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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2468 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 3, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Vidya thread.

49.4% of players have the "Defeat the Paintress" achievement. 49.0% of players have the "Go back to Lumiere" achievement.

0.4% of players have quit the game mid-cutscene and never launched it again.

On that note, please help sell me on Clair Obscur. I'm not this much of a contrarian to just discard the chorus of glowing reviews, I know the game is good, and I think I recovered from Automata and am ready to get my shit totally rocked by a videogame again; but I don't have limitless time anymore and when I see a JRPG (FRPG? EuRPG?) my gut immediately pegs it as a 50-60hr commitment at the bare minimum. Sadly my fried brain finds it much easier to consoom roguelike number-go-up slop rather than commit to a proper game.

((On that note, Balatro was so good some madlads made Balatro 2: slot machine boogaloo. Cloverpit is amazing, I love it. Do not play it.))

If it helps, it's more like 30-40 hours. I don't know if you'll "get your shit totally rocked" though -- I think some of the reception is due to lowish expectations (previously unknown studio etc), but it's definitely a fun time.

It's not this long. I've been playing it for 30 hours, according to Steam, and according to the other commenters, I have probably five hours of plot left.

when I see a JRPG (FRPG? EuRPG?)

It's "JeRPG". Well, mechanically it's pretty much a standard JRPG with a few "must keep the player engaged" changes that I'm not a fan of, the big draws to me are the setting and the writing.

Japanese games are much more adventurous with their settings, but even they are prone to defaulting to X-buts ("it's basically X, but...") these days. CO is completely alien and weird, it's like you're trapped in a surrealist painting. The only annoyance is the lack of structured exposition. You start the game in the middle of an important weird ceremony, and you have no idea what's going on. Your PC knows what's going to happen, everyone around him knows, but you don't. You have to piece everything together from bits of dialogue. I know the reason, but it's a cheap narrative trick, especially in a video game.

The writing is very... French. You know what beats an American story would have, what beats a Japanese one, you can peg the archetypes of the party members right after meeting them (with a few subversive X-buts in the mix). Well, not in CO. Well, partly. Sometimes a brooding guy with a deep dark secret is just a brooding guy with a deep dark secret, it must be a universal trope. But the way he's positioned in the overarching story is different.

Having tired of Hades 2 for the moment and stirred by mentions of Synthetik and Ruiner downthread, I tried Hell Clock to get my ARPG/top-down action fix. The premise seemed solid enough, and the Curse of the Dead Gods-esque artstyle feels fresh.

About 6 hours in I must surmise it is... not good, i my humble o. In brief, Hell Clock feels distinctly like a game made by someone who really likes ARPGs generally and PoE specifically (with a touch of Hades, ironically), with zero actual understanding of what makes these games work.

Un-briefly:

+ I found the artstyle quite nice, although the levels themselves are fairly barren and the style makes projectile spam really blur together as a side effect.

+ The character controls well and movement is responsive, Hades-tier is the highest praise I can give it. WASD really oughta become the new standard for ARPGs going forward.

+ Voice acting sounds good, although a language I do not understand.

- Its most glaring con is that many game systems were evidently made by someone who does not understand how roguelites/ARPGs and metafaggotry optimization works. Examples galore:

- The levels are static, never changing throughout runs. It actually took me a few runs to nootice because that's like, the most basic expectation for a roguelike, but once I noticed my enjoyment fell off a cliff; I have no idea how you sustain interest in such a game without at least a token effort at procedural generation. This alone is a black mark on the game in general.

- The starting skill variety is far too limited, and more skills only open after beating Act 1 (which took me most of the ~6 hours), at which point your interest may or may not be gone. Mine certainly was.

- Gear is permanent and you do not lose it between runs, but the only things it gives (as of Act 1-2) is flat stat bonuses - HP for body armor, base damage for weapons, movement speed on boots etc. There is no variety, every slot is literally one stat, and the only upgrade is number go up. For an ARPG this is a fatal shortcoming; they even know how to do it, Sanctum relics (your other kind of equipment) are properly random and roll affixes! Maybe this gets better later, but with no actual stash for gear (how?!) I highly doubt it.

- The skill tree contains passives that increase dismantling yield and make upgrading relics/gear cheaper - forever dooming your autism to respec every time you upgrade your shit or clear out your stash if you want to make the most of it. For extra aggravation, the only respec option is to reset your tree entirely instead of deallocating points one by one.

- [cw: autistic rage] Mechanics are extremely hit or miss, due to the limited skill variety you are more or less corralled into a few working builds early on. Bleeding specifically is an outright scam: the mechanic is lifted straight out of Last Epoch so I quickly figured out how to work it, but I noticed I am not doing nearly as much single-target damage as I expected to. Bleeds just didn't seem to stick to bosses despite gazillion small hits per second, and at the Act 1 boss (and after a bit of googling) I finally realized why: bleed damage is unrelated to the hit that applies it, but bleed chance somehow still directly depends on it - bleed chance is greatly reduced the less damage you deal relative to total HP! My only damaging mechanic is directly countered by an affix-less wall of HP, the kind that bleeds are supposed to be good at killing in the first place! Spending literally 15 minutes to plink the boss to death due to my main damage source ceasing to work was the final straw, I alt-f4'd out of the game shortly after.

This actually gave me painful flashbacks so if any mottizen ever makes an ARPG, carve this insight into your psyche: any damage mechanic that can plausibly be played as main DPS must never be entirely negated by things outside the player's control! Leave damage immunities in 2000 where they belong! None of that "500% bleed resistance for undead" muh realism bullshit! Even Chris fucking Wilson Jonathan fucking Rogers, the king of player-hostile game design, figured out this part immediately following PoE2's release!

- The admittedly novel setting of 19th-century Brazilian badlands appears to mostly cash out into incessant glazing of the Canudos, victims of the eponymous massacre. I suppose alt-history is a perfectly cromulent narrative device, but by the time I encountered... checks notes Head-Cutter (in actual, literal hell!) I completely checked out of the narrative, it is impossible to take seriously. This kind of hamfisted political narrative never fails to give me the ick regardless of subject matter; I know nothing about the Canudos but I will be entirely unsurprised if they were actually some sort of horrible militant sect with plenty of chips on their shoulders that required direct gov't intervention to root out.

((Out of curiosity, does somebody know of a game extolling the virtues of jingoistic imperialism and brutal colonisation? Off the top my head I only recall Broforce and New Vegas: Sneering Imperialist edition.))

In short, I did not entirely hate Hell Clock but it wore out its welcome remarkably quickly and I am glad I picked up the uh, extended demo version from the high seas instead of buying it. Just play Tiny Rogues or something instead.

I generally share your assessment, though I don't think I hated its flaws quite as much as you and stuck it out slightly longer, getting halfway through Act 2 before dropping it.

The permanent gear does get a tiny bit more creative in Act 2 with occasionally having an affix, or having a different boost (a belt that increases the duration of your status effects instead of boosting your max damage), so there are tradeoffs. But with no storage for it you kind of have to commit to a build long-term since swapping can only be done when you find a new piece, which is stupid and makes the game more repetitive (which it already was). They should have stuck to the main skill tree for straight stat upgrades and used the Relics as gear.

You know, I've never liked that pre-final chapter in JRPGs where you get to fly around the world map and collect ultimate powerups before tackling the final dungeon and the BBEG. The only one that made it interesting was FF6, where you were putting the team back together.

Well, I am not enjoying it in Clair Obscur, it's just a boss fight after boss fight that all hit hard enough that you have to perfect that dodge timing. I kinda want to skip to the final boss, but FOMO is keeping me back.

You can do the side content after finishing the story, and unless you want to absolutely rinse the final story boss you should.

My advice is to just go to the final area and finish the side content later, it's a better curve that way.

Anyone knows good games with top-down action gameplay like Last Stand Aftermath, Ruiner or The Ascent?

Synthetik for a sci-fi gun-optimizing roguelike.

And hey, there’s always Foxhole if you’re more into WW1 logistics.

Once a week or so I come by /r/foxholegame subreddit to harvest the crying and the bitching.

Coincidentally, this is how long it takes for your facility to produce anything worth shipping.

Len's Island

Amorphous Plus (downloadable as part of the Flashpoint Archive)

be me, Dark Souls 2 fan (though I haven't played it in several years)

enjoy using Heide Spear, which has innate lightning damage, on a character whose dump stats are attunement, intelligence, and faith (which are useful only for magic)

notice that a new wiki has been created for the game

idly check out the page on scaling

mfw lightning damage scales with faith

mfw the meta tryhards say that there are "low returns on melee weapon scaling", so you're supposed to go for weapon upgrades and temporary buffs instead

Maybe I'll start a new playthrough with a character for whom faith is not a dump stat.

I really enjoyed my Agape Ring run of DS2.

In short, you run a particular sequence at the start of the game, get the Agape Ring early on, and permanently lock your progression at the lowest tier of matchmaking (<40k souls collected).

I found it much better than new game+ for a good challenge.

Yeah, the Dark Souls game mechanics are very counterintuitive. In fact, arguably much of the games' difficulty is rooted in the fact that players don't know how the games work. In Elden Ring, you can one-shot (up to phase transitions, which are often hardcoded) every boss in the game by doing the correct buff incantations, which basically renders the entire game trivial. And it's not like this is some glitch or exploit -- it just falls out of basic understanding how buffs stack and doing the obvious thing.

Then again, this is hardly unique to Dark Souls. Basically every single-player game is like this, in the sense that actually knowing how the mechanics work is a game-breaking superpower, rather than the baseline expectation.

I've never really found this complaint really compelling. In fact, I'll top it: You can beat most parts of all DS games by summoning another (often ridiculously overlevelled) player and letting them do everything for you. You don't even need to know anything.

DS is imo very clearly, very deliberately designed to accommodate large differences in player skill without resorting to outright different difficulty levels. That's also the reason why I usually say that DS games are better grouped as high casual, but not quite hardcore.

In fact, arguably much of the games' difficulty is rooted in the fact that players don't know how the games work.

That's mostly an inversion of reality in practice; Plenty of bad players who don't know how the game works follow some online guide for an OP build to do exactly the stuff you're complaining about. Better players deliberately avoid the OP things bc they don't need it and just do a run with some weapon/spells they like. Even better players deliberately use gimmick gear (not me, sadly) or other limitations.

I agree with much of this. My issue is that Elden Ring is saturated with mechanics that compound unnaturally well in favor of knowledgeable or skilled players and are either useless for casuals or actively counterproductive for them. Take Bloodboil Aromatic: it's extremely expensive to make (requiring an Arteria leaf), meaning you can only use it sparingly. Yet it increases your damage taken by 25%! As a casual player, by far your number one concern is bosses killing you before you have a chance to heal, which this item (and many others, e.g., Fire Scorpion Charm) exacerbates. So what exactly is the point of this item? "Well, if you're good enough to not need it, it makes the game a lot easier!" Yay?

If I were the designer, I'd just remove the penalties on these items. Similarly, the Great Rune system is only useful if you're good at the game and don't need it anyway. I'd just remove rune arcs entirely: once you have a great rune, you can just set it and it's active. These changes make things easier for bad players, while not changing anything for skilled players (and if you want to rebalance the game around this by increasing boss HP, the net effect is the game is the same difficulty for casuals, while being harder for good players).

Even potions (ahem, Flask of Crimson Tears) run afoul of this. Good players don't need these at all: just don't get hit, yo. But for bad players, attempting to use a potion often causes you to get hit, as the animation is painfully long and many bosses are coded to input read it. Again, this could be trivially redesigned in a way that's better for everyone: make potions fast or even instant, and increase boss HP to compensate. For casuals, potions would actually feel useful; for better players who weren't using potions anyway, the game gets harder.

Sorry for the late reply. I understand where you're coming from, but I find your perspective a bit one-sided. On many of these, the DS devs (and many players) simply have a different view, and they would be less happy with the game you would design. Which is fine - imo games, like most art, should be designed first and foremost to your own vision, with as little accommodation to others as possible. But it wouldn't be, strictly speaking, an improvement.

Take Bloodboil Aromatic: it's extremely expensive to make (requiring an Arteria leaf), meaning you can only use it sparingly. Yet it increases your damage taken by 25%! As a casual player, by far your number one concern is bosses killing you before you have a chance to heal, which this item (and many others, e.g., Fire Scorpion Charm) exacerbates. So what exactly is the point of this item? "Well, if you're good enough to not need it, it makes the game a lot easier!" Yay?

"Increase damage inflicted at the cost of increased damage taken" is a common design choice in DS games. As you say, these actually mostly make the game harder, but they allow you to do content faster if you're good enough. It's intended as a reward for skill, as I see it.

Similarly, the Great Rune system is only useful if you're good at the game and don't need it anyway. I'd just remove rune arcs entirely: once you have a great rune, you can just set it and it's active.

DS already has pretty minor penalties for dying unless you're really careless. Again, rune arcs are a reward for skill.

Even potions (ahem, Flask of Crimson Tears) run afoul of this. Good players don't need these at all: just don't get hit, yo. But for bad players, attempting to use a potion often causes you to get hit, as the animation is painfully long and many bosses are coded to input read it. Again, this could be trivially redesigned in a way that's better for everyone: make potions fast or even instant, and increase boss HP to compensate. For casuals, potions would actually feel useful; for better players who weren't using potions anyway, the game gets harder.

That would be pointless, you might as well just increase player health if the potion is instant anyway. And since increasing boss hp is one of the most awful ways of increasing difficulty, the logical next step is to remove that extra player HP AND the extra boss hp to make the game more fun again.

Also, potion usage is a skill test, yes, but a fairly minor one. Generally speaking once you've passed beginner level in skill, potions are imo fairly satisfying: You get hit often enough to need them, you are good enough at timing to usually be capable of using them, but it's always risky enough to keep you on edge, and it's definitely better not getting hit in the first place. It incentives you to git (even more) gud. At the highest skill lvl, you'd just convert all flasks to mana, which can be viewed as another reward for the skill of not being hit.

Overall, imo you need everything in a good game: Some items/mechanics directly help bad players. Some are low lvl or medium lvl skill test, encouraging you to get better, but once you can reliably pass that threshold, they help you clear higher-lvl challenges. Some are just pure rewards for good play and outright require high-lvl skill to use, but allow feats not otherwise possible. Some are memes that actively gimp you, so that simply using them serves as a way of showing off your skill.

In general, I also like the DS aesthetic choice of being able to simply take a short look at another player, and I can usually tell quite reliably whether they're a complete noob, a loser, a tryhard, a "simple" good player, or a total monstrosity.

As you say, these actually mostly make the game harder, but they allow you to do content faster if you're good enough.

Well, Bloodboil Aromatic in particular does not allow you to do content faster: it's a huge pain in the ass to farm the recipe and materials! There is no world in which doing a boss 20 seconds faster is going to make up for 15 minutes of farming.

Bloodboil Aromatic, as far as I can divine, has exactly one use: doing nuke build tricks. If they'd make my adaptation and just get rid of the damage-taken penalty, it would have lots of uses! You'd have to do this arcane farming routine, but it would indeed give you a big boost that might help you beat a boss you were having trouble with.

Now, damage-gamble talismans (as opposed to consumables) like Fire Scorpion Charm do have a much more common use: they're good for level 1 challenge runs. If you're going to die in one hit anyway, then it makes no difference if you take more damage, so equipping something like the Fire Scorpion Charm is all buff and no downside. And unlike Bloodboil, skilled players do use it since, it's not a consumable so you don't have to farm it each time you want to use it--you just pick it up once and equip it.

Anyway, I do agree that having a variety of items with weird cost/benefit analyses can make the game more interesting. But even here, what you'd want is "complicated" items for skilled players to not require farming (as good players will just skip it if it does), and all-good-no-downside items for unskilled players to be the sort of thing you'd be able to craft from naturally exploring the world and having an inventory full of materials. Bloodboil is the exact opposite of this principle.

Finally, you have to compare these things not in a vacuum, but to other stuff that exists in the game: compare Bloodboil Aromatic to Flame, Grant Me Strength. The latter is a spell, meaning you pick it up once (right from the start of the game, if you know where it is) and use it as many times as you want, it grants +20% to both physical and fire damage, it occupies the same "internal" buff slot as Bloodboil Aromatic (meaning you can't use these two at the same time), and there's no damage taken penalty!

Again, rune arcs are a reward for skill.

Agree with much of what you say, but strongly disagree with this. Great Runes are my reward for killing an actual demigod, master of their domain, and stealing a chunk of the fundamental force powering the universe from their corpse. And then finding their rune tower and beating whatever bullshit is guarding it. The whole plot was about how the Elden Ring's shattering and Queen Marika's disappearance sparked a power struggle trying to grab hold of these things! They should be an actual serious meaningful upgrade to reflect my ascension to demigodhood or super-super-demigodhood, and at least one should be permanently active.

Elden Rings isn't Dark Souls, it's epic fantasy. You are on a journey to become God-King and your acquisition of power should reflect that IMO.

That said, Elden Ring is very inconsistent with power levels. I remember beating the really hard boss who owns the second half of the secret Haligtree medallion to open the secret path to the Haligtree and being really surprised when one of the first mobs you meet is a zombielike aristocrat trudging through the snow who dies in two hits. Like, you can barely stand, how did you get here? Did I spend ages finding the key to the front door, a quest which got an entire village and several named NPCs killed, only to find that everyone else was happily getting in and out through the back door? I suppose he could be left over from before the path closed, but then why isn't he in the Haligtree brace toasting crumpets over the fire?

actually knowing how the mechanics work is a game-breaking superpower

See The Power of Ten for an exploration of that. TL;DR of every book in the series: The MC is a gamer dropped into a (real) world that runs on that game's logic. By using their (relatively modest) starting boost and (absurdly OP) mechanical knowledge, they grow powerful, save the world, and ascend to immortality.

I'm not sure about recommending that series based on its merits, but it absolutely 100% demonstrates that point.

My first introduction to Soulslike games was Bloodborne. And it was a very short introduction due to me selecting the cane starting weapon and trying to make sense of it for several hours. Cane is an ASS of a starting weapon for someone not familiar with the gameplay. I was very pissed that day. Especially when I complained to a friend and he basically said "Yeah, everyone knows the saw is way better starting weapon, DUH".

Yeah, this kind of game design annoys me (although I'm not entirely sure what to do about it). On the one hand, Souls games show you numeric stats -- in fact, you quite literally select which number to increase when you level up, which is a huge amount of freedom in control over numbers. So it looks like you're supposed to care about numbers. But on the other hand, the numbers often behave counterintuitively, and further, the games often hide numbers from you where the value of the number is the only thing of any relevance: e.g., you get an item that "boots fire damage". Ok, boosts by how much? Is it a 5% boost? A 50% boost? Double? It's like the game wants the player to think this is irrelevant, yet even 2 seconds of thought shows it cannot possibly be irrelevant: whether the item is good or not is entirely determined by how big that damn number is!

The especially silly thing is Souls gameplay in particular would be fine with all of this drastically simplified, or even eliminated. The fun part of Souls is learning boss routines and experimenting with new weapons and skills. You could almost get rid of the numbers entirely and still retain what makes the games fun.

It's like the game wants the player to think this is irrelevant, yet even 2 seconds of thought shows it cannot possibly be irrelevant: whether the item is good or not is entirely determined by how big that damn number is!

I think it's a credit to the games' balance that ultimately I almost always find the answer is "just big enough to make a noticeable differencr without unbalancing the game". An item that adds fire resistance will add enough resistance that if you were struggling with an enemy that does fire damage it will be noticeably easier, but usually not enough to trivialize anything.

Elden Ring (and other DS games, afaik) isn't balanced, though! That's my point! You can literally kill the bosses in 1 hit with the right setup (modulo scripted phase transitions)!

And this is especially interesting because the buffs at first glance don't seem like they should be that strong. For example, the Fire Scorpion Charm only gives like +12% to fire damage, and it increases your damage taken by 10% as punishment. Compare that with, say, the Flame Staff in FFXII, which gives +50%. The latter feels much stronger, while the former feels like it barely does anything and probably isn't worth using at all as a casual player.

The reason buffs are so overpowered in Elden Ring isn't because they're so strong; it's because there are so many, and they stack multiplicatively (when they stack at all, which they usually don't). This gives them a synergy that has a net effect far more powerful than the sum of its parts, most of which don't feel particularly powerful at all in isolation.

Here's an example setup: put your stat points in strength, choose a heavy weapon (eg, Giant Hammer), set the Royal Knight's Resolve ashes of war (+80% to the next attack), equip the charge attack talisman (+10% charge attack), set your physick to strength tear and charge tear (+15% charge attack), set an aura buff (e.g., Golden Vow, +15% attack), set a body buff (e.g., Bloodboil Aromatic, +30% attack), equip Red Feather Branch talisman (+20% damage when hp low), wave the Commander's Standard (+20% damage). When you multiply all these out, it's an almost 500% boost! That is a ludicrous, game-breaking amount of damage.

There are lots of variations, especially for fire or holy-weak enemies, and you can freely tweak it around for your convenience -- I mean hey, if you do it suboptimally and it takes a whole two hits to knock the boss into the next phase, will it really ruin your day? You can even do a half-decent version of it using only ingredients from Limgrave (greataxe+6/charge talisman/charge physick tear/determination AOW/golden vow AOW/Oath of Vengeance/exalted flesh). It will take 2 hits to knock Margit to phase 2, which I'd say is sufficient to call imba and say it trivializes the boss.

For what it's worth, the reason this is so counterintuitive is that you cannot just stack buffs arbitrarily, despite the fact that it probably sounds like you can from the above. For example, if you try to use Exalted Flesh and Vyke's Dragonbolt at the same time, this will not work, because these two buffs occupy the same internal "slot" (called "body buff"). To me this is highly counterintuitive, as one of these is a consumable item and the other is a spell, and they don't have effects that are remotely similar. In contrast, you can stack Flame, Grant Me Strength and Golden Vow, despite these both being incantations and having almost the same effects. There is, of course, nothing in the game that explains any of this.

Anyway, my point is the degree of trivialization you get by actually knowing the game mechanics is not normal. Contrast Elden Ring with, say, Kingdom Hearts: there is no amount of game knowledge that will allow you to kill Sephiroth in one hit, or even get remotely close. Knowing the game mechanics does not trivialize the game.

It just feels like an excuse for FromSoftware to develop crazy anime-jumping-all-across-the-arena bosses with crazy moves. "Oh no, the player has so many bullshit combinations now, we need to create more bullshit bosses to combat this." And that way we have dlc with bosses dancing all over the floor, goddamn sunflower. The worst part of course is that even with the stakes of Marika you will spend 2 minutes buffing yourself and after a certain point I started to despise this cycle.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of the DLC, aesthetically or gameplay-wise, and even the base game's combat often felt "overdeveloped" to me. There were multiple occasions where a boss uses what is obviously a finishing move (e.g., Tree Sentinel raising his weapon and smashing it into the ground) only to PSYCH! ITS NOT ACTUALLY A FINISHER LMAO with some physically-nonsensical follow-up attack to smack you in what obviously "should" have been a punish window. Also, lots of bosses have input reads, where if you try to do anything (in particular use a potion to heal) outside of a designated punish window, they'll immediately intercept your action with a fast attack. I found this extremely crass design.

It feels like FromSoft is annoyed that good players are too good at their games, but the ways in which the developers are trying to raise the difficulty are pretty lame. Though in some sense, I do understand their frustration: Souls games have a skill window that is far smaller than most other games, in the sense that beating them as a casual is quite hard, but learning to play at a near-pro level (in the sense of doing lvl 1 challenges, no-hit challenges, etc.) is surprisingly easy. It really is too difficult to be mediocre at the game, and too easy to be good at the game.

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