How do you feel about Nero in DMC4 in terms of playstyle?

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I like the integration of back to forward commands, I feel like it adds an interesting kinaesthetic component to his playstyle.

The really key thing about Nero is that to make up for not having the weapon variety dante has, they made his commands a bit more straightforward and augmented his abilities in a few ways. Like his charge shots exploding, that’s cool, devil trigger letting you cancel anything and being a small burst, that’s cool. The table hopper dodge, also cool. The devil bringer obviously seems like it’s a gap closer a lot like dante’s trickster style teleport. Since his air dash has an attack at the end, you need to rely a bit more on jump canceling to get damage off it. Seeing as he can attack in the air without any style business, he has a more straightforward air game that incidentally leads players to try jump canceling, leading them into the advanced option, basically because of the air dash thing.

The trouble I have with Nero is that he lacks in options. He doesn’t have any good ranged options besides charge shot 2 and 3, and those take a long time to charge. His normal shots are only good for extending combos, his devil bringer does no real damage. This means he kinda sucks against cloaked enemies and blitzes because he has to wait for the charge shot to go through before he can actually fight them. (though devil buster and bringer are both rather effective on cloaked enemies). Dante meanwhile can get the cloak off those enemies instantly by teleporting at them, and doing DT rain storm. Against Blitzes, Dante has Drive on rebellion, charge shots, lucifer swords, honeycomb shot, fireworks on rebellion, royal guard parries and royal release.

With Nero it feels a lot like there’s a “right” way to play, with Dante it feels a lot more improvisational. with Nero you constantly hold down the charge shot, with Dante you don’t need to. With Nero you hit L2 after every single attack with the perfect timing. And so on.

I think Nero is designed pretty alright though. I like him more than MGR Raiden, or Bayonetta honestly. And that has to do with him having a lot of command moves. He does have more dial combos on account of the creators trying to get more out of just one button on one weapon, I feel like this isn’t an approach that is very enticing to most people, but having the number of distinct command moves he does is helpful to people getting into the game for the first time, less memorization. Or rather, it’s easier to remember. That and I personally prefer that style of design over its competitors using nothing but dial combos.

Smash 4 Deserves Respect

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Thoughts on this video?


This is the moron who made the “Melee is a Beautiful Accident” video. I’ve been meaning to make a response to that crap, because it’s ignorant.

I’m proud of the crowd chanting Melee. I don’t think Smash 4 deserves respect. Smash 4 went way over time. Smash 4 had its own stream, but top 8 had to happen on the melee stream and it was completely boring.

I don’t think the smash 4 scene deserves respect, I don’t think smash 4 apologists like this guy deserve respect. He’s saying Smash 4 is more calculated, it isn’t. There’s a common fallacy among morons to say that a slower game is more tactical/calculated/strategic/intellectual. It’s bullshit. It stems back to an old notion of dumb jocks who play fast games like football or basketball, versus smart nerds who play slow games like chess. Melee has more complex decisionmaking that hinges on more factors. The players have more options and more ways to use the options given to them.

None of the things he describes as strengths of Smash 4 are missing from Melee or Project M. “You have to make certain reads so you can land a certain move and follow it up.” Like this isn’t routine in the other smash games. “A lot of it is happening in the mind of the player” Like this isn’t in the other smash games too without being boring to play or watch. He doesn’t know about the neutral game, because describing the smash neutral game, compared to other fighters, is really fucking hard, because it’s really fucking weird. In slower paced fighters, what this guy doesn’t understand is, in the neutral game, you can’t really attack, because attacking is really unsafe, if you aggress then you get punished, so characters instead jockey over getting a position where they can attack safely and throw out safe ranged attacks. In a slower game you can see everything coming before it happens, so you have a lot less of people throwing things out simultaneously and a lot more of people hanging back and camping. This is a similar situation to what went on in the transition to Street Fighter 4 (though nowhere as bad).

He admits in the video that he’s not into melee, and he’s considering picking it up. He’s operating from a stance of ignorance, and deserves to be ignored.

Melee to Smash 4/Brawl is like Street Fighter Third Strike to Super Gem Fighter Mini Mix. I’m not going to respect people who push that shit. Far as I’m concerned, they’re sellouts or fools who are only in it because it’s the newest game or because they’re hoping to make money off pushing an inferior product.

Melee’s no accident, and anyone who comes at it from the standpoint that it is will never be able to address a situation like this accurately.

And someone tell this asshole to make his points more concisely. He meanders around the topic like a drunk guy at new years. Also to cut the damn machinima in his other videos, it makes me cringe.

Regarding Unlocks

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What do you think of certain types of moves like the dodge in TW101 and MGR being unlockable instead of available right from the start?

They’re core mechanics, it’s kind of pointless. It’s additionally silly how enemy step (jump cancel) was an unlockable move in DMC4. If you’re going to lock those mechanics away then you’re asking for trouble. Especially for something like unite guts. The theme of beat em ups is that the character has all the actions they need to overcome any sort of challenge within the levels available from the get-go and the only upgrades they receive are more powerful moves. Holding things like that back are just poor planning.

I honestly think all the unlock systems for moves in those types of games are kind of pointless. Having these as unlockable distracts from the intrinsic joy of mastering the system. People value accomplishments like clearing hard mode for their own sake. While people feel a type of contentment with finally unlocking everything, it’s a hollow achievement in comparison. Having the character change over the course of the game can help create a variety, a difference of feeling from when you first pick up the game and when you finish it, but I feel like those sorts of changes should be connected more directly to in-game challenges, like earning a new weapon in devil may cry by beating a boss or tracking down a new weapon in a remote area in dark souls, both of those have a more direct pattern of completing an action to receive a reward rather than ambiguous things like money systems between missions. It’s less like completing a grind to succeed and having more definite goals. It also wastes less of your time with repetition.

Regarding the unlock systems, in which types of games does it work fined in?

In general I think progression based unlocks work better than buying it from an amorphous shop, as a general rule. As for what games that sort of thing works well in… I’d think games where you don’t have very definite goals or stage based progression, such as Just Cause 2 or another open world game. The sort of idea is that the player will go all over the place and do whatever they want to do, and having a definite progression path based on accomplishing specific challenges at specific points in time wouldn’t go over very well. Though that doesn’t really justify the idea of being able to buy any of your upgrades at any time, because that seems more of a trade-offy grindy type of thing.

Unlock systems with point buy make sense in games where you’re forced in some way to specialize, because there’s inherently tradeoffs to getting one thing over another, and it comes across better thematically when different upgrades make the character more differentiated from other possible characters. In devil may cry, you eventually end up with all the upgrades, that’s the intention, so grinding for points to buy things is more of a holdover goal, preventing people from getting at the juicy part of the gameplay they really want to do. The notion is that there’s a limited number of these points and you can only get so much for them. Dark Souls softly enforced this with multiplayer, because people tried to stay around the level that other players tackling the same area were at so they could co-op and invade, so people had to make tradeoffs. Then Dark Souls 2 ruined that and everyone just went with optimal gear all the time.

What’s dumb about upgrades in console brawlers? You play well, get money, earn new abilities, and to compensate, enemies (should) get harder or more complex. It’s about progression of the player’s abilities and also a way to teach more complex movesets to players without overwhelming them.

I can agree it helps teach complex movesets to new players by limiting them to only moves they understand one at a time, but I dislike the grindy aspects of it, and I’d really hate to play a fresh game of DMC or Bayonetta and not have some ability I used all the time. Like not having the teleport on Trickster style, or the stinger attacks for bayonetta. That’s especially painful in MGR where I have to play the prologue and I can’t air parry. God hand gets along a bit better with it, because you’re limited in how much you can customize the moveset, you have to pick and choose between options rather than having all your options at once (and god hand starts you with more of a “full toolkit” to begin with), but games like DMC or bayonetta everything is always available if it’s unlocked (barring like equipment stuff). Given they fully intend to let you take that stuff back to the beginning of the game to have fun with it in the early areas, I don’t really see the point in locking it off from the player.

Making Good QTEs

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Since QTEs have become more controversial in gaming now, would you say games like “QTEs” in DMC4 and Mario and Luigi series are good ways of implementing the “mechanic?”

There are QTEs in DMC4?

I wouldn’t call those things QTEs in the first place. They’re mechanics with a consistent operation that fit into a larger schema. Quicktime events are when the game’s camera cuts to a cutscene and you are required to press an arbitrarily defined button within a certain window. The whole reason QTEs are bad is because they’re arbitrary and separated from the other mechanical interactions. They’re all or nothing and reinforce none of the core game skills.

QTEs aren’t there because anyone thought they would be a good game mechanic, they’re there because developers wanted to represent actions that are not possible among the existing game mechanics because when you have complete control of a scene you can make actions look a lot cooler. Then the button prompt gives the more bare of senses that the player did something, connecting them to the otherwise disjointed action onscreen.

The only game with good “QTEs” is God Hand, because they’re barely QTEs. Enemies have grab type attacks with unique animations and you always do the same input, shaking the stick back and forth, to escape them. Some enemies like demons can be countered by pressing the action button, but this is a context sensitive action and you’re not locked out of your other options to do that. There are mash QTEs too, but those are primarily for pummeling enemies that are already stunned, and Gene actually speeds up or slows down during them relative to both how fast you’re pressing the buttons and his momentum (it takes him a while to speed up the punches from when they’re slow and a while to slow down from when they’re fast, so if you dip in mash speed briefly, but recover, he won’t slow down very much). You only enter these voluntarily, or to escape one of the faster grab type attacks. They all consistently use the same inputs. They all serve a purpose in the gameplay and create a diversity that wouldn’t be possible without them.

Do you think AI can be more difficult than a human opponent?

Celia Wagar2 Comments

Easily. Most multiplayer games can easily be dominated by AIs through simple routines. The classic example is SF alpha 2 akuma, who would walk up to you and if you did anything that wasn’t invincible, he’d throw you, if you tried to throw, he would dragon punch, and if you dragon punched, he would block. This an unbeatable option select that is completely unbeatable, but no human could ever do it because you’d need intensely fast reaction time. The computer is already capable of processing everything going on on every frame, having the AI decide based on that is a light load.

In Starcraft there are a ton of build orders that are incredibly hard to counter, requiring specific timing pushes, but they’re so hard to execute that human players can’t even bother with them. Brood War AI tournaments are dominated by these. It’s so much more effective to program for that, that the designers of those AIs don’t bother to have the AI scout or react to anything their opponent does, they simply program a routine where it sweeps every corner of the map until the opponent is destroyed.

In Chess or Checkers or other turn based games of perfect information, the usual routine is simply to simulate every single possibility as far into the future as is reasonable, and weight the possible moves this turn that lead into scenarios that take more pieces in more possible futures more highly than those that lose pieces or take none.

The real question is, in what field can a human opponent compete with an AI? What are AIs still poor at?

An obvious one is object recognition. So they’d probably do bad at pictionary. They’re also pretty shit at Go, mostly because simulating possibilities for go or scoring different outcomes as more/less advantageous is incredibly difficult. They’re also pretty terrible at predicting human behavior (Yomi), which lead to me beating one pretty hard in rock paper scissors. They don’t really know how to write jokes or things that we’d find aesthetically appealing. Still pretty terrible at translations. Pathfinding algorithms are still too rigid to really produce effective use of movement in combat situations. They have a tendency to be indecisive or switch routes up frequently or to be too committed to a route that becomes blocked. AI are good at finding the shortest path between two points, better than humans, provided they have all the data, but it becomes harder as movement mechanics for a game become more complex and link together more physical spaces, not to mention that computation time becomes prohibitively expensive for searches like that, where humans can parse wider fields of possibilities more easily using heuristics (a good enough solution). Computers can have algorithms modeled like heuristics but don’t have the same self awareness of when an operation would take up too much time to take an estimated result. All estimations made by computers are the designers realizing in advance the scope of the estimations to be made.

Depth and Balance in Luigi U

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Do you think a timer being too short can be a flaw? For example, the timer in New Super Luigi Bros. is a mere 100 seconds and the levels are filled with hazards and platforming gimmicks, but is it now a massocore platformer? If there a reduction in player agency because the levels are now short?

Answer to the first question is, “No duh.”

The key thing with difficulty is, you need to give players some room to breathe. Difficulty is supposed to bring out the depth in a game by constricting and balancing different elements. Too little difficulty and anything is permissable, too much difficulty and everything has to be perfectly optimal. The timer exists in mario to keep people moving along in the level, so they can’t tackle every problem at their leisure, they need to keep up some semblance of a pace. However people dislike harsh time limits as a psychological thing. So when a timer is implemented, it’s better to keep it as something on the backburner, give people enough time that they don’t have to worry about running out as long as they keep moving.

The key aspect with difficulty is balance. All the different elements need to be in a semblance of balance with each other so that the player is pressured to make a selection between them. If the time is too high, players will ignore it like it’s not even there, if the time is too low, then there’s such a hard dropoff point for success that most people will give up. If you give someone too much health, if the lethality is too low, then they’ll just walk through all the enemies and hazards, if you give someone too little health, if the lethality is too high, then nobody is going to work their way up to actually completing anything. These factors are going to work differently based on every game design, every level design.

I have no idea if NSLBU is a masocore platformer or not, though I’d place my bets on not really.

I have no idea what player agency is even supposed to be. It’s like the fuzziest of fuzzy concepts that I hear tossed around, the concept of agency in games. I don’t know whether there’s a reduction in player agency or not because the time limit is short.

What I do know is that only a few players are really willing to stick with a game designed in such a flat way. The Thief reboot had some custom difficulty modifiers that made the difficulty astronomical, but they didn’t really bring out the interest in the game because they made it about executing one specific solution instead of finding a viable solution among many possible ones. Difficulty in a game like Devil May Cry, or Bayonetta, or Ninja Gaiden Black, or God Hand, focus the player to perform better using a variety of tactics available to them. Difficulty in a masocore platformer or a low depth game focus the player to repeat the same few tactics until they work. In Vanquish you try all sorts of different things on god hard difficulty until you come out on top, in Call of Duty, you repeat the same few seconds until you move along or go insane.

The key thing is that without depth, without balance between different competing options, difficulty makes games exercises in frustration instead of interesting problem solving affairs.

What’s your ideal game? Like if you were to make one what would you personally put and make sure is in there?‎

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I have like a dozen different game ideas I would like to produce. I can’t say any one of them is really ideal.

One thought I had was what if there was a 3d beat em up with a chain combo system along the lines of guilty gear? Where you have a set of moves that are available at any time and cancel into each other, pushing the enemy further back with each one, costing you the ability to combo into some options because of your distance from the target.

What if there was a beat em up game controlled by mouselook where you could glide between a fleet of different airplanes, fighting enemies on the wing, and using rocket boots to zip along the surface of each wing or for boost jumps and such? I made an animated film based on that idea.

 Another one was what about a multiplayer third/first person arena shooter where you selected distinct characters that all had unique movement options and were basically as differentiated as fighting game characters between their attack and movement choices. One character I could include would basically be a super charged version of a modern military shooter character and a quake 3 arena character. One could be based on the movement and attack styles from Gunz, except more fleshed out. I could give some characters double jumps, air dashes, teleports, etc. Then Overwatch came out and seems to be an implementation of this idea except as a team shooter.

I had a design doc written for a metroidvania, which I would probably redo from scratch and combine with another idea I had about making a fairly complex 2d platformer crazy action game, I figured out a way of making the command inputs used in fighting games more natural in that interface by taking a page from Symphony of the Night.

I had a thought about working on an RTS that focused more on unit micro by diversifying the movement patterns of each individual unit more based on schemes that are rather absurd from the perspective of simulating a little warrior down there but make total sense from an abstract perspective (like every time you issue a command, the speed is set to 0, and it gradually speeds up in movement as it follows its order, so you want to directly control those units as little as possible, or other units that could only move in straight lines of a certain fixed distance). Additionally having it so sending orders to units would temporarily buff them, and this buff was stacked for non repeating orders, akin to a style meter in DMC.

I have a tabletop RPG idea based on having no levelups for characters or dice rolling or random factors of any kind. I’m looking to flesh this one out and get it published when I have a chance.

I have an idea for a perfect conglomerate of mario style RPG mechanics.

I’d really like to produce any of these, but I don’t have the means or time right now.

What makes the Souls series so appealing to you compare to other action RPGs?

Celia Wagar21 Comments

Other Action RPGs have shitty combat. The vast majority of them do. How many games have better 3d melee 3rd person combat than the Souls series? Not very many, and the few that exist are not in the action RPG category, except maybe severance blade of darkness which I heard people say was better than Dark Souls and Dark Messiah but I haven’t been arsed to play yet. Finding good melee combat is a hard thing to do in the first place.

Beyond that, Dark Souls (and the series in general) is like that Gesamtkunstwerk thing people like to talk about, and I’m not just saying that because Mr B Tongue said it, I’m saying it based on different principles for different reasons.

Souls doesn’t just have a combat system that works on totally flat terrain with one on one enemy encounters, it has a combat system that varies significantly based on the terrain and structures surrounding the player. It varies significantly based on the number and type of enemies fighting the player. And it uses these as an opportunity to create level designs where enemies ambush you, surround you, fight you in conditions that favor them more than you, like tight hallways or from the high or low ground, with ranged reinforcements, and more.

Souls has level designs that are branched and interconnected, yet have a clear progression, beginning and end. It makes use of the Z axis to thread levels back through themselves in a number ways. On a higher level, it has a nonlinear progression between the whole levels, in the case of dark souls it has a multithreaded design that folds back in on itself in a number of places, so you can reach nearly anything in the areas before sen’s fortress with a skip and a jump. That and they just flat-out let you go to places you didn’t really need to early on, like new londo and the catacombs. New Londo even linked into the valley of drakes which links into everywhere else. They have shortcuts in the levels which get unlocked over time to interconnect areas and make runbacks shorter. This creates both a challenge to explore the world, and to route different paths across it to grab the shit you need to get other stuff done, and I like that type of backtracking.

Each game has a ton of different weapons that make the game all different and the courtesy to add massively varied enemies as well. Even the hollow enemies can be devastating, even if they’re a bit weak at higher levels due to more damage resistance. They’re all made in a way where it’s tricky to avoid their attacks, not just caring about doing a ton of damage or having a ton of health.

Not to mention they capitalized on a really unique netplay scheme before anyone else could, and it had the fringe benefit of preventing people in the single player from taking a degenerate strategy and ruining the difficulty curve of the game for themselves.

The Souls games did a lot of things right, they were just each crippled by a few things they critically fucked up.

On Game Reviews/Critique

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Why do so many people think that those who strive for journalism to be more objective want every review to play out like food ingredients label, i.e., to be completely devoid of subjectivity or personality. Furthermore, what’s the best way to respond to that people who make said judgement?

I find it funny how people equate something devoid of subjectivity or personality to read like a food ingredients label. I find it funny how one would think that objectivity necessarily segregates expression of personality from objectivity. For example, the Animator’s Survival Kit. It was written in a very personality-driven way, but the things it describes are accurate. They correspond to a truth about how animation works. That’s the place where I come from in artistic criticism.

Continue reading →

Begin Blog Here:

Celia Wagar1 Comment

Hi, I’m Celia Wagar, and I write a lot about video games publicly and privately. A lot of my content is stored privately, maybe 70% of it. This blog is an attempt to get more of that content public and in a presentable format.

Don’t expect stuff here to be my final word on a subject, a lot of my writing goes through various edits or gets completely scrapped as I refine ideas. Some of the posts here are going to be harvested from conversations or articles I’ve written elsewhere. I hope to produce more video content in the future, so writings here may serve as the basis of a video.

My first project here will be migrating a lot of my more interesting/worth remembering answers on my ask.fm.

I have a lot of information on assorted video game related topics, please ask me if there is something you would like to know more about. It may end up with me amending the article in question or writing a new article as an answer.