Can someone please explain to me why this game is so beloved but the map design is awful...

>>buy DLC
>dlc
dude you're fucking retarded. theres literally an npc in each area that sells you a map for that area, you can find him by looking for little scrolls of paper on the ground and following the trail. Also a shopkeeper in the first area sells you a charm that tells you your location on the map. stop fucking posting about a game you clearly know nothing about

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OP here, I did buy the map. You have to buy an additional accessory that takes up an item slot to even know where you are on the map. Don't try to defend this user.

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for god's sake, somebody help her

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>I have the spatial awareness of a baby, and this is why the game is bad

>You have to buy an additional accessory that takes up an item slot to even know where you are on the map.
cry more nigger

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ok, my bad. He gets farther than the dirtmouth bench. But check this out: twitch.tv/videos/575141792?t=0h21m49s

I timestamped it in the middle of his complaining. He's only 20 minutes into the game, and he's like "I'm waiting for the story to kick in." and "nothing is happening".
He beats the first boss, then he quits the game at the 28 minute mark twitch.tv/videos/575141792?t=0h27m41s

You guys think I make this stuff up. But no. Some people really are too ADD to for this game. Can anyone here honestly imagine having an attention span so short?

>I have to use items in the game to play the game? Wtf

Get good at map reading. You can't tell where you are relative to where you've been?

My fiance refused to play hollow knight without that charm. You have the geonavigation skills of a woman. Are you a tranny, or did your brain just not develop properly in your teens?

Why are you complaing that the game has a special item to help retards like yourself?

I finished the game with that charm and never removed it unless it was ABSOLUTELY useless like bosses etc - didn't think game was extremely hard or anything but that is a luxury I never wanted to forfeit and whaddya know, never did.

>Why would I enjoy being lost
Because you're not a fucking dweeb?

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>takes up an item slot
>1/3 slots, other charms in that point of the game don't take more than 2, later in the game you can have 11 slots

>The game gave me items to use if I find it difficult to play without them? Outrageous!
You're only making Hollow Knight look good.

It's a good game but the map system is dumb tedious shit meant to pad out the game

how?

Sounds like you're getting too old and senile to have basic navigational skills

I have ADHD and it's not easy to predict how it affects things like this. Sometimes I can't really start, other times I'll go 6 hours straight. Games, books, studying, etc. I don't understand it well, but there's a lot more going on than just an aversion from anything that takes some patience and effort to pay off.

>DoS
>god tier
lmfao opinion disregarded

Symphony of the Night is too easy to be in the holy trinity

The map and being lost in general from time to time is fine, the pacing of the game is not though. I get that it wants to be all Souls-like but in an exploration based game you just lose too much progress
>hurr git gud
I beat the game and it's one of my favorites of the generation but its non-boss battle areas would undoubtedly have been more fun if the game had a more forgiving checkpoint system

>axiom verge
>good tier
I would put it in meh tier

There's nothing wrong with the checkpoint system. And you don't "lose" anything but money. Which is still gettable after death. This is more forgiving than games like Metroid where you lose all progress in between save points. Same with Castlevania. You know, the mother and father of the metroidvania genre? That's just how the system works. Hollow Knight actually casualized the system, by allowing players to retain collectables they picked up along the way. So if you die after finding a charm, or a hollow nest seal or whatever, then it's not a complete loss.

Also, most people don't think to do this, but you can actually abuse the checkpoint system by quitting the game at any time. Whenever you feel like you're in an unwinnable situation, just quit and reload, and you will save your items and progress, only your position is back safely at the bench.

I'm aware, Metroid is also poorly paced a a result. That doesn't make it a bad game as its other merits far outweigh the pacing issues (just like Hollow Knight) but more forgiving pacing would absolutely be a welcome improvement especially for exploration
Yes, again, it's absolutely obliterating the pace of the game

>Metroid is also poorly paced a a result.
Aaaaand your opinion is rendered irrelevant in a single sentence. Get good shitter. Go play one of your shitty savescummy open world sandbox games. The Witcher 3 is more your speed, shit for brains.

>dying outside of boss fights
Maybe you should play a game that's a little bit easier, sonny.

>ignores the part where I say it's not a bad game
>devolves into an autism attack about open world games and Witcher 3, a game I dropped 20 minutes in
Okay retard
Sorry I forgot that people who died outside of boss fights were not the target audience for the game, I didn't know it was built for a sekrit club of 10 people

Why in the hell would somebody who doesn't enjoy navigating and exploring play a metroidvania?
>Man, I got the new CoD, but it kinda sucks. The game is making me spend a ridiculous amount of time shooting people.

>>ignores the part where I say it's not a bad game
Because that's literally irrelevant to the point. You claimed the checkpoint systems creates poor pacing, and that's what I take issue with.
There isn't a pacing issue as you claim it. You're just a bitch.

It's made that way to try and force you to get lost in samey looking rooms. Everything about having to go to the hub and buy the map if you miss it, needing trinkets to record or show your progress it's all superfluous and doesn't add to the game at all. Just tedium and devs trying to fix what wasn't broken.

It would be perfect if you just had to find the map guy and purchase it to unlock normal Metroid mapping. That way you still have the sense of being lost

Hollow Knight has a very forgiving health/healing system. On top of that, boss fights are the only time where you don't have the option to just walk the fuck away. The game's mechanics are clearly chosen to foster an exploration strategy that is cautious, deliberate, and methodical. Strict punishments for failure are part of fostering that sort of gameplay. I'm sorry you're too much of a spastic smoothbrain to make smart decisions, but it's not the game's fault.

>I want the sensation of being lost. But I don't want the possibility of becoming lost.

The game slows down to a halt and you have to repeat the same areas (tons of them) over and over again. You don't explore anything new, open up new mechanics, or progress at all in those lengthy sections- you're just treading water. If that's your idea of good pacing then great, I mean it might be that you're an nostalgia swallowing moron who has nothing better to do with their time, but either way the game isn't broken by whatever you or I think of its pacing
>Strict punishments for failure are part of fostering that sort of gameplay
You can absolutely have less strict punishments for failure while fostering methodical gameplay

your short term memory has been erased by instant gratification and overuse of your phone

stretch your brain muscle a little brainlet

I like La-Mulana but boy does it make me feel like a moron

>you have to repeat the same areas (tons of them) over and over again
And every time you suck and have to repeat them you get better at them, and in some time you should be flying trough those areas in minutes.

When I play a Metroid or Castlevania game they don't arbitrarily obscure where you've been. You are still lost, but your pushing onward and filling up a map at the same time. Exploring and cataloguing. Hollow Knight adds a bunch of unnecessary steps to this process. It's not fun IMO just tedious. Especially with how samey many rooms are.

>You can absolutely have less strict punishments for failure while fostering methodical gameplay
It's not an issue with skill levels or difficulty. It's an issue with approaching the game in a way that the game is clearly trying to teach you not to do. You're supposed to die once or twice in the early game and say, "Damn, it's a real pain in the ass to get sent all this way back. I should be more careful, especially if I'm low on masks and soul." and then get through the rest of the exploration without dying. If your synapses are too unresponsive to make that realization, it's not a problem with the game. You should probably stick to games targeted at more casual audiences.

but they do. Castlevanias send you back to an earlier save on death rather than just respawning you, so any progress you made is lost entirely.

Correct, but the point is that the game could definitely teach you those mechanics better without having you repeat so much of the areas
>It's not an issue with skill levels or difficulty
That's exactly why I didn't mention those dimensions of comparison, it's an issue with pacing, your tirade about me somehow being too dumb for the game is nonsense when my complaint is that the game could have taught me the skills required for completion without becoming tedious

So basically you have zero capacity to retain spacial information or navigate without the game explicitly drawing a detailed map in real time. I'm sorry, that must be a difficult thing to have to live with, but you don't need to try to drag a game for your own inadequacies. If you don't like (or are incapable of) navigation and exploration, why did you even play this game?

>Game rewards players who have played the game enough to remember the map layout and rooms by freeing some extra trinket space for them
>Why can't I just have a free map guys wtf I want all the shinies and power ups nowwwww
>What do you mean I need to memorize areas in a game about exploring a lost kingdom?
>Where are the quest markers and the option to quick travel to objective HOW DO I KNOW WHAT TO DO?

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don't bother. he's never played the games he tries to bludgeon HK with. these types are always like that.

>the game could definitely teach you those mechanics better
How? By putting a long dull softcore tutorial section in after each powerup you get?

That's not arbitrary at all, you died. You deserve to be punished

Just use it for exploring and take it off for a boss fight not hard desu

The game already does that by making the areas around where you get your powerups explorable through those powerups (as any well designed game does). What the game could stand to do better is have more frequent checkpointing (perhaps even an extra life system that you can fill up to allow for more experimentation) or just a higher number of save points. You shouldn't be punished very severely for misusing a powerup when you're in the early stages of mastering it, for example.
I hope at the very least you're understanding now that I'm someone who enjoyed the game and just wants it to employ things that would've made me enjoy it even further instead of the drooling retard I've been characterized as here

right, and HK only punishes you if you died. It's actually considerably more lenient since you don't lose any progress beyond actual physical distance traveled and your map (once you buy it) actually gets updated when you die.

I do like exploration. Having to jump through hoops for a basic map is dumb. I still played and enjoyed the game but that part was just stupid. I felt lost in Super Metroid just fine without the devs trying to make me get lost in samey rooms.

>You don't explore anything new, open up new mechanics, or progress at all in those lengthy sections- you're just treading water.
This isn't necessarily true. You can ignore the dead ends on your second run. As you now know you are unable to proceed through that route, thus making it skippable, until you have the powerup to make it the whole way through. You can also plot routes more efficiently after death. Since you know mostly where to go, you take the shortest way going, and the shortest way coming.

There has to be some penalty for death after all. So they can't completely remove all path retracing. Only, you should be able to do it more efficiently, in order to avoid death. If you died along your journey, then it is likely it was a series of events that lead to your death, not a mere single encounter. So to place the player ahead off those series of unfortunate events, would make his journey easier.

There is also the chance that one did not master a previous challenge. Say for example you barely escaped a group of enemies in your first run, only to die later. Then there is a good chance that the encounter you escaped before will kill you now.

Endurance and patience is also a skill. Often time when players get set back, they become impatient, and that causes them to play more sloppily. If they were given more checkpoints, then they would be alleviated of this issue, and their patience would never be tested.

If retreading were as simple as you say, then it shouldn't take you long to find your way to your destination. But it's only a problem when you're uncertain or lost, and thus you waste time taking wrong turns, or fighting monsters that aren't in your way.

I haven't been acknowledging your take on pacing because it's nonsense. You're hinging it on the idea that the game is kicking you back to redo progress unfairly, when that is absolutely not the case. Backing off, healing yourself, then trying again is always an option. If you're pressing forward in to unseen territory with two masks and no soul, then you die. The cool part is that nothing in the game is forcing or even encouraging you to do that.

I'm not the guy who said HK was too punishing. I actually think it's a bit lenient compared to most metroidvania, but it's bosses are harder than most too so it's fair. Having to equip a bunch of shit and buy a map off an NPC every area for a basic map is lame

The maps are detailed enough that you can use the general shape of the room you're in, the exits to other rooms, and other factors like if there's acid or spikes, to easily find where you are.

Do we have to have nothing but bait threads all the time now?

Your whole argument is that you're slow to learn, and that you want the game to go easy on you. So yeah, assuming you're not a retard, that only leaves the possibility that you're a spaz who struggles to focus without constant stimulation

>there are shills unironically defending the map system in hollow knight

Let me remind you all how the HK map works.

>Start game without map
>Pass village, every door is sealed, you see a sign for a map shop and it is deserted
>Find the fat jew
>Buy a map from the fat jew
>This map is unfinished and you can't see where you are on this map
>Fat jew tells you to finish the map you paid for by yourself
>You cannot add new areas to the map
>Fat jew tells you to go all the way back to the village to buy a quill from his wife so that you can finish the map you bought from him
>You go all the way back to the village and this time the map shop is open
>Buy a quill so that you can finish the unfinished map you bought
>Buy a charm so that you can see where you are on the map
>Realize that this wastes a valuable charm slot and never use it
>Buy pins so that the map actually shows you useful things
>Buy more pins later in the game so that the map actually shows you useful things
>Go back down and finish the map yourself
>Enter a new area
>You are no longer allowed to use the quill that you bought
>Go and find the fat jew so that you can buy a new map
>This map is also unfinished and you have to finish it yourself
>Repeat this for every single area in the game
>Oh by the way you aren't allowed to zoom in your map and have to strain to make out where walls and doorways are
>This is what the developers considered 'fun'

There is no defence for this pile of shit. It is not entertaining, it is not interesting, it is not challenging. It makes the early game complete shit and people are absolutely justified for dropping it as soon as they encounter the map system.

Making the game easier would still make it considerably less enjoyable for other people. The answer to your problem would of course be that there was an easy mode in the game, and I can understand that some people enjoy easier games. I will still call you a casual though.

what's so bizzare about all this bitching is that Hollow Knight is one of the most generically good games out there. It does everything right, and without the map system as it is, stuff like hollownest wouldn't work at all.

finding the map guy is part of the exploration part of the game you pretend to like, and you don't need to equip anything if you just take a second longer when looking at your map. jesus.

we had a good Hollow Knight a bit ago

Yes and if it was all about finding him I'd be fine with it

The game should really have a "casual shitter" mode for people like you so you could stop complaining.

The game is taking away something you clearly use as a crutch to avoid paying attention in other games. Calling it out as a problem isn't really critiquing the game, you're only outing yourself as somebody without an attention span.

Zoomers are so used to navigating by minimap that they forget about actually exploring yourself. They consider the map to be crucial to the entire experience and resent anything between them and it. In reality maps often get in the way of a fun exploration experience more than they enhance it and Team Cherry have found a balance that works.

All of what you say is true and something I agree with except for this
>Endurance and patience is also a skill. Often time when players get set back, they become impatient, and that causes them to play more sloppily. If they were given more checkpoints, then they would be alleviated of this issue, and their patience would never be tested.
Endurance is always something that should be tested in exploration, but more frequent checkpoints wouldn't get in the way of this at all. In fact it can characterize individual areas even better. Take Celeste, for example- it's a brutal platformer but the checkpointing system is forgiving because the actual platforming areas are so rigorous that you have to master the mechanics to move through it. Your endurance is tested, your mastery of the mechanics is tested, and you never feel like you're not progressing as every mistake you make adds to your learning of the area. That's distinct to something like the White Palace which is just unfun to go through despite being far less challenging.
While Celeste is a pure platformer I think pure platformers are a good thing for Metroidvanias to look at. For example, Ori and the Will of the Wisps is a lot more fun to play than Blind Forest because its moment-to-moment game design now far more greatly resembles pure platformers (though Ori has the opposite problem of most other Metroidvanias in that it's way too forgiving). I hope that makes sense.
>unfairly
Where on Earth did I mention that it was unfair
I don't want the game to be easier, I want the game to be paced differently. Again, Celeste gave me far more trouble than HK but the pacing of that game was far superior to HK (though HK beats it out in other metrics and is, IMO, the superior game).

Is it even possible to refute this? I think not.

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how the fuck can game design be dishonest

Op here, couldn't have said it better myself. I'm going to play Castlevania now and have a good time instead.

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>It does everything right
It imitates Dark Souls just enough to trick faggots into thinking that mashing the attack button after jumping over an attack is good gameplay.

>finding the map guy is part of the exploration part
No, it's an exploration blocker. There's no reason to bother trying to explore an area fully until you get the map for it. You just wander around until you find the fat jew and then you're allowed to play the game again.

This. How much are you willing to bet that people that complain about the map in this game have never used a paper map, but google maps has done their pathfinding for them their entire life.

Do you... Do you actually know what exploration means?

>Game where your options are moving and hitting things
>Does not hit every single object they see
Why are people so fucking stupid it hurts inside.

I'm playing through this now for the first time and I swear to god, it's actually pretty overrated even though I do like it.

My issues so far are the artificial difficulty (I can seriously get damaged while I'm trying to heal?) and that the atmosphere and art direction are so fucking boring. The game goes for that 'mysterious, desolate kingdom/world got devastated sometime before the game starts and you have to pierce together whatever vague bullshit details we give you,' horseshit that Dark Souls started. Whatever happened to clarity?

Checks out for me, yeah

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the mapmaker is usually pretty early in the level and can be found without going very far out of the way of the critical path