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I JUST SAW AN ARTICLE 2 MINS AGO DAYING ITS THE BEST THING IN VIDYA GAMES
parries your article
Lmao get rekt
shield bash author
Breaking: video game journalist who’s bad at video games offers objectively incorrect insight
People (especially fucking game journalists) need to figure out that not liking something doesn’t mean it’s objectively bad
I remember when people thought quick time events were cool.
There’s a lot to be said about the aging of game mechanics and the efficacy of their continued use.
Yeah, and it’s right now. Reread the second line of my comment
Depends on the game. Parrying in the opening moments of Witcher 2 is a fucking pain, because it consumes 1 bar of stamina, as does rolling dodge, and you only have 2 stamina at that point, which also takes forever to regenerate. If the enemy isn’t dead after 2 parries, you’re fucked for 20 or so seconds because you have no way to actively avoid damage other than running away
On the other hand, the parries in the Batman Arkham games and Shadow of Mordor feel great.
I really prefer dodging to parrying or blocking, so I don’t like it when a game is set up so that parrying is necessary or overly rewarded in a way that makes the fights much longer or more difficult if you choose to not play that way.
I haven’t played it in a while (due to performance issues,) but I remember parrying in Deadlock being really satisfying. The timing was so generous, and led to mind games, fakeouts, mixups and all kinds of shenanigans about when you parry, bait parry, hold parry so the enemy doesn’t know if you’ll parry, training the enemy to expect when you’ll parry before changing when you parry. And because melee isn’t the only focus in combat, it made it a nice skill expression without being a win button.
give me parry or give me death. If I can’t run around in my loincloth and boots with a parry tool and a stick and beat the game with timing alone I’d rather die.
Third Strike parry is peak gaming. I also enjoy Street Fighter 6 parry. However, my brain feels real good landing them in Third Strike
2 articles with opposite opinions on the same site, posted at the same time. Ok, interesting
both are from different authors, so, i guess that is something intern
Yeah, might be like an inside joke or rivalry or something
Not uncommon if there are strong differing opinions among the editorial staff.
i’m parrying both sides, so i always come out on top
Obviously this is hyperbole, because water is the worst thing in video games, but I do agree that parrying really is a pain in the ass.
Claire Obscur had an amazing water level where the entire point is that it wasn’t a water level – you could run around on land freely, everything just looked underwater.
And Maelle encourages me by aggressively shouting “Parry it!” at me.
True, I tried parrying my Xbox and it kinda glitched, but then worked just fine. But when I tried water on it, it stopped working at all.
Skill issue
Playing through a bit of black myth wukong was both humbling and made me more aggressive in elden and sekiro… shit is tough though
I will take it one step further:
Timing is not the only skill that is fun and developers should acknowledge this.
The reason we talk about parrying this way is it’s everywhere now and people have decided it’s what’s needed to make turn based games compelling, but it isn’t.
The reason they think that is that people have decided that timing a thing is the only exploit-free, skill-driven action you can have at the core of gameplay.
But it isn’t.
I find it a bit lazy to default to this approach on everything and it’s certainly on everything. Timing is a big part of gaming, particularly in real time action stuff, but there are other tools in the toolbox.
Here’s an observation: the reason people keep trying to make metroidvanias and being worse than SotN and its handheld sequels is that modern designers can’t get over adapting Soulslike combat where the Igavanias were more concerned with giving you a ton of options. Timing is there, but there’s a ridiculous amount of self-expression through tool selection. You can go for a tanky build, you can break DPS and movement a hundred different ways. Getting good at those games makes them look like a broken mess, but it’s self-expressive and fun.
Timing a marker to a yellow bar in Clair Obscur or trying to guess when the ridiculous fifteen second windup animation of an enemy is going to trigger a five frame active window is not self-expressive and fun. It’s a QTE.
Clair Obscur’s combat has other issues with balance beyond that, and you can certainly spec to trivialize the parry even without changing the difficulty level, but the annoying part is the focus everybody puts on the timing minigame versus the actual (pretty solid) turn based game design running underneath.
It’s the QTE debate all over again. If it’s a forced mechanic, meaning there’s no alternative than to learn the pattern and parry effectively, I agree with this guy that it sucks. But I haven’t seen many games where that’s the case.
Modern accessibility standards seem to be doing a better job of making games enjoyable by a wider range of players, giving options to disable QTEs entirely on one end, or offering alternative solutions to fights besides mastery of timing dependent actions on the other.
At least he knows his opinions are bad lmao
After giving it some thought I kinda agree with the author. Not in the hyperbolic sense that it’s the worst thing ever, nor in the sense that I don’t like parrying because I suck at it, but I agree on the point where he’s talking about fencing.
There’s so much more creative freedom and depth in actual martial arts, HEMA, fencing etc. that is just completely missing from most games. You don’t get the contact feel of your opponent, you can’t physically feel what your opponent will do. You can’t really gauge how far your attack will reach or, more importantly, how much range your opponents have. You can’t choose your angle of attack and, again more importantly especially in the context of parrying, choose how you defend. Your attacks are generally just a button click at which point the character does whatever attack has been programmed. Your defense is just a button click that generally blocks all attacks in front of you. Your parry is also just a button click that if timed right just parries (and sometimes automatically ripostes as well). All the nuance of melee combat is simplified to “one button for blocking/parrying and one button for attacking”.
So yeah, parrying does suck until we can turn it into something more engaging than just timing a button press.
Gameplay has been so on the decline nowadays, that just having an actual reactive counterplay element like a parry is a major positive, even if it’s a huge simplification of defense. So, more engaging defense mechanics would be nice, sure, and there’s certainly huge underexplored territory on “offensive” actions with non-universal parry type defensive properties to make fighting more interesting, but that doesn’t mean what little we do have becomes a negative or less engaging.
It was tragic that the current Soul Calibur dumbed their deflect down to a single simple action instead of the series standard of at least needing to match low/high height zones (mids could be deflected with either, which was a nicely subtle drawback), but it’s still better than not having it at all.
Parrying is good. More interesting parrying/defense is better, but that’s a level of player and dev effort/investment that’s rarely on the table.
Games that have a good Merle combat system might be something for you. I would think of mordhau, which has a quite complex and challenging fighting system. However, its quite hard to get into it, since its almost dead.
I haven’t played Mordhau but based on what I’ve seen of gameplay it has a different issue I have with first person melee, which is that you have no perception of reach. If you can’t identify how far you or your opponents can attack then the gameplay turns into sticking your face in your opponents face and I find that pretty annoying. I guess I’m kinda picky about my melee combat.
You can learn to judge reach in Mordhau, though what you’re describing is a fundamental problem in video games. Unfortunately, like Chivalry before it, Mordhau devolved into ultra-high skill cap animation manipulation. Still, it has the best, highest fidelity melee combat ever, making games like for honor look and feel like trash. It’s almost impossible to enjoy any other melee combat games/RPGs after experiencing Mordhau.
While it’s become long in the tooth and populated now by only the super try-hards, check out Mordhau. Blocks, ripostes, parries, chambers; all attack angle swings and stabs. Really the best that it’s been done, by far.
Tried half sword?
For Honor has, to this day, the best melee combat I have ever experienced in any game. The biggest problem that game has is that it’s a fighting game in medieval disguise, if it was more adventure/rpg, I’d bet people would be all over it. I do like the fighting game part of it though, but fighting games are ROUGH to get into, sweatiest player base around.
There are games like Half Sword, Hellish Quart and Blade Symphony (and maybe to an extent Exanima) that are built around “realistic”/physica-based sword/melee combat (idk about Half Sword as that’s basically QWOP Knights, but there can still be plenty of skill involved).
