Jim Sterling / James "Stephanie" Sterling / James Stanton/Sexton & in memoriam TotalBiscuit (John Bain) - One Gaming Lolcow Thread

[The Fatriarchy]

It seems a common trend these days, where how good a game is will be determined by how easy it is to be beaten by brainless idiots.

 

[Gloria The Glorious]

It seems a common trend these days, where how good a game is will be determined by how easy it is to be beaten by brainless idiots.

Both ways, honestly. Just as people like Jim Sterling complaining about needing to pay attention results in games that are hand-holding, self-playing nonventures, anything that can be worked around is now not allowed to be criticized as stupid design.
"I couldn't figure it out, so it's ableist."
"I didn't have an issue, so it's a skill issue."

 

[Brother Wind]

Yahtzee's review of DD2. Unlike Jim, he actually shows how the one save slot and the Demon Souls "Less max health after death" if you choose to try again made him realize he wasn't really enjoying the game that much.

And yet, he still got the microtransaction thing wrong. And its been half a week, but something about that death story rubbed me the wrong way too. Like I am the biggest Yahtzee fan, and that video made me real disappointed in him. Like it seems like Journalists decided fuck that game in particular for some fucking reason

 

[Gravityqueen4life]

And yet, he still got the microtransaction thing wrong. And its been half a week, but something about that death story rubbed me the wrong way too. Like I am the biggest Yahtzee fan, and that video made me real disappointed in him. Like it seems like Journalists decided fuck that game in particular for some fucking reason

Synthetic Man and Mortismal Gaming were the only reviews that gave the game a fair shake and explained the microtransaction correctly. it feels like DG2 gets the same treatment as Starfield being "safe" hate. the game we are allowed to be angry about beacuse there is no fear of being cancelled for it.

 

[Oliver Onions]

"I didn't have an issue, so it's a skill issue."

I feel this a lot. It is the absolute worst in the Soulslike community, those motherfuckers are terrified to admit their games are anything other than perfect. Even objectively bad design like the ridiculous runbacks in older Souls games are defended as 'upping the intensity of the boss fight'. No, I'm sorry, they are nothing but a waste of time; may as well just put a cooldown on retrying the boss.

The one that boils my piss the most is when people try to justify shitty design with lore. I remember a lot of that when people were defending Darksiders 3, saying it's totally cool that Fury loses half her health to a single hit from a basic enemy because 'she's the weakest Horseman', ignoring the fact she's still a Horseman of the fucking Apocalypse.

 

[AngryTreeRat]

The one that boils my piss the most is when people try to justify shitty design with lore. I remember a lot of that when people were defending Darksiders 3, saying it's totally cool that Fury loses half her health to a single hit from a basic enemy because 'she's the weakest Horseman', ignoring the fact she's still a Horseman of the fucking Apocalypse.

Darksiders 3 is a game that was just fucking bad. The first two games are Zelda like. They are a bit more edgy than anything Nintendo ever made, but you play them and you realize that they are very much more kin to the likes of Zelda than they are to anything else. However, by the time of Darksiders 3, the in thing was souls likes. And my God was that game the biggest fucking failure to emulate those games I have ever played up until that point. Got to it late because I didn't play it until it happened to show up in a humble bundle I bought to get other games. I cared more about a steep discount. When I got to it I decided to give it a fair chance. I had put it off because I was a big fan of the first two and I was very angry at the genre change. Even giving it a fair chance by putting it on its original settings where was supposed to be more like a soul's like and cranking up the difficulty to really see what that was like, it was a fucking mess. I have never played a game that felt that slow. I genuinely enjoy playing the Dark Souls series in the heaviest armor I can find with the biggest shield I can find one handing the biggest sword I can find. There's an entire business day between me pressing the button for attacking and actually hitting the attack. Yet I would never describe Dark Souls as feeling slow. I would never describe it as feeling clunky. Darksiders 3 was both of those things. Not only that, but Darksiders 3 really was a case of strange imitations of the soulsborne games. Not counting Elden Ring, If you play through that series, you will notice that damn near every piece of loot is found in a chest or on a corpse. Item pickups are a distinctive glowing ball. Darksiders 3. Imitated these factors. In fact, the generic demon corpses used as loot dispensers look incredibly out of place amongst all the other demons in the game. You can tell they were added just to provide a loot spawn points. They added a bonfire system for fuck's sakes. And none of it felt particularly well implemented. There are times when I play a game and I can tell who they are trying to imitate, and you can tell that they know what the good version of that thing looks like, but not how to execute it. Darksiders 3 was a game that felt like the people making it watched videos about soulsborne, made some surface level observations and tried to copy them.

Here's the funny thing. By the time I got to it, they had already released the update that let you change the control scheme to be more action oriented. 3/4 of the way through the game I got so pissed off with it that I decided to swap to that. Still playing the game on hardest settings possible otherwise. I didn't get pissed off with the game because it was hard. I got pissed off because I was bored and impatient and was dying because I just wanted to be done with the game. I was in the process of analyzing. The boss fights didn't feel like they fit the combat system I was stuck using. The move set didn't fit the combat system I was using. Nothing felt like it went together. Suddenly switching to control scheme. Everything clicked into place and I just barely started to have fun. It was far too easy, but when I died I started to blame myself and not feel like it was the game wasting my fucking time. And even then if that entire last quarter of the game was what it was like for the first 3/4. I don't think I would have liked it. I still can't give that game better than a 3 out of 10.

I'm pretty sure the only reason they decided to call Fury the weakest horseman of the Apocalypse to drop her into a soulslike. Or they use that piece of lore as an excuse to make it a Souls like. The thing is when you are playing a Souls like it is not slow. Being that close to death makes everything feel a lot faster, and encounters in those games are resolved very quickly. Something like DMC has a longer time to kill a random enemy on the higher difficulties than a Souls like.

 

[Oliver Onions]

Darksiders 3 is a game that was just fucking bad. The first two games are Zelda like.

Minor correction, but Darksiders II was more like Diablo. It was all about min-maxing your gear and cooldowns to become a whirlwind of death. It also lifted the parkour system wholecloth from Prince of Persia 2008, a game I always feel deserved more credit than it got on release.

The thing I really liked about the Darksiders franchise was how each game tried something different (including Genesis' isometric shooter gameplay,) but they absolutely shat the bed with 3. As you say, it's abundantly clear they started out making a Darksiders game that played similarly to the previous 2 then someone told them to make it like Dark Souls because that was the new hotness and they tried to retroactively apply that gameplay style.

I feel the same way about Jedi: Fallen Order/Survivor. Respawn have absolutely no idea how to make Soulslikes and those games would be a million times more enjoyable if the combat was more like Devil May Cry/Bayonetta.

 

[AngryTreeRat]

Minor correction, but Darksiders II was more like Diablo. It was all about min-maxing your gear and cooldowns to become a whirlwind of death. It also lifted the parkour system wholecloth from Prince of Persia 2008, a game I always feel deserved more credit than it got on release.

The thing I really liked about the Darksiders franchise was how each game tried something different (including Genesis' isometric shooter gameplay,) but they absolutely shat the bed with 3. As you say, it's abundantly clear they started out making a Darksiders game that played similarly to the previous 2 then someone told them to make it like Dark Souls because that was the new hotness and they tried to retroactively apply that gameplay style.

I feel the same way about Jedi: Fallen Order/Survivor. Respawn have absolutely no idea how to make Soulslikes and those games would be a million times more enjoyable if the combat was more like Devil May Cry/Bayonetta.

True, I often considered the looter aspects of it more secondary to the fact that at its heart it was still more of a Zelda-like than a real Diablo-like to me, but at this point we can sit here and really split the hairs for quite a while. Regardless, it actually understood the systems it was working with. It wasn't the best example of anything it did, but it definitely executed them all competently. It is a game that is far more than the sum of its parts.

Darksiders 3 should be noted as being made by a different team under a holdings company who traditionally only really used their IP to make remasters deciding to make a new entry in one of their cult series and fucking it all up. I've actually never done a deep dive into poking people to find out the story behind its development, I'm sure somebody has done it by now and I could just look and steal their homework, but having played the game with that later patched in option to make it more action oriented. One of my takeaways was it felt a lot closer to the way the game was meant to be played. The boss battles especially suddenly felt like they suited the combat system I was using when previously they didn't. I have a lot of suspicions about what happened with that game in development and very few of them are good.

 

[The Scorpion]

Both ways, honestly. Just as people like Jim Sterling complaining about needing to pay attention results in games that are hand-holding, self-playing nonventures, anything that can be worked around is now not allowed to be criticized as stupid design.
"I couldn't figure it out, so it's ableist."
"I didn't have an issue, so it's a skill issue."

The day "skill issue" entered our lexicon, the internet got magnitudes more annoying

 

[Oilspill Battery]

Synthetic Man and Mortismal Gaming were the only reviews that gave the game a fair shake and explained the microtransaction correctly.

How does the microtransaction work? Its a microtransaction, you give money you get token no? How much more complicated than that does it get?

 

[Gravityqueen4life]

How does the microtransaction work?

in order to fast travel in the game, you need two items. A portcrystal and a ferrystone. you set the portcrystal on a location in the world and you use the ferrystone to teleport to that location. gamers thought you could only get these items from microtransaction and not something you could get in the game. of course you can find both items in the game but they rare and expensive.

i think the worst part of all of this is that the shills that were paid by capcom to advertise this game, didint know how the fast travel system worked and spreed misinformation or, knew about the day one DLC but didint say anything about it until the last moment.

 

[Prince Vegeta]

Additionally, people like Jim and Yahtzee parrot the wrong info, spreading the confusion and lies.

 

[Gloria The Glorious]

Additionally, people like Jim and Yahtzee parrot the wrong info, spreading the confusion and lies.

Yahtzee literally just said he didn't feel like covering the Microtransaction angle beyond "He'd have more access to fast travel if he paid for it more, cheapening the idea that fast travel is restrictive" before commenting it was likely Publisher demands rather than the game being designed around it.

He said it was "rare" in the world to encourage fast travel (something people in this thread literally praised the game for when Jimbo complained about it). What misinformation did he spread about the microtransactions?

 

[Prince Vegeta]

Yahtzee literally just said he didn't feel like covering the Microtransaction angle beyond "He'd have more access to fast travel if he paid for it more, cheapening the idea that fast travel is restrictive" before commenting it was likely Publisher demands rather than the game being designed around it.

He said it was "rare" in the world to encourage fast travel (something people in this thread literally praised the game for when Jimbo complained about it). What misinformation did he spread about the microtransactions?

My bad, I thought he meant pay with real money = only option.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

I didn't know Jim graduated to Internet Famous. I wanted to ask if he covered StopKillingGames.com, or is he like the usual journo scum that would rather not actually help the industry in any way and just complain about easy targets.

 

[AngryTreeRat]

I didn't know Jim graduated to Internet Famous. I wanted to ask if he covered StopKillingGames.com, or is he like the usual journo scum that would rather not actually help the industry in any way and just complain about easy targets.

I don't think he has, but a far superior reviewer MandaloreGaming mentioned it in his latest video. (Yes this is just an excuse to point out how inferior Jim is compared to better reviewers that he has to share YouTube with who kick his ass in views and subscriber growth.)

 

[Pierre D'Olnique]

I don't think he has, but a far superior reviewer MandaloreGaming mentioned it in his latest video. (Yes this is just an excuse to point out how inferior Jim is compared to better reviewers that he has to share YouTube with who kick his ass in views and subscriber growth.)

Don't know how you can say Mandalore is superior to anyone give how gleefully he jumped on the Vinny rape allegations bandwagon and issued a quarter-baked "apology" after it immediately blew up in his face. Clout chaser, nothing more.
But still I'd like to see people push Jimbo to take a stance on this, because it has ZERO political motivation - Ross is being 100% pro-consumer. Can he make a video just about vidya without interjecting "straight white/orange men bad" into it?

 

[Moja Zemlja]

Its topical but not worth watching, its an almost 20 minute video to complain about a single tweet bit by bit with as much repetition as you expect.

 

[Oliver Onions]

Don't know how you can say Mandalore is superior to anyone give how gleefully he jumped on the Vinny rape allegations bandwagon and issued a quarter-baked "apology" after it immediately blew up in his face. Clout chaser, nothing more.

That was bad, but it has no bearing on the quality of Mandalore's videos. I assume all YouTubers are pieces of shit in their personal lives, it saves me disappointment in the long run.

Its topical but not worth watching, its an almost 20 minute video to complain about a single tweet bit by bit with as much repetition as you expect.

Top comment when I loaded the video.

I know tipping culture in the US is fucked up in some sectors (mainly restaurants), but the desperation these people have to raise the spectre of actual oppression that hasn't existed for hundreds of years so they can pretend to be victims never ceases to amaze me.

 

[Dumpster dived waifu]

Top comment when I loaded the video.

I know tipping culture in the US is fucked up in some sectors (mainly restaurants), but the desperation these people have to raise the spectre of actual oppression that hasn't existed for hundreds of years so they can pretend to be victims never ceases to amaze me.

It's not called the oppression Olympics for nothing.