Cooking? And usefulness/relevance of mechanics

Aug 25, 2017 4:32:55 GMT -6 ZeroSbr said:

My point is that if you're doing something like a melee only run, yet you're level 30 or so and see no need to equip any armor better than mid-game armor because end/post-game enemies deal barely anything to you, the developers messed something up. If something is not useful in any context, that's a problem.

That context is a self-imposed thing someone is choosing to do rather than just playing the game normally though. Anything can be useful in some context if you're going for a slippery slope like that. You could do a magic-only run of Symphony, or kill all the bosses with familiars or transformations (and it would take forever), but...that's kind of beside the issue of how useful something is for a game's design. The nunchuku is useful in a chucks-only run, right? It's just a limitation. It's great that some people find those things fun to do, but unless the game itself has a specific in-game mode for it where it makes sense (as Circle of the Moon does for instance), then it just feels weird gimping yourself like that. A game shouldn't feel limiting, or that you have to hold back, which in itself sounds like a game that should have been designed better if that's really necessary.

I'd sooner just play something different with an actual challenge than handicap myself at that point. It also sounds like a lame safety net excuse someone can use mentally when it doesn't go well for them..."meh, I keep dying here, but it's because the game is just designed poorly. I'll use an ability just this once to get by and then melee again". And then it happens again, repeating the deflection strategy. Is the game designed poorly, or is the person just not playing the game as intended? Sometimes I think people are even denying learning a game properly and playing it with house rules for the sake of their own pride, to hide behind limitations to feel "above" the brokenness of the game they've heard so much about. Were they to really dive in and learn the actual full scope of the game, they might find it's challenging on a level more fair than needing to subtract game systems. If it's really gotten too boring/easy for them otherwise, it may be time to try something else, or speedrun the game. That's just my opinion on the whole thing, mind. I'm in a fighting game background where beginner players have classically liked to ignore entire mechanics because they're cheap, so they never get better and miss what the actual game is.

It's not the game anymore at these points, it's the player being silly about it imo heh. We can't control how folks will/won't play the game and use things or not, but the best way to go about it is just to present the player fun options that have enough utility to at least be experimented with. I used the wolf to get around some until I got the bat, and would still use wolf run occasionally afterward just because it was easier and less MP than doing a bunch of Wing Smashes. If Bloodstained is like SotN in this way, I'll be definitely completely satisfied. If it's more like Ecclesia, that's great too, but I do think that the SotN style is more suited to larger audiences and better for nostalgia.

I went further off topic here because I've been meaning to talk about the "x-only run" type thing for a while. I think it's fine to do that, but I wouldn't say it has a place when considering what a game's balance is. Maybe I'll move all of this to a new topic actually...

A melee-only run isn't self-imposed?

I see you edited your post, so it's

Armor is as important as it needs to be, though, which isn't very. It's more of a detail of a character's stats than a feature and we're mostly talking about features and options here. I think that armor had the degree of usefulness they intended, like how the Souls games' armor have their use somewhat negligible. You more often wear the armor pieces for special effects and resistances than defense (in SotN's case, the circlets for magic absorb, or in Souls games poison or curse resist for specific parts of the game). Cooking, spells, familiars and so on are a different thing. I think the patency of armor being weak is pronounced enough to relevance only by someone doing such a self-imposed melee run anyway, though