Just a light-hearted video to finish out the year. Lots of exciting stuff planned for the channel in 2023. Happy Holidays!

@VentKlik

Жыл бұрын

Hyped for whatever's next!

@HobbesGaming

Жыл бұрын

Merry Christmas Gems!

You are a very underrated channel. I agree with you on the base that many people don't properly enjoy the games they have before they go buy other ones.

Agree. This is how I play dungeon crawlers too. BUT I have not played as many games as you yet.

You somewhat covered this in the video, but I also want to add that going for achievements is most fun when you don't feel like you have to get all of them. Its fun to try new ways to play and find secrets, its not fun to push yourself through a challenge you don't enjoy just so you can say you did it. Gemsbok isn't saying to force yourself to 100% a trophy list when you're already having no fun, but that an in-game to do list is a great source of intrinsic rewards.

@TheGemsbok

Жыл бұрын

Absolutely! Despite accepting this paradigm for what it means to beat such games, and despite being more keen to complete games than most players---there are still a number of games in this style that I played extensively and then stopped, despite having (for various reasons) never beaten them in this sense. A few are even featured in this video: Super House of Dead Ninjas, Crypt of the NecroDancer, and Hack, Slash, Loot.

@cirocamoletto03

Жыл бұрын

@@TheGemsbok to 100% Crypt of the NecroDancer you have to practically be superhuman, it's insane.

This is how I've always treated achievements. Most of the time, they're a good indicator of how much of the game I've experienced. Some lists are better than others, of course, but that's up to the developers' discretion. If there are no achievements (some games don't have any), I just look up missable/secret things.

reminds me I forgot to back and play it after the last big update, I should probably do that.

Just needed to say sir lol you deserve way more major credit for your content...you pick cool and interesting topics and the vids are really insightful..you can see the passion and eneregy you put in the channel...no lie dude this is great material lol hope its grows for you..

Would love to see your take on "NOITA" please

@TheGemsbok

Жыл бұрын

Haven't played it yet, but it's one I have my eyes on.

One of my favorite KZreadrs!!

My nostalgia comes up errytime when I see BOI Wrath of the Lamb clips

Thanks for what you do, man! I've critiqued your delivery in the past but I'm a big fan of the videos and your writing. I found your channel by searching for more content extolling the virtues of spelunky 2 and have been enjoying your work ever since. The Witness video in particular I think really captured something special and elucidated points that were heretofore unwritten about a fantastic piece of art and philosophy. Happy new year stay breezy

Thank you for this video. I really enjoy your content, but I have recently made it a point to experience the relevant topics before watching related media. Videos like this one, that focus on a broader topic instead of an individual work, are great for someone like me! I’m very excited to play Dead Space 2 in order to watch a previous video of yours! Love the content, and keep up the good work!

@TheGemsbok

Жыл бұрын

Thanks for the comment! As a viewer, I abide by a very similar policy myself. That's why, as a creator, when relevant I always either include a dedicated spoiler warning or else make it very clear when I'm about to start discussing plot details. (For reference, by the way, the Dead Space 2 video in particular is intentionally structured to minimize spoilers. It relegates the most noticeable spoilers to the last two of the ten points, and gives a spoiler warning at the end of the eighth so people know to skip to the conclusion. But if you would prefer to go into the game completely fresh and with no details whatsoever spoiled beforehand, that's totally understandable.)

@HowdyYT

Жыл бұрын

@@TheGemsbok Thank you so much! I appreciate your hard work and dedication!

This would also work for Dead Cells if that game wasn’t expanding by 20% every six months since it launched

ive played tons of these rogue like games, probably my favorite genre. i love gungeon but i cant beat it yet. Nuclear throne is my personal favorite tho, you should check it out if you havent. Just found your channel today from the portal video, great stuff i am subbed and excited to see whats coming next!!

@latterdaze

Жыл бұрын

oh shit i see you put game play footage, what are your thoughts on nuclear thrones progression/design? i like it because it goes on forever so really cannot be beaten

@TheGemsbok

Жыл бұрын

Nuclear Throne is a cool game, to be sure. Have considered writing about it every once in a while. Played a few dozen hours, but for some reason it never quite hooked me enough for me to push through to 100%, get all B skins, get all crowns, etc. I would prefer if more of its content was available in loop zero (a la other loopable roguelites such as Risk of Rain and Isaac), and I never cared for the intentional 30 FPS lock. But it does have (despite their simplicity) some of the most satisfying melee mechanics of any 2D game I've played.

Getting all achievements in Enter The Gungeon is pretty fun... Outside of the hunting quests. I started playing the game on double speed to get through it quicker, and even then it took several hours of grinding.

@TheGemsbok

Жыл бұрын

The hunting quest achievement was the last one I got, but I didn't really find myself having to grind to get it. After I'd completed all the other achievements, I rounded up the last few hunting goals while doing several non-achievement-related things I'd previously skipped---such as unlocking the gunslinger, doing a rainbow run, and taking a few trips through boss rush. Wrapped up the whole game right around 100 hours.

"you would like to play your favourite rougelike or rougelike adjacent game for all eternity" if we are talking about isaac? that isn't a hard ask lol (I have 424 hours this year alone in isaac on ps4 and have not gotten infinity percent yet)

It is a crime against humanity you are only as popular as you are.

@TheGemsbok

Жыл бұрын

Ha, you're very kind to say that. But before the Dark Souls video released, the channel was tiny (~1.8K subs). Channel size has multiplied by 7 just since then. So I'm going to keep making videos, and hope for the best.

Almost done getting 100% achievements in my Terraria mediumcore play through - the amount of time put into 100%ing a game is something I will probably never do again lol

@TheGemsbok

Жыл бұрын

Hahaha, perfectly understandable. If it's any consolation, though: 100% in Terraria took me nearly three times as long as 100% in Gungeon.

@HobbesGaming

Жыл бұрын

@@TheGemsbok I haven't exactly been speedrunning it, but the playthrough is on 111 hours with 39 fishing quests to go, and the corruption and hallow are still intact. (I'm mining out the entire world instead of cleanteminating it}

I remember finishing all the achievements in Enter the Gungeon. This game is awesome, but man did it piss me the fuck off lol

I agree. Too bad I'm terrible at this game to have a decent progression pace.

The only thing I don't really like about achievements in rogue-ish games is their being tied to in-game unlocks. I purchased the game, I should be entitled to all its content without jumping through arbitrary hoops.

@TheGemsbok

Жыл бұрын

Interesting! Out of curiosity, do you feel the same way about not just character upgrades but also character abilities being hidden around the gameworld (or even locked behind challenges and minigames) in metroidvanias, RPGs, Zelda games, open-world titles, and so on? Many of those games are about the same duration as getting 100% in a modern roguelike, after all.

@smackdownsoup

Жыл бұрын

​@@TheGemsbok Absolutely not. This opinion is limited specifically to rouge-ish games. This has nothing to do with the time it takes to get 100%, or minigames, or anything else. It's more related to the product that I am purchasing. When I buy a Zelda game or metroidvania, I expect to explore the world to collect upgrades and new abilities. Rogue-ish games, on the other hand, usually just hide single items behind arbitrary achievements. The items are, at best, loosely related to the achievement, and have no bearing on game progression. To me, the best experience a rouge-ish game can provide is when the entire game is available to you; All the items, enemies and mechanics, and you need to figure out how to finish the run with all this stuff there. And to this end, the biggest frustration I have with modern rouge-ish games is that you can't get this experience until many hours in, at which point you're already tired of the game. A recent example is Slice and Dice. This game rules, but there are over 100 achievements to unlock basic game mechanics like enemies, characters and items and I just want to skip all of it and play the game in its entirety.

@TheGemsbok

Жыл бұрын

Ah, okay, I see what you mean. Yes, I do like games in the vein of Spelunky, FTL, Downwell, and Dicey Dungeons---where a run after 100 hours is the same as a run after 1 hour (with, if anything, only new characters or modes to unlock along the way). But I also have no problem with games like Isaac and Gungeon which have enormous quantities of interesting-but-often-interchangeable goods to roll out to the player over time (the reason being that those two games in particular have such an immense amount of content that they don't suffer for it in the early runs). In Isaac, they even manage to use that structure to craft difficulty and complexity curves that ramp up the more you play. So, it's not just a matter of getting better and better stuff. The result is that getting 100% in Isaac _feels_ like something closer to a campaign than it does to a traditional roguelike. I genuinely believe that starting with everyting available in Isaac would be like starting Hollow Knight for the first time and it's in Godseeker Mode; even with all the tools handed to them, the difficulty would start far too high for a new player to enjoy themselves. I guess one point I'm still unsure about in what you're saying is how something like the mirror shield, light arrows, and magical boomerang in Minish Cap would measure up in relation to this complaint. That's one of the reasons I asked my initial question in the earlier comment, because there are frequently tools like that in such games---that you get by doing obscure or arbitrary tasks, and only long after those tools would be useful to the player.

@smackdownsoup

Жыл бұрын

@@TheGemsbok Let me try to put it another way. I view rouge-ish games as fundamentally different from "traditional" games like Zelda, etc. Asking if you should start a Zelda game with optional items like the mirror shield is clearly absurd, because doing the task to get the mirror shield is what a Zelda game is. Should Ocarina of Time simply give you all 100 gold skultullas at the start? That's an arbitrary task. Obviously not, that would ruin that part of the game. On the other hand, doing an achievement to unlock items in a rouge-ish game is, in my opinion, antithetical to the (ideal) design of these games. Every run should be on equal terms. The player should be forced to work with what they get, and it should be possible for any item, enemy, etc to show up. Until you have everything unlocked, the game is incomplete, and I don't want to spend 50-100 hours just to unlock the game. Look at Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. It's a traditional roguelike with zero unlocks. From the very start, you can play as any race and any class. But the game sorts the races (the primary difficulty selector), into difficulty buckets, giving new players a nudge in the right direction. DCSS is not exactly the most beginner friendly game, I just bring it up to demonstrate that there can be other approaches to easing the player in that don't leave the game incomplete for dozens of hours. I think your view on starting Isaac with everything unlocked is a bit extreme. Even if everything is unlocked at the start, you would start your first run with no items, and you would find items at the same rate as you normally would. There's no sudden influx of abilities/mechanics as you describe. Would the rate of new stuff be faster than in the game as it is now? Of course, but I think it would be manageable for players. One more thing, I'm being pretty anti-unlocks in this post, but I do recognize the value of player on-boarding. I just think you can do that without locking away such significant portions of the game for so long. (And yes, I do consider a single item unlock to be a 'significant portion' of a game)

@TheGemsbok

Жыл бұрын

Right, don't worry, I understood what you were saying. Perhaps the Hollow Knight analogy was misleading. I was simply trying to explain why I see things differently---why I don't recognize such a hard dividing line that has conventional campaigns on one side and traditional roguelikes on the other. Instead, I feel that many games now productively exist in between, and at any rate that some of the issues you see arising from games being in between _do_ affect games at either extreme (with those redundant late-game secrets in Minish Cap being one example). In the paragraph of my reply entirely about Isaac, I wasn't talking mainly about items (and I certainly wasn't talking about abilities, although arguably that would be a reasonable way of discussing some of the characters' and tainted characters' starting items). Again, perhaps I was unclear about this. Ultimately, I was using Isaac as an example of a game intentionally and productively dwelling in between the two types of games. Thus, I was really talking about both the items _and_ the huge sets of (intentionally higher-difficulty, sometimes _far_ higher-difficulty) enemies, minibosses, bosses, room layouts, characters, and paths that are not in the game at the very start. There is such an extraordinary wealth of that kind of harder and harder material in the game, and it is paced out so deliberately through the experience of the game as a whole---that it forms a campaign-like difficulty curve for players that ramps up appropriately across literally hundreds of hours. Referring to such a structure as a means of player onboarding for 'the true game' misses the fact that, in Isaac, climbing that curve for those hundreds of hours _is_ 'the true game.' Thus, jumping in at the end of that curve in Isaac is what I felt would be similar to new playthroughs of Hollow Knight beginning in Godhome, or new playthroughs of Demon's Souls beginning in its notoriously difficult New Game Plus. The players having access to 'end-game gear' is not remotely as important as the fact that they haven't played the rest of the game leading up to that point in preparation for the end-game difficulty. And it would be similarly inappropriate for a new player to start a normal playthrough of New Game in Demon's Souls with end-game gear, which would be like if Isaac started without any of the more difficult content unlocked---but all of the items available anyway. All such variants are fundamentally distinct from the intended experience as balanced by the designers. Many players, when they've unlocked absolutely everything in Isaac after hundreds and hundreds of hours, immediately start a new save file. There's someone talking about doing that elsewhere in this exact comment section. I think a full understanding of Isaac's structure can only come from thinking about why people see doing that as the way in which to continue experiencing that particular game.

I think the concept of "beating the game" loses its usefulness when taking about rougelikes the same way it does for, say, esports. Each person will find their own set of motivations for playing the game, and therefore will have different thresholds where they feel satisfied. It's a peculiarity of campaign (and specially story-driven) games to have a clear ending the way movies and books do.

@TheGemsbok

Жыл бұрын

Yes, that certainly looks true on first glance---that in a competitive game, or a roguelike, or a score attack arcade game, there initially seems to be no sense in which one could reach a broadly recognizable state of closure or completion. But I have this odd feeling that there may be some other way to look at it, some way that _would_ allow people to feel they've reached a state of formal conclusion in such games. Now, if only someone would figure out what that way might be, they could possibly make a video on that subject for our benefit . . .

@franciscofarias6385

Жыл бұрын

@@TheGemsbok Yeah I just don't think you found it. One criticism against this framework is that achievements are too arbitrary, mechanistic and, in many cases, grind-y and exhausting. It's a fair goal to set to oneself, but I don't think it's fit to be the "finished the campaign" of roguelikes -- because, again, I don't think there's such thing.

@franciscofarias6385

Жыл бұрын

@@TheGemsbok Btw there's no need to be defensive, I disagreeing with you don't mean I don't like your videos

@TheGemsbok

Жыл бұрын

@Francisco Farias I am glad that you enjoy the videos! And equally glad to receive comments, whether in agreement or disagreement. There is similarly no need for you to project negative emotions onto comments you encounter here. Mine, at least, are always intended in good will. The one I made earlier in this thread is supposed to be humorous! I should highlight, though, that the notions that achievements are too arbitrary or that achievement sets may be poorly designed are the primary topics covered in the second main section of this video.

Honestly, who cares what it means to "beat" a game? It's a pointless and uninteresting semantic debate. And I don't see what the problem would be with a view that embraces that games are there to be played until you get bored with them. That's the point of all entertainment media; to entertain, and once they can no longer do that, they have ceased to serve their purpose. In short, I think it's an uninteresting dilemma, and I don't think you have shown why the alternatives to your preferred option are supposedly less valid either.

@TheGemsbok

Жыл бұрын

I feel this is implied at various points in the video, but: the larger goal, I suppose, is to fit as many genuinely and thoroughly excellent entertainment experiences as possible into my finite lifespan.