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Counterpoint: Evo Moment #37
Sekiro did it pretty well (almost as a rhythm action game), but in everything else it’s a bit shit. Usually you have to press a button within a particular timing window, except the actual timing can either be incredibly obscure (necessitating trial-and-error) or insultingly transparent and generous (i.e. the Assassin’s Creed model).
this made me realize I don’t give a fuck about video games anymore
Depression happens. I hope you get better!
it’s been like 15 years I doubt it 😭
give me parry or give me death. If I can’t run around in my loincloth and boots with a parry tool and a stick and beat the game with timing alone I’d rather die.
At least he knows his opinions are bad lmao
Sekiro was lightning in a bottle, I can’t think of any games released after it that come close to how great the gameplay was in it.
Ghost of Tsushima
i absolutely love the ‘sekiro-mode’ deflecting hardtear introduced in elden ring’s DLC and i hope they continue to emphasize that gameplay element
Why the two opposite articles?
Stirring up drama and discussion = clicks = money
Third Strike parry is peak gaming. I also enjoy Street Fighter 6 parry. However, my brain feels real good landing them in Third Strike
Breaking: video game journalist who’s bad at video games offers objectively incorrect insight
People (especially fucking game journalists) need to figure out that not liking something doesn’t mean it’s objectively bad
I remember when people thought quick time events were cool.
There’s a lot to be said about the aging of game mechanics and the efficacy of their continued use.
Yeah, and it’s right now. Reread the second line of my comment
I really prefer dodging to parrying or blocking, so I don’t like it when a game is set up so that parrying is necessary or overly rewarded in a way that makes the fights much longer or more difficult if you choose to not play that way.
I hate parrying so much. I can never get the hang of it in any game. I can play twitch shooters at a decent level, I can play the most challenging platformers without any issue, my reaction time is OK for someone of my age, but give me a parry mechanic and it all falls apart. For some reason, my brain cannot handle video game parrying.
I ended up downloading a mod that extends the parry window by 500% in Claire obscure. I still fucking fail at it at times. It completely ruins the game for me :(
What platform and controls are you using
If you need to ask that question the mechanic is fundamentally flawed.
The design isn’t flawed, but the implementation definitely is. kB+m have huge input delay and dropped input issues (at least on gamepass PC version)
But the point is you built a timing mechanic in a turn based RPG that is dependent on latency in a world where you are adding arbitrary amounts of latency in the display, the rendering, the controller polling and the platform itself.
That’s a bad fit between design and hardware. I’d argue that’s always the case and modern gaming SUCKS for timing-based mechanics compared to old ride-the-scanline CRT gaming. And yet they are extremely popular and people seem to assume timing challenges are the only way to make fun mechanics.
It’s just a bug bro. There are performance mods that fix it by simply tweaking unreal settings.
No, you were fishing for a bug to dismiss the point the guy was making, but the issue is deeper than that.
I play a bunch of fighting games and I can tell you I can feel combos not working going from PC to PlayStation or from a DS4 to a DS5 or from my PC gaming monitor to my TV.
That didn’t use to be the case. Timing could be different in consoles or arcades because those were entirely different games, but if you could do a thing on one TV with one controller you could do it on any TV with any controller on that game. That’s not the case anymore.
And yet “react to a visual cue in something the enemy does and press the button in a small frame window” is a much, much more frequent core mechanic now than it was then.
Don’t play with shit hardware then. Everything is going to suck if you have a massive input delay built in because your tv prioritizes post processing, not everything has to cater to you
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Yeah, I know about the sound. I’ve watched multiple videos with guides how to parry. Somehow my brain refuses to get it
It’s a me thing, I couldn’t get the hang of parrying in elden ring, and not even in botw can I do it. But put me on e.g. Interrupt duty in wow, and I won’t miss a single interrupt. I could time the bonus jumping attacks in Mario rpg games without any issue.
I’m not a bad gamer by any means, but for some reason I can never ever get the hang of fucking parryibg.
LOL, get good.
I disagree but I do fucking suck at it.
Counterpoints: Mordhau, Nine Sols
After giving it some thought I kinda agree with the author. Not in the hyperbolic sense that it’s the worst thing ever, nor in the sense that I don’t like parrying because I suck at it, but I agree on the point where he’s talking about fencing.
There’s so much more creative freedom and depth in actual martial arts, HEMA, fencing etc. that is just completely missing from most games. You don’t get the contact feel of your opponent, you can’t physically feel what your opponent will do. You can’t really gauge how far your attack will reach or, more importantly, how much range your opponents have. You can’t choose your angle of attack and, again more importantly especially in the context of parrying, choose how you defend. Your attacks are generally just a button click at which point the character does whatever attack has been programmed. Your defense is just a button click that generally blocks all attacks in front of you. Your parry is also just a button click that if timed right just parries (and sometimes automatically ripostes as well). All the nuance of melee combat is simplified to “one button for blocking/parrying and one button for attacking”.
So yeah, parrying does suck until we can turn it into something more engaging than just timing a button press.
Tried half sword?
While it’s become long in the tooth and populated now by only the super try-hards, check out Mordhau. Blocks, ripostes, parries, chambers; all attack angle swings and stabs. Really the best that it’s been done, by far.
For Honor has, to this day, the best melee combat I have ever experienced in any game. The biggest problem that game has is that it’s a fighting game in medieval disguise, if it was more adventure/rpg, I’d bet people would be all over it. I do like the fighting game part of it though, but fighting games are ROUGH to get into, sweatiest player base around.
There are games like Half Sword, Hellish Quart and Blade Symphony (and maybe to an extent Exanima) that are built around “realistic”/physica-based sword/melee combat (idk about Half Sword as that’s basically QWOP Knights, but there can still be plenty of skill involved).
Gameplay has been so on the decline nowadays, that just having an actual reactive counterplay element like a parry is a major positive, even if it’s a huge simplification of defense. So, more engaging defense mechanics would be nice, sure, and there’s certainly huge underexplored territory on “offensive” actions with non-universal parry type defensive properties to make fighting more interesting, but that doesn’t mean what little we do have becomes a negative or less engaging.
It was tragic that the current Soul Calibur dumbed their deflect down to a single simple action instead of the series standard of at least needing to match low/high height zones (mids could be deflected with either, which was a nicely subtle drawback), but it’s still better than not having it at all.
Parrying is good. More interesting parrying/defense is better, but that’s a level of player and dev effort/investment that’s rarely on the table.
Games that have a good Merle combat system might be something for you. I would think of mordhau, which has a quite complex and challenging fighting system. However, its quite hard to get into it, since its almost dead.
I haven’t played Mordhau but based on what I’ve seen of gameplay it has a different issue I have with first person melee, which is that you have no perception of reach. If you can’t identify how far you or your opponents can attack then the gameplay turns into sticking your face in your opponents face and I find that pretty annoying. I guess I’m kinda picky about my melee combat.
You can learn to judge reach in Mordhau, though what you’re describing is a fundamental problem in video games. Unfortunately, like Chivalry before it, Mordhau devolved into ultra-high skill cap animation manipulation. Still, it has the best, highest fidelity melee combat ever, making games like for honor look and feel like trash. It’s almost impossible to enjoy any other melee combat games/RPGs after experiencing Mordhau.
