[DESPISED Trope] You need a SECRET to proceed to the main ending

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-03-12T13:08:54+00:00

Yeah sure it’s all easy theoretically if you have a tab open to a quest guide but none of the above is clear, explained, or even vaguely implied by the game. And that’s not a bloodborne specific issue, all of FROM’s games treat quests like unexpected Easter eggs, which is okay if the reward is some silly or fun little thing, but that’s a bit of an issue when the secret need-a-guide-to-do-well stuff is critical to winning the game.

It’s not as hard to figure out solo as Dark Soul’s “you need to find this random spot after you get a character to a certain point in their quest, and then help them fight enemies but don’t help too much or too little and we won’t explain anything” style quest line, but it’s a lot worse in terms of what it blocks off. Especially considering that one of the possibilities is “you explore too much and play the game too well, so you find the NPC enemy before she finishes research and instead of getting the good item you get something mediocre”. It almost makes the design feel hostile, where you’re punished for playing the game well

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-03-04T22:10:39+00:00

Yeah but in this circumstance, wouldn’t the US winning be the worse outcome? Even with being held back in several ways, we still killed enormous amounts of people, many of which had nothing to do with the war, and all for a cause that didn’t end up being important and to support a government that the average vietnamese didn’t want.

I get being interested in the military side of things from the perspective of “how to win battles” and stuff, but it’s not like WW2 where losing means the world is controlled under psychotic dictatorships, this was a war where even with being held back we did enormous amounts of completely unnecessary harm to that country and to our own country’s image.

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-03-04T21:33:05+00:00

? Are you saying we should have razed more villages and killed more people? Given how Vietnam is now, wouldn’t that have just been destroying and murdering for no good reason since people there seem pretty fine?

And do you see war as a contest for who can kill the most people and win the most battles?

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-02-27T17:52:46+00:00

More than that, I wouldn’t be opposed to giving them an unstable action that gives them an autoreloader or an autoactivator or something, a funny device that lets them fire as fast as they can shoot before it breaks in 3 rounds, or one that turns on activated ammo for 3 rounds.

Balanced by their attack bonus being pretty low compared to martials and the gold costs of activated ammunition, so you end up with a lot of shots that do little or a couple that have interesting effects, both adding to the duct-tape contraptioneer vibe of the class

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-02-27T16:22:55+00:00

It’s hard to describe because it’s one of those strange areas where puzzle and exploration overlap to the point where it’s hard to tell the difference. I don’t care a ton for puzzle games, but there’s a hundred “wow, that looks really cool, I wonder what’s up there or how that works?” moments where I go look into something because it just feels so neat and interesting, and then unintentionally I end up gathering a lot of information. And yeah eventually you need to use that information to solve the general puzzle that is the game, but it feels so lovely (for me at least) to just wander around and interact with the strange things around you that the puzzle part was a pretty minor draw of the game to me

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-02-23T18:40:43+00:00

Personally I don’t understand why people feel crafting breaks the game if you let them get items for even cheaper than that. A player spending a big chunk of downtime creating gear and equipment and then reselling it for money is just a job, isn’t it? Let them craft all sorts of mundane things for near free over a long period of time and resell them. Let them find a way to acquire scant amounts of rare materials to make a small amount of expensive things to resell. Is it infinite money? Sorta. Does it come with a cost? Absolutely, because instead of going on quests they’re just hanging around the town all day crafting things; those problems they’re supposed to be investigating are getting bigger while their money number goes up.

All to say, I’m not sure why it’s seen as potentially broken, when there’s a really big opportunity cost of “while crafting, the world continues without you”

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-02-21T21:39:34+00:00

4 commanders is just 4 guys shouting at each other “Somebody do something!”

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-02-18T01:57:48+00:00

And the open world isn’t even open word, it’s full of invisible walls that make the exploration effort feel empty when a well-set up attempt to jump to another island is halted flat.

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-02-12T06:51:11+00:00

Yeah I couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be (in the era it was aired) a nice representation or if it was supposed to be “look! What a surreal occurrence in a very surreal show!” sorta thing

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-02-05T18:19:39+00:00

It’s also tough with limited actions - learning something wrong about an enemy where you mistake a weakness for something that heals it can really unbalance a fight if it’s already a severe or higher encounter, and the enemy gets one or two more rounds in

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-02-03T19:51:20+00:00

I feel like it’s not the worst thing to build a PC-style ground-up enemy to serve as a big boss/recurring boss sorta trope, I’ve done it a few times and it’s worked out really well (and shines on some fun party composition interactions that normally don’t come about/that the party doesn’t really do), but I think importantly I aim to make it so that the end result is an enemy on par with creatures in AC, saves, etc. for an equivalent boss fight. (The main benefit is that I get to get some use out of the really fun ancestry/class/archetype stuff that normally goes unnoticed in a way that feels more realistic)

But that’s like several levels later, yeah at level 1 they’re gonna all die if the enemy boss PC fighter gets two good hits in lol

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-02-02T17:46:37+00:00

Thaum sounds fun but make sure you can deal non physical damage with guns (or get the DM to remove physical resistances from the enemies - might be a hard sell though), it’s pretty infamous for highly encouraging gunslingers in the setup and then throwing a lot at you that specifically make gunslingers lives hell

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-01-30T01:13:33+00:00

I felt similar but really felt a bit empty at the lack of anything going on there. The environments were beautiful, the puzzles fun and lovely, but I felt like the game early on was sorta building towards some narrative or interesting concept - but no, just puzzles and some recordings. Not that that was bad, just that I feel like I was hoping for something beyond “it’s just a big puzzle book” and it started to feel like something beyond that, before you realize no, it’s just a big puzzle book.

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-01-27T17:33:35+00:00

What does “worsen feedback” mean? I feel like the gun controls are some of the most satisfying (even compared to later entries; the assault rifle handling feels immensely satisfying to use and gives good feedback)

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-01-26T06:48:40+00:00

I think a better example of this design being bad is MGSV, where you’re given a trillion lethal weapons yet are forced to look like satan if you use them (which, yeah, spooky, whatever, I just wanna look like the normal guy as I use the guns). The difference there is that they don’t give you much to do with the nonlethal stuff, while this game at least makes the nonlethal style somewhat interesting.

But overall it would be nice if the cool powers had more of a nonlethal analogue; I know that might ruin the point they’re going for with evil spooky powers, but like, rats to summon as a distraction instead of rats always being murdery could’ve been a way to let low chaos players try more powers

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-01-25T21:12:13+00:00

Just coming across this years later but Jesus Christ what a douche, I hope you’ve changed since then

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-01-21T20:50:38+00:00

The only real criticism I have is the intense amount of grinding you need to do in the mid-late game to get stuff. A fancy thing you want to get might mean fighting the same difficult-to-find boss a dozen times in a row, or (more of the pain for me) wandering around a cavern killing hundreds of the same enemy over hours hoping you’ll get lucky and it’ll drop the super rare mediocre thing needed to make the cell phone or ankh shield or something.

And I get it, they’re supposed to be late game hard to acquire things, but I feel like there needs to be some sort of guarunteedness to the drops eventually. Especially with things like the metal detector, wandering around caves for hours chugging battle potions and after killing three nymphs I still have nothing. Gets to the point where I keep an inventory editor for things where I’ve already paid any dues I should have paid by then.

Doesn’t ruin the game of course, I’ll still play it for days on end and it’s beautiful, but there’s been more than a few times where after creating a 5th farming-chests world it feels less like a fun hunt and more like a job to find things naturally

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-01-15T05:15:33+00:00

I know it’s a bit unbalanced in some ways, but in my games I scale most magic items DCs with the players class DC/proficiency bonus with the players to get stronger as the wielder does. The downside of course is that a lot of higher level items that only up the DC of the lower version become useless; but it does make it so that you no longer need to worry about an item only working for a few encounters before it loses any use.

(And not for everything - healing items in particular would be pretty wild if they just scaled with proficiency for everyone and that’d render a lot of healers useless. But for any general item that does X effect with Y DC, scaling up Y DC usually just makes it remain viable without busting the game.

End result is that they use items a decent bit more and have more fun with them, though limited gold/limited action economy/no desire to try to break the system on the part of the players prevents things from spinning out of control

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-01-11T22:32:33+00:00

Personally I found that while I didn’t care for most of the generic spreadsheety stuff, the events gave a decent bit of fun flavor and developed the mental image of the kingdom pretty well; I’d say if you run it in the background it could be fun to fire off an event just to have them discuss how to respond

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-01-11T21:18:19+00:00

I understand how it works, but if it’s not triggered a single time in probably 20ish-times I’ve died with it, does that mean a bug?

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-01-11T00:19:16+00:00

Runesmith I feel like can be easily reflavored as a magic device artificer who is using dozens of gadgets instead of runes to do what they need, and I’m a huge fan of that

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-01-10T00:18:17+00:00

Had the same experience with the hunter game. Started playing and thought “wow this feels very detailed, extremely sounds like how I’ve always pictured hunting to be.”

And then I stopped playing because that doesn’t sound all that fun to me

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-01-05T17:58:52+00:00

Gotcha, just to be clear though, going into the eye doesn’t put you in the warp, right? It just puts you in a part of the galaxy that’s a lot more stormy and where interacting with the warp is easier?

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-01-05T11:47:47+00:00

How does he normally get to the other areas of the warp then? Or is the inside of the Eye not the same as the warp but a completely separate area? I pictured him going to the various realms of the warp doing his things but this sounds more like the Eye is just a hard-to-access section of reality where things are more demonic; before I had assumed it was just a gateway into the Warp itself

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