Playdate: Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

I thought the boss riding the horse was harder than Father Gascoigne. Also I wish the mini bosses re-spawned. Grinding isn't as fun in the earlier game when you just fight the same trash mobs over and over. It would be nice to have more challenging enemies around during the in-between.

Why does this have the GBE Playdate icon? This is GBW?

If you're looking for something mostly spoiler-free just a fair warning that chat attempts to spoil quite a bit.

Press L1 to parry

Good stream but I had to stop watching cause of chat info halfway through. I really don’t think reading chat questions adds anything worthwhile.

Side note, this game is great.

I am 100% sure I have lost skill points from dying.

Lol were starting at the mid-way point here. Sees where there at ha you're still at the beginning of the game.

Ben is playing this like its fucking Warframe and its making me nauseous! just trying to rush through i get it

@spacemanspiff00: There's something you can get to make trash mobs drops better message me if you want details. Anyway this is the first game in a long time where I don't mind grinding for money/upgrade materials just cause killing fools is so fun.

@veektarius: I mean, if you keep going east of Vinny you will find Ben playing Sekiro. It's just science.

@dr_mel: How is science going to help you when you fall off the edge of the earth?

@css_switchfoot: Don't be dumb. Everyone learns in 1st grade that the world works on Pac-Man rules, you pop out the other side.

@cyrusraven: I know the item to which you are referring. Its more of a desire to fight those enemies again. I would have liked to practice against them. I found I would beat a mini-boss by the skin-o-my-teeth sometimes, no health items left, and what I learned wouldn't stick with me as well. And early on most enemies are easy to brute force through so I just felt more unprepared for fights then say Soulsborne. A little more trial and error if you will.

Watching Rorie explain the Demons Souls lizards to Brad of all people was delightful.

For anyone who has yet to see this glorious video, someone did great work.

https://youtu.be/yJTWIuCP6tY

I don't know where to complain about giant bomb naming conventions for their shows, and it's a minor gripe at worst, but

listing this as a GBE playdate feels like a mistake?

Kind of like how Gotta God Hand or the Goldeneye show are endurance runs, but we don't call those that anymore unless we do?

I would like Giant Bomb to be a little more consistent with this kind of thing. It's making me low key crazy.

Cripes, that boss battle is a fucker.

Dan missed the boss at the top of the castle

Excellent, I now have a notification sound of Brad saying "Surprise, mother fucker!"

@polliwog said:

Yeah it was a bummer, I´m at about this place in the game myself and I had to stop watching.

Technically this is a "GB Playdate" per the show page. Also those other features aren't Endurance Runs because there isn't a new episode every weekday.

Is this how Ben plays the game on his own time or is it just stream nerves?! Running through areas at full speed and constantly dying doesn't seem fun...I thought it's supposed to be slow and deliberate.

Comparing the stealth in this game to Tenchu or MGS is insane. The stealth in this game is bad and there's nothing worse for gameplay than bad stealth.

The shards are not distraction items like rocks in Far Cry, and people thinking of them that way is likely causing their problems.

The shards are just the pebbles from Bloodborne, you target someone and throw a Ceramic shard at them to get them to come to where you are.

This can either be to gt them to come round a corner so you can wall-hug-kill them, or into a patch of grass where you can circle around behind them and get them.

The stealth in this game has limits, but I've found it to be fairly consistent, which to me is what makes stealth good.

Is Rorie a bummer?

Not sure if he beats the samurai dude... but he is making that fight waaay harder than it needs to be.

I found the "trick" rather quickly when I realized it seemed his attacks hurt you far too much and blocking wrecks your posture completely. You gotta side dodge and he misses completely.

@elite49: someone in chat was saying this game was just next to assassin's creed in terms of stealth ... which is so far from the truth and you're right in that this game is bad stealth. Granted I am not very far but my experience (and from watching GB play) has been that you attack one dude, activate everything close - stealth over, in Odyssey you can assassinate 4 people before the 5th has stood up from a camp fire thanks to the teleporting assassination spear you can chain 3 times in a row.

I probably love assassin's creed Odyssey probably more than any game and stealth is one of the reasons, just so satisfying. It is the best stealth game short of SOS rogue in everquest that I've played.

That 20 overlooked mechanics video from Vaati was really good. He put some stuff in there that isn't that hard to figure out, but could save you time and experimentation without spoiling anything. I'd recommend checking it out.

This forest area that is lush, green and sunny doesn't look that different to those starting rocky/snowy areas with dead trees - Brad Shoemaker (paraphrased)

Okay Brad, if you say so.

As for the stealth in the game, I've found it to be pretty effective and also consistent in it's rules, some enemies can seem to see better than others or based on where they're positioned can get suspicious faster, but generally it makes sense.

If I get caught it's usually because I did something stupid, or the area is designed to make it hard to avoid their field of view in general.

Rorie made this stream kind of a bummer with the chat spoiler stuff, people always defend the awkward moments he creates and/or weird shit he says as some kind of sense of humor thing or that he is trolling but I don't see it nor understand why they're so sure of that. He doesn't seem to add anything and in many cases it just feels like he takes away from the overall enjoyment of videos. I'm putting this as nicely as I can, but it's how I feel as a viewer that enjoys Giantbomb.

ahhh, Ben's pain during the Rorie spoiler blast. Really funny viewing. Great stream duders, really excited to check out Tenchu Souls.

Ben you're just not blocking enough!

I've found that if you hold block, and quickly release and press again when you wanna deflect it's very safe, as opposed to being completely open and trying to time a press. That way if you mistime the deflection, you'll usually still block.

It's kinda like the "foot down" method of playing Rock Band drums. You keep your foot down and only lift up when you're gonna hit a note.

It's not something you wanna do all the time but it can help with at least learning patterns instead of just dying instantly.

Spamming block also works better than you might think lol.

Also with the Mikiri Counter, just stand still and hit dodge. You'll dodge straight at them and as long as you're mid dodge animation, you'll counter. The window is very large.

@super_sonic_awesome: Never.

Just so everyone one knows, only true deaths spread dragonrot. If you die, and respawn it won’t spread. This allows you to pretty much keep attempting mini bosses, retreat and rest if you need too. Bosses lock you in with a fog door though. This took a lot of anxiety off me lol.

Usually I say no, rorie is hilarious, but the whole run time of this felt like he was straight up trolling and it got old (it doesn't help when chat's only goal is to get themselves over though). The classic "do Ben and rorie actually hate each other" debate.

@lizardman101: Most of GB have always had this mentality that something has to be happening nonstop on stream or else they think people will hate it. Which is silly and outdated, because even successful streams aren't like that, people appreciate some thought and methodology behind a player's actions.

But it could be this is just how they play for whatever reason, I feel like if you're 20 hours into Sekiro you'd have a little more familiarity with what the game is asking of you, but then Brad "20 hours deep" into Bloodborne was pretty rough to watch too once upon a time.

Not to say these guys have to be great at the game, I'm at the end and still die occasionally to random shit when I'm not paying attention. But usually 20 hours into a game you understand a good bit of how the game works and I don't get much of that impression from these guys, or they just haven't been paying attention to the story/information given to them.

Ben knew the axe works on the "Rats" and it does, it'll cleave their hat in two if they don't block the attack, but even if it isn't a one hit sometimes, it still fills the posture meter all the way up, so rather than have an awkward protracted fight you just keep axing them until their posture breaks, which is only ever like 1-2 hits, but somehow he let Rorie and chat lead him astray.

I just want Brad to know that I would love a Load Your Last Souls of Dark Souls III. Please do it, it's not worn thin at all for me!

That's because it's not a stealth game. It's an action game with stealth elements. You're not meant to be able to kill everyone without having to fight them by playing the stealth right, you're supposed to use it to thin the herd and make an encounter easier, remove one of a miniboss's health bars before the fight, or skip an encounter altogether if possible. There are plenty of enemies who are in positions where they are impossible to stealth kill.

Was hoping for East, as this was titled. Love Ben, Brad and Rorie, but I'd like to see Dan and Vinny's reactions.

Quite literally laughed out loud when Ben resurrected against Saze and instantly got chopped back down. This game gives no fucks.

@hashd: I haven't. I was sitting on 2 SP for hours fighting the boss on top of the castle.

Brad you can totally do a Load Our Last Souls for DS3, it would be delightful.

Ben's pretty good at Sekiro, fighting the Dojo guys you can see he has the flow of the combat right. Mostly just looks like stream inattention leading to death - and Rorie distracting him ha.

Man I really dislike Rorie in this. If he's not talking over Ben and interrupting with useless or wrong advice from chat, he's chewing ice into the mic.

I think the stealth in this game is quite solid if a little bit rudimentary.

It probably would'vebeen frustrating if this was a Stealth Game, but in this it feels great to sneak around and tip the odds in your favour a little bit before you're caught and get to engage with the in depth combat system.

More often than not you're at least getting a jump on the initial enemy before it fully pops off, and even so there's usually enough grapple points and verticality to get out of a tight spot.
Often in a souls game running forward or away means triggering ambushes and sets of enemies that you're supposed to approach carefully, getting swarmed with little ability to get out, in this you can just jump on their heads or swing away.

I think the biggest fumble with this game's stealth system is how it uses Ceramic Shards. You cannot aim them and you pretty much have to hit the enemy to lure them, which imo is counterintuitive with how stealth games usually handle lures.

It's the same thing you could do in any other From Souls game except they added detection markers.

@veektarius: Because "Playdates" originated as GBE Playdates, but this is a GBW Playdate. They're all housed under the same show, called "Playdate".

@bestyhammar: I started watching that about a month ago and then decided to watch through the whole series instead. If anyone has 25 hrs to kill I highly recommend it.

Breaking Ben

thanks rorie for the spoilers, dipshit

@caffeinatedking: One of the most depressing realizations I've had over the past few weeks is that the crew doesn't get the subtler lessons that these games are trying to teach. Most of that disillusionment was from listening to Bakalar, but whenever I hear any of them talk about these games it's pretty clear that they don't understand information about the game that isn't explained to them slowly, at length, and in detail, preferably through text. The shards are one example. The lessons that BloodBorne tries to teach through its boss design is another.