaguest details.

I believe I saw it during a Nintendo Direct/Nindie Showcase over the past two years.

From what I remember the concept was a turn-based RPG/puzzle game where your "battles" were having conversations/dialogue with others. It was 2D, and had your character on the left and the opponent on the right during the "battles".

I'm also fairly certain it is not Last Word, which is the only game along these lines that I found that seemed similar to what I described.

Did they pay it all out at once? I feel like companies usually pay bonuses like that out quarterly to avoid high turnover all at once when people get their yearly bonus

foolm0r0n posted...

I honestly like the tool in concept, but the execution makes no sense. All the ratings are subjective anyway so how does it help? There doesn't seem to be a tangible metric that it lets you optimize for.

If there was a system in there for testing with various demographics and seeing how much people like or identify with the character, that would be useful. Or more of a red flag / green flag system.

I am fairly certain that it's just a weighted system measuring deviation from the most common. My guess is that they input some set of protagonists and their characteristics, and valued the most common at "0".

Since you're essentially just looking at how "common" each quality is, I think it's probably a relatively objective way to measure things. Of course, you'd have to discount the fact that categorization is something that people are generally bad at (including those who built the tool).

It's not a very sophisticated-looking tool-- seems like it'd mostly be useful for identifying gaps than any actual guided development, but maybe that's what they're using it for. Plus (questionable) PR.

Q3 gang :(

UltimaterializerX posted...

The final two manor letters - I cant reach them, but if I kill Rykard Im sure all the NPCs leave (the side quest guides Ive looked at say so). How do I actually finish the assassin quest stuff? Do they go somewhere else?

From what I remember, you can still finish the letters and get their rewards after killing Rykard. The rewards will just be on the table.

Not sure about the ones related to Patches though.

Own a fourplex with friends and live in one of the units

I used the red heater shield since it's one of the lowest equip load shields that also has 100% physical blocking. Just added Golden Parry to it and it was perfect for humiliating some crucible knights

There's a wing place in my hometown that had "tequila fajita lime wings" that were by far their best flavor. The other stuff was still good, but I really miss those wings.

The place has unfortunately gone a little downhill since. It's still my preferred wing place, but it used to be so far above and beyond other places.

65 endurance seems like overkill? I had a full set of tree sentinel armor + greatsword with just 51 and still had some wiggle room to keep medium load, but I guess if you're using a greatshield you might need the extra points. At the very least, I'm pretty sure you also get very few benefits to equipload and stamina at 60+. I think you'd be better off with more points in vigor.

Also I'm not sure if this is the phys defense talisman you're using, but the Dragoncrest Greatshield Talisman can be found in the Haligtree, and it gave me like +10 extra physical damage reduction, so I had something like 48% phys damage reduction total.

Yeah I had mostly defensive talismans (Erdtree's Favor +1, Dragoncrest Greatshield, Green Turtle, Claw Talisman were the ones I used)

The L2 from Blasphemous Blade occasionally knocks Malenia to the ground, so it helped a lot in keeping my mimic alive, and it helped in keeping me alive whenever my mimic used it.

Seanchan posted...

It's entirely possible I'm doing something wrong. I felt like my normal "block until R2" wasn't working because of her healing, so I was trying to stick to R1 attacks to interrupt her.. Also, her jump in the air followed by spinny death thing was tearing through me.

What's your build? I had 55 Vig, 51 End, 42 Faith, and 30ish Str, and Basphemous Blade with Mimic Tear +10 ate her alive. I also changed my Physick to the one that gives you unlimited FP so I could spam my L2 for the first twenty seconds and get my mimic to the second phase with mostly full health.

I think one of the important things is that even if you get hit by first part of Waterfowl Dance, you should dodge toward her for the second and third portions.

Game beaten. Accidentally chose the Ranni ending because I saw the blue symbol on the ground and pressed Y without thinking. Was pretty mad at myself about that, but had fortunately created a backup save pretty close to the end. So I played through again and realized...I never finished any of the other questlines to get alt endings. So I just got the default one. Oh well.

Overall pretty good game. 8.8/10.

Fought Fire Giant, Mohg, Godskin Duo.

Were the Godskin Duo supposed to keep respawning? Weird fight

Yeah, I almost feel like they might be too good compared to other options. Or maybe those other options just aren't good enough.

Malenia beaten. Abused the hell out of my Bloodthirsty Blade's ash of war.

I don't know who that is other than a streamer/youtuber

Just got to Malenia. Got her down to ~25% health (second phase) on my second attempt, so I'm looking forward to the next 20 attempts to being nowhere close to that.

I've been using the Blasphemous Blade and heavy armor now, so I'm back to medium load, which is very difficult to get used to after playing for 80% of the game as light.

Also I feel like 90% of my combat in general is jump attacks. It's very silly when I fight ogres or knights and basically just do jump attack -> jump attack -> jump attack -> visceral attack.

How long are the games out of curiosity?

Mac Arrowny posted...

What I did is used the Cerulean Hidden Tear in the Flask of Wondrous Physick to cast it, since that nullifies FP costs for 15 seconds (not sure if they fixed the glitch where it only lasts 7 seconds yet).

Oh I assumed you still needed the amount that it would take to cast it, even though you're not using FP. If it works that way, there's so many summons I could have been using!

Twitter was trash before and will continue to be trash (although I'm confident that Musk can find a way to make it worse). It will always be the place where nuance goes to die.

I only really played during the first year or so, so it's possible things changed a lot. I don't remember fights dragging out that long, but I do remember you'd get some standoffs that last a while because there'd be a choke or a point and you'd need a critical mass of ultimates to clear it-- just trying to advacne would mean you'd get torn up very quickly because of how easy it is to get one-shot or two-shot.

Grand Kirby posted...

Apparently it's pretty good. It's a bit of a different game from OW1, with more of a focus on individual play and skill, as opposed to the "everyone group around the shield and see which team outlasts the other" mentality the original game had, but apparently it's fun and fast and takes the game to a new level. I hope to try it out myself.

Interesting. I think the two issues I had with the original (which tie into each other) were:

1. Time to kill was pretty fast, so battles were generally over before you had time to think about individual strategy.
2. Ultimates dictated the pace of the game a lot. TF2 had something like this with the medic's uber, but every character having ultimates made the gameplay feel a lot more stale because they are happening constantly.

I dunno if OW2 has changed these aspects at all, but maybe I'll check out some footage.

Tested out the Blasphemous Blade for the first time against the Black Knife Ringleader. That ash of war is pretty awesome. Not sure I'll end up using the weapon over my Coded Sword, but it helped a lot for that fight. I'm just not used to how much stamina It seems to consume to swing it around. Plus, while my faith is high, my strength and dex is basically just at the min req for it. Anyway I can't use her spirit ashes because I need like 30 more FP and that's probably not happening soon.

Went back and fought the lightning dragon and did Sellen's quest, which basically broke me in terms of looking things up. The dragon just flies off to some random location in Altus Plateau (and I wasn't about to re-explore the whole area), and Sellen's quest I would not have figured out the last few steps (given I never found the secret basement lair). Also the dragon fights continue to be more annoying than interesting.

The twin bosses on the way to Morgott's Divine Tower were strange. I figured that because it was an ambush and the entire area was black that they'd both charge me...instead they just came at me one by one? Very polite of them.

I feel like the days when I play where I'm advancing the main story and doing the main dungeons, I really enjoy the game, but the days where I'm just clearing some random ass catacombs and doing optional tasks like restoring the great runes or quests I enjoy the game a whole lot less. But I feel compelled do do those things because of the 5% chance it gives me something I actually want.

_stingers_ posted...

I had the winged scythe well before astel, so you must've missed it. I believe it was somewhere in the weeping peninsula.

Blasphemous Blade is your best faith weapon late game for sure. You get it from Rykards rememberence

I actually do have the scythe, but for some reason didn't really like it when I tried it out, so it's still completely unupgraded.

Got the Coded Sword recently, which is basically what I wanted from a faith weapon...my starter weapon but with more faith scaling. Now I finally have some semblance of range.

Also finally figured out where to go in Leyndell. It turns out that I had completely missed the drop down from the dragon wing somehow.

Beat Morgott and Rykard. Guess it's time for Giant Mountains.

Well, took a break and then beat him first try. Was still really annoying chasing him around the arena every time he teleported, and it was a huge pain in the ass just trying to hit him.

Really would like to find a better Faith weapon soon.

Trying to fight Astel. I'm getting real tired of fighting bosses with spindly-ass legs that like to hop out of reach every five seconds. It doesn't help that I'm using the Cipher Pata, which has like six inches of reach. The target lock basically gives me the choice of either being able to see what's going on (by using it) or being able to actually hit him (by not using it).

Also, what the hell is with the attack where he vanishes from sight and then suddenly grabs for an instant kill? I can't even see where he is because the target lock breaks, so he's gotten me nearly every time with that attack.

I've been out of town and haven't had the time to play, so just returned.

Managed to find my way to Volcano Manor by running past the fallingstar beast.

I've been wandering around Leyndall for hours trying to figure out where to go, and apparently I am shit at navigating this city. I just keep doing loops and winding up back at a location I've already been.

PrivateBiscuit1 posted...

Oh, yeah. It's all over SF area, and I've been meaning to see it for two weeks now and just committed to it. I actually went to the Alamo to watch it!

Also, we STILL need to get that drink!

I went to the Alamo to see it too! I think it was one of the few theaters showing it during the limited release. Also the Alamo is awesome, so it was a good excuse to go there.

Definitely still down to get that drink. I think you're down by Hayward, right? Maybe somewhere in Oakland? I'm out of town for a bit but can hit you up when I get back.

Saw it two weeks ago and it's been on my mind ever since. Amazing movie.

It's so dense with jokes while also managing to be incredibly moving. There's a bunch of stuff I missed on my first watch (such as a repeated musical gag that I can't believe I missed), so I may end up watching it again soon.

I think a conversation log would've been nice if they're not going to have any sort of quest log. Just like, a list of names and all the dialogue you've had with each character.

Because there's characters that tell you a thing once and then refuse to repeat it ever again.

neonreaper posted...

one other product that has suffered is scotch. Not only do they add coloring and chill filter the stuff, but it has attracted all sorts of douche bags. Cognac is getting started down the wrong path now too.

Oh yeah, liquors have experienced an unprecedented boom in the past decade or so. Which is tough when you're making the stuff ten years in advance. Cognac doesn't need to age as long so it doesn't have the same issues as whiskeys...you can't even get some Japanese whiskeys now because of how in demand they are relative to their supply.

I feel like I've actually noticed an upswing in higher quality (but more expensive) foods. For ice cream for instance, I've seen way more Tillamook (which is delicious) in grocery stores even though it's twice the cost of other ice creams.

Tillamook did have to shrink down the size of their ice cream container, but they didn't try to hide it. Which is better than I can say for most products.

Fastbreak posted...

You're in the right area for her justice already. Go through the village and it's across the second bridge. You can summon Nephelli to help

I fought that boss before she appeared in the village...so maybe she just skipped to whatever step is after that?

htaeD posted...

I really dont know how Rya can be missed if you go to Altus Plateau the normal way either.

I got up there by following the cliffside path that takes you to the magma wyrm boss fight. I later went back and found the albanauric woman, but I couldn't really figure out where she was telling me to go look for the other half of the medallion, and I had already seen both ends of the lift so I didn't really care.

Speaking of Albanaurics-- they're both the weird round guys that do cartwheels in Liurnia and the old men whose legs don't work? They don't look that similar to me

Seanchan posted...

Nepheli moves around a bit. She's been at one location for me for a while and I'm not sure how/if I move her quest along. There are a few different things you can do with the poison though.

I last saw her at the Village of Albanaurics, where she said she was going to mete out some justice but gave no indication of where and to whom.

hockeydude15 posted...

you can't finish grape girls quest if you complete Raya Lucaria.

Oh. Welp.

I've been trying to play somewhat blind (read a lot of people's comments about the game but try to avoid actively seeking info).

As a result, I have no idea what's going on with any of the quests. I thought I was following Ranni's quest well enough until I was running across the Lake of Rot and it really felt like I shouldn't be there.

Nepheli fucked off ages ago to God-knows-where, Seluvius wanted me to give her something that seemed suspiciously like poison, but I literally never saw her again. Then he died.

Other missing persons include: Blind girl who wants some grapes, hug lady, monk dude from the roundtable who was seeking Goldmask even though that guy just points at the sky, some girl named Rya who I've never seen once.

Also from skimming Seanchan's posts (since he's been roughly playing through at the same pace at me, I have determined that 1) I somehow missed the Mimic Tear ashes somewhere in Nokron and 2) I should have stumbled upon Volcano Manor somehow by now (just entered Leyndell)

Not necessarily, but the longer a game is, the harder it is for it to hold my interest. A lot of the novelty of me playing games no longer exists, so it's a much shorter period of time between me starting a game and thinking "yeah, I think I've gotten all I'm gonna get out of this".

Best arrangement, instrumental or a cappella

Meta Knights Revenge (FromKirby Superstar), The 8-Bit Big Band featuring Button Masher

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIP3HdFl-JM&ab_channel=The8-BitBigBand

What, you don't like hitting them two times and then having them immediately dash away and cast three spells back to back with no real ability to punish?

Yeah me neither.

Beat Radahn

What a weird fight

Went back to Draconic Crucible Knight to see if he'd let me in

The answer is still no

UshiromiyaEva posted...

You aren't supposed to fight that dragon their lol. It leaves before it dies.

It's meant I be like a horror section, dragon in the deep fog, sneak past it!

lmao are you kidding me

The phasing out permanently was intentional? It didn't even look deliberate! It looked the same as when it or any other dragon goes too far from its spawn