why can't you stand ANYWHERE on mhòrgorm?

[schrodinger_s_kitten]

ngl it feels like a "♥♥♥♥ you" :/ is it like trauma from the st speedrun not touching the route for a good bit precisely bc you can stand on so many places? bc einvald falls also has a ton of places to stand and tbh it's so fun to find places where you can stand. it's part of the fun of the climbs and idk it feels like there's something missing, especially from eldris and mhòrgorm (don't get me wrong though I'm SO GLAD not to be able to knock out on most ice holds anymore, though I still live in fear and hate of those tiny ice nubs)

so yeah is the ANNIHILATION of standing anywhere but the base on mhòrgorm a form of railroading, or is it an accident? falling on that mountain is so stupid honestly. you slide right off extremely flat surfaces. it really feels like a middle finger or smth. "oh boy a thing that looks 100% like a floor maybe I can catch myself & recover! WAIT WHAT NO-" am I like missing something or? sorry if I'm being rude I'm just very emotional rn :/ I can take the thread down if it's too aggressive

edit: corrected the accents on mhòrgorm from forwards to backwards and corrected einveld to einvald

[schrodinger_s_kitten]

I should stay away for longer, I don't get why I'm so angry :( I was having such a good time on eldris and mhórgorm

[LightbearerJ]

You aren't the only one. :/

[schrodinger_s_kitten]

just reiterating this bc with the addition that you can stand on those small little ice blobs, thus knocking out on them instead of catching yourself on them, it just feels cruel :/// I wanted to have fun not get frustrated. the message I've gotten from the dlc is "follow the freaking route" and like. I get that, but being able to deviate was one of the things that made the main game so fun. I don't mind the overhang gaming or the crampon prohibition, those feel like fair challenges, but for some reason the complete elimination of standable surfaces on mhòrgorm feels demeaning :(

I don't get it, I keep going into mhòrgorm thinking I'm gonna have fun and then getting more and more frustrated, with the virtual sun in my virtual face, with the holds having collision and completely throwing off my movement, with the pickaxes ragdolling, but mostly with myself for making simple mistakes or not grabbing holds. I'm just sad :( after I finally managed to have a chill time on eldris and vísir too...

[Keytargonian]

Ngl the more I play of this game it really feels more and more like Andos just wanted to make a rage game, but didn't commit, and occasionally decides to actually turn the game into a insanely frustrating rage game. Genuinely would not be shocked if it was just a "♥♥♥♥ you"

[LightbearerJ]

Originally posted by Keytargonian:

Ngl the more I play of this game it really feels more and more like Andos just wanted to make a rage game, but didn't commit, and occasionally decides to actually turn the game into a insanely frustrating rage game. Genuinely would not be shocked if it was just a "♥♥♥♥ you"

To reel it in somewhat. I think the base game is absolutely amazing. The DLC is a much different vision and while that's not for me, I think it is important to distinct between the two. Which are you talking about?

[schrodinger_s_kitten]

Originally posted by Keytargonian:

Ngl the more I play of this game it really feels more and more like Andos just wanted to make a rage game, but didn't commit, and occasionally decides to actually turn the game into a insanely frustrating rage game. Genuinely would not be shocked if it was just a "♥♥♥♥ you"

hmmm hard disagree on that.

the feeling I get, personally, is that jensen is a) extremely committed to his artistic vision and little things that make the game that bit more diegetic & immersive (holds having collision, you having to pick up the bivouac from your tent before you climb instead of automatically having it, no soundtrack but rather a phonograph, functionality of coffee chalk tobacco etc.), and b) to some level, frustrated that ppl didn't follow the routes (or smth along those lines idk how to explain it something something crampons op).

I'm an artist as well - musician and writer - and I abs admire point a, though I do believe some things (namely: holds having collision, pickaxes ragdolling, and ice boulders disabling pickaxes for upwards of a second when they hit you) can be detrimental to the gameplay experience rather than enhancing. but again I'm an artist myself and I respect them as artistic choices even if I don't like the artistic choices

point b is uh yeah. I get that. jensen wants the players to experience all his work! which is fair it's a banger lmao. the concept of influencing how others enjoy your work is a pretty complicated topic; I'm often on the more liberal end of things, and I believe the lack of places to stand on mhòrgorm other than the base stems from jensen wanting our experience to get closer to his vision.

I think mhòrgorm feels more demeaning than tempest or vísir or eldris bc those all don't have many horizontal surfaces at all, and like you fall from top of st you barely even touch the wall of the mountain. you fall from mhòrgorm you slide off very flat surfaces, it feels like a tobogan of doom (whatever they're called in english not my first language KEKW)

to wrap up this ESSAY of a comment, I did NOT think I was gonna write this much, I appreciate and admire how little jensen has changed about the base game's maps in regards to the geometry, and how involved he is with the community, especially the speedrunning community. I would NOT call peaks a rage game, it's just a good difficult game with flaws man :p

please ask me to talk abt the sound design, I want to write an essay abt how much I love the sound design /lh

[Keytargonian]

Originally posted by LightbearerJ:

]
To reel it in somewhat. I think the base game is absolutely amazing. The DLC is a much different vision and while that's not for me, I think it is important to distinct between the two. Which are you talking about?

I think both have a lot of flaws that don't get talked about. When I think of the weaker parts of the game I tend to think Great Gaol, where are there are just frustrating moments that peak through an otherwise enjoyable challenge. To me, a lot of the DLC looks more like Andos looked back at the base game and regretted portions of it, so built the game around those. The intense shut down of a lot of items and crampons come to mind. Part of me likes that because it means you get far less of the SUPER annoying bits of Solemn Tempest at least, but also it becomes more about just doing more of the basics.

[Keytargonian]

Originally posted by schrodinger_s_kitten:

hmmm hard disagree on that.

the feeling I get, personally, is that jensen is a) extremely committed to his artistic vision and little things that make the game that bit more diegetic & immersive (holds having collision, you having to pick up the bivouac from your tent before you climb instead of automatically having it, no soundtrack but rather a phonograph, functionality of coffee chalk tobacco etc.), and b) to some level, frustrated that ppl didn't follow the routes (or smth along those lines idk how to explain it something something crampons op).

I'm an artist as well - musician and writer - and I abs admire point a, though I do believe some things (namely: holds having collision, pickaxes ragdolling, and ice boulders disabling pickaxes for upwards of a second when they hit you) can be detrimental to the gameplay experience rather than enhancing. but again I'm an artist myself and I respect them as artistic choices even if I don't like the artistic choices :pearseMEGALUL:

point b is uh yeah. I get that. jensen wants the players to experience all his work! which is fair it's a banger lmao. the concept of influencing how others enjoy your work is a pretty complicated topic; I'm often on the more liberal end of things, and I believe the lack of places to stand on mhòrgorm other than the base stems from jensen wanting our experience to get closer to his vision.

I think mhòrgorm feels more demeaning than tempest or vísir or eldris bc those all don't have many horizontal surfaces at all, and like you fall from top of st you barely even touch the wall of the mountain. you fall from mhòrgorm you slide off very flat surfaces, it feels like a tobogan of doom (whatever they're called in english not my first language KEKW)

to wrap up this ESSAY of a comment, I did NOT think I was gonna write this much, I appreciate and admire how little jensen has changed about the base game's maps in regards to the geometry, and how involved he is with the community, especially the speedrunning community. I would NOT call peaks a rage game, it's just a good difficult game with flaws man :p

please ask me to talk abt the sound design, I want to write an essay abt how much I love the sound design /lh

I'm an artist myself, and the issue with "artistic vision" is that you eventually have to decide if your artistic vision will be a detriment on the end-product. I think that Peaks of Yore has moments where this is just the case. For example, the crampons, for as OP as they can get, are VERY inconsistent in a lot of places. Birds are another mechanic that I think were poorly implemented.

The thing with peaks is that it's a really amazing game, that has a few mountainous (please hold your applause for that A tier joke) flaws that stick out ESPECIALLY when the game is so good around those flaws. Like, don't get me wrong, Peaks is f-ing fantastic, and there are so many things to love, but also when it sucks, it sucks b a d.

The difficult moments don't often feel difficult because they're asking you to test your abilities to your limits, it's because the mechanics are being stretched to a point where they BARELY work, or you're being asked to do a weird esoteric thing that you've never had to do before while playing, and it's insanely precise to get it off. (Insert a joke here about skill issue, I stand that making INSANELY hard sections can be good in theory, but there are multiple moments in Peaks where the execution fails.)

Peaks punishes failure with making you start again, that's all well and good when your climb is maybe 100m, but when you're getting to the longer climbs, where you have to repeatedly attempt jumps that take you five minutes to get to, and you can't get the sense of why half the time your crampons don't work, so you have to keep going again and again and again. Those five minutes add up. Eventually it feels like you're wasting your time instead of spending your time learning a fun challenge.

I also want to say when I made my original comment, I was insanely frustrated, but I will also mention that I've done a lot of the stuff in this game. I've free solo'd all of the Advanced Peaks, I've worked through Great Bulwark, all the time trials everything. I'm even working on a proper essay myself about the writing of this game, I DO love this game, but gods I hate it sometimes.

tl;dr I think artistic vision can only get you so far before it starts being a significant detriment on your game. You have to actively balance it, and I think there are portions where the balance fell apart.

[schrodinger_s_kitten]

Originally posted by Keytargonian:

I'm an artist myself, and the issue with "artistic vision" is that you eventually have to decide if your artistic vision will be a detriment on the end-product. I think that Peaks of Yore has moments where this is just the case. For example, the crampons, for as OP as they can get, are VERY inconsistent in a lot of places. Birds are another mechanic that I think were poorly implemented.

The thing with peaks is that it's a really amazing game, that has a few mountainous (please hold your applause for that A tier joke) flaws that stick out ESPECIALLY when the game is so good around those flaws. Like, don't get me wrong, Peaks is f-ing fantastic, and there are so many things to love, but also when it sucks, it sucks b a d.

The difficult moments don't often feel difficult because they're asking you to test your abilities to your limits, it's because the mechanics are being stretched to a point where they BARELY work, or you're being asked to do a weird esoteric thing that you've never had to do before while playing, and it's insanely precise to get it off. (Insert a joke here about skill issue, I stand that making INSANELY hard sections can be good in theory, but there are multiple moments in Peaks where the execution fails.)

firstly: I'd like you to know your puns are loved and appreciated /gen /pos

secondly: yeah I get that! I also mentioned some stuff that clearly comes from jensen's artistic vision I think is detrimental rather than enhancing to the gameplay; it's a tricky balance to find.

I'd like to point out that the character's movement mechanics are very well-fleshed out and tuned. if you're having issue with crampons it's probably the geometry; idk if it's the geometry itself or the way your character interacts with the geometry, but either way it's pretty funky sometimes and yeah, you lose a crampon jump, you lose momentum, etc.

(and I stand firm in my point that the birbs are fine!! they're cute and easy to deal with/avoid :) I love them <3)

Originally posted by Keytargonian:

Peaks punishes failure with making you start again, that's all well and good when your climb is maybe 100m, but when you're getting to the longer climbs, where you have to repeatedly attempt jumps that take you five minutes to get to, and you can't get the sense of why half the time your crampons don't work, so you have to keep going again and again and again. Those five minutes add up. Eventually it feels like you're wasting your time instead of spending your time learning a fun challenge.

I also want to say when I made my original comment, I was insanely frustrated, but I will also mention that I've done a lot of the stuff in this game. I've free solo'd all of the Advanced Peaks, I've worked through Great Bulwark, all the time trials everything. I'm even working on a proper essay myself about the writing of this game, I DO love this game, but gods I hate it sometimes.

tl;dr I think artistic vision can only get you so far before it starts being a significant detriment on your game. You have to actively balance it, and I think there are portions where the balance fell apart.

are you going without ropes? personally I think ropes are like. THE best rage mitigation feature in the game. a lot of the time when I fall it's bc I didn't put down a rope and failed a jump either due to a simple mistake or bc I got overconfident lmao. tons of falls have ended up with me saying "ok I gotta rope there".

on the waste of time, tempest actually made most of the dlc pretty chill in comparison! I'd lose like a 15 minute run on e.g. dunderhorn and go "eh I killed a 7h run on tempest once this is fine" it was probably the no-lifing that got to me, I'm not made to play a videogame day and night man /gen

yeah I was also pretty frustrated when I made the original thread and my second comment. I do stand by the core points I made (I don't like that there's nowhere to stand on mhòrgorm, I don't like that you can stand on the ice nubs), but yeah esp the comment was more venting than anything. I'm ~60% through wally mode and I WILL get free solo on tempest mark my words

honestly for me it's more the lack of optimisation than anything bc I don't have a dedicated graphics card so I have to play on 720x402 to get 50-60 fps. that's almost half my laptop's natural res. half. I cannot read the text on the maps. help. (due to that & other issues I don't think jensen's tested the game on low res tbh lmao. not sure why he'd've done it but it'd've been nice)

[Keytargonian]

Originally posted by schrodinger_s_kitten:

I just accidentally clicked off and lost all of my response, was about 7 paragraphs, so I'm doing a TL;DR because I'm on Tempest right now, I'm tired, and I just want to be done with this game at this point.

basically the game works in smaller mountains, even leading up to the Bulwark, because you're not losing multiple hours, but as soon as you are spending more than 20 minutes on a mountain, it doesn't feel like you're falling from a fun challenge, when you lose seven hours of your time, it feels more like Andos just wants you to piss your time away and doesn't care how he does it. Like, he's actively putting in "lol this is gonna piss people off" moments

Was putting low ceilings on jumps where you need height necessary? Constant quick rocks that knock any direction they want? The TINIEST sliver to recover at some points where you fall anywhere from 1000 to 6000 meters? No. They weren't. Geniunely, Solemn Tempest is the worst mountain in the game by a landslide (pun not intended but I'm keeping it in)

Birds just introduce a problem that were brought up by crimps, slip rocks and just straight up absence of holds. It feels like Andos just wanted to add birds because he liked birds (which is legit, birds are awesome), and worked backwards. I don't super want to beat on that though, if you like them, I'm glad you do. I don't. (I know I said I don't want to beat on them while responding to it, but I just want to get my thoughts out there. Like I said, I don't want you to feel like they're bad, and you should think they're bad. If you like them, sick, I'm glad, genuinely.)

The larger scale mountains really show the flaws of this game in a big way. As soon as you're spending more than an hour on one mountain, all the geometry weirdness, or inconsistencies with any of the mechanics gets brought into the limelight. Sure, it happens on other mountains, but when the mountain takes at most ten minutes to clear, it doesn't matter as much. You just get going again, and you've seen more of the mountain and you can actually remember it. Or you straight up don't notice it because maybe you did something wrong. Eventually it feels like the level geometry is just playing against you.

Ropes are all well and good on those smaller mountains too. But when you have a ton of distance to cover, suddenly, you don't want to use your ropes as much.

I guess what I'm beating on is that there are points that feel like the game just fell victim to "vision" Sure, Andos could have made another book of actually fun, but still SUPER challenging peaks, but instead of he put them in one mountain, and made it about as tall as Everest. Sure, the crampons and picks could have been more consistent, but then it won't be as hard! Sure, you could be able to stand on flat surfaces that you should just OBVIOUSLY BE ABLE TO STAND ON, but there's oil slick on them, because it makes it harder to recover from falls. Because vision.

Apparently I forgot what tl;dr meant, and I went on a ramble on accident. I'm not even angry at the game anymore. I feel like I'm numb, and I don't even know if I want to play it anymore.

[Keytargonian]

Responding again just to make sure you're aware that I'm not wanting to be hostile. You seem like a geniunely super chill and nice person. I have enjoyed the discussion and I hope I'm not coming off as an a-hole or anything. I just hit the peak of my annoyance with the game tonight, and the fact that yore being so polite despite everything is super cool of you. I just need to get a hold of myself better, I think.

[schrodinger_s_kitten]

bro you are so right. everyone who's summited tempest seems to have 2 types of thought: a) it's hell and I never wanna do it again, or b) it's hell and I love it.

maybe it's just that my playstyle lends itself well to the game in general tbh. I described the game as slow & tense to my brother, and that's I think a p good desc. I go pretty recklessly sometimes, which even helped me enjoy the sh!t out of the launch patch castle, then I rope on jumps I don't get/am not confident on, and on later attempts remove the rope. e.g. I went from like 3 ropes to 0 on the first few hundred m of vísir. I also use rope to test out jumps to see how easy they are, and if they're easy I remove the rope & keep going.

and it prolly also just affects diff ppl differently. I am honestly not THAT bothered to lose 30m or even 1h runs – or that one 7h run (it was segmented by bivouac, I did stop to eat & sleep & do other stuff lmao). it was more the grind that ruined my fun. I had to step back from the game for a while it just wasn't working anymore :/ but yeah 2min 5min 10min resets are whatever for me yk? and I think that's close to how jensen himself plays the game; just like you write what you wanna read, or compose what you wanna play, jensen developed a game he wanted to play. he's just a tryhard nolife basement dweller giga gamer or smth /j

but this is just me giving jensen the benefit of the doubt. and also that one probability heuristic that goes "don't attribute to malice what can be explained by ignorance" lmao.

and yeah you sound like a chill person too :) dw you've come across as civilised /gen /pos also love your puns. now if you don't mind I'll go play the NEW UPDATE WOOOO

[Keytargonian]

Yeah I have the same thoughts on losing a few minutes. I'm a Souls vet lmao. Losing time is just what you do in those games xD

I think it's the higher quantities that get me real bad. I think I'm taking a break today and am going to get back to Tempest-ing tomorrow

[schrodinger_s_kitten]

have a nice rest, then good luck have fun!! :)

[Keytargonian]

Originally posted by schrodinger_s_kitten:

have a nice rest, then good luck have fun!! :)

I'm choosing to believe that your luck gave me strength. I got up to 3km, and fumbled a jump, but saved it real quick at 2.6km. I got back up with no issues, and then got all the way up to 5.5km without any issues whatsoever. 5.0km was the farthest I had gotten before.

I get another 600 up, and futz up a grab, and I fall bad... I miss all of the ice walls and the main recovery point of the 4.5-5.5km sprint...

But then I save myself at around 4.2km. I picked up one of the ropes that I never needed on the way, and got my way back up to 4.7km. (I'm using the bino here as I need to go to bed now lmao)

I'm confident in my next few hundred meters, but as soon as I get back to where I fell, I'm gonna rope, and I'll be at new mountain. It's the final stretch. I have nineteen ropes. I got overconfident, and after 5.6km, I'll have 18, and then I have a rope every roughly 100 meters. Ideally I'll need them less than that, alternatively, I can play kinda cheesy and go out of my way to recover as many as possible while on the last 1.9km. (I don't have the safety harness. I think if I have to restart again I'm going to harness just so I can see the peak and be done with it. I haven't used the harness at all my entire playthrough, and actually accidentally free solo'd Ymir's Shadow.)

I don't know if tomorrow is it, but I hope it is.