I think people beat themselves up entirely too much, maybe possessing absurdist expectations that help totally butcher their mood in the process.


Expectations cannot be subverted if one doesn’t have any to begin with

I basically didn’t leave enough time for myself today to play around with ideas, thusly this post is probably going to be more of a teaser of things to come? That’s my guess, as sometimes I push the limits of how much productivity I can cram into a limited time frame, and then there are times where I basically strangulate the spacetime continuum itself to get done what I desire to see achieved. One day I may achieve a better work/life balance. Today is not that day.

I really thought I would have moved beyond conversation involving Silksong, as I’ve continually cited my working article output on Doom: The Dark Ages as “too much”, which is kind of an odd notion the more I think about critiquing my own work, as one would think putting out a lot of ideas on a topic would be preferable. This misguided perception may in fact, turn out to be complete bullshit upon further introspection, and I should chuck my guilt on the matter straight in the fuck-it bucket. This is my long winded way of saying there is more discussion of Silksong yet to come, as I think there is a lot of interesting conversation to be had involving the title, with quite obviously, not the least of which is difficulty, as…at least for me, kind of pushes me to get into the nitty-gritty of player psychology, and as a fan of psychoanalysis, I very much enjoy the deep dive into the minds of others.

For example, I’ve seen many conversations about the diagonal downward stab definitely be ripe for some contention, and I’m guessing the big reason as to why could be, in a quick moment of spit-balling, that it may boil down to something as simply as the element of homing onto the target attached to the move being absent, in essence, with many players likely use to attacks such as this kind of just “doing the work” for the player, with the action kind of only needing activation in other games, and then the movement auto-piloted to the target after the fact.

If it’s not the lack of homing, which I suspect is the case, I know the attack also “cuts out” super quick, so maybe if it also just lasted longer, possibly with an upgrade in speed, people would be more taken with it, but people are definitely a bit grumpy about the whole affair. I’m of course not even discussing the platforming related sections related to “the sting”, though quite obviously, a homing quality of life feature would make that nearly automatic, so perhaps in combat alone the refinement would satiate the hearts of many.

Yesterday’s post, entitled “Democratizing Difficulty”, was merely an excellent launching point for such a discussion to be elaborated, and quite frankly, upon more review, I don’t think I had heard anyone quite phrase it like that, so ample follow up is worthy of consideration.

I attempt to say all of that with a great helping of modesty attached. I don’t mean to toot my own horn, but the conductor says the brass section wouldn’t be the same without me.

~Pashford