Bonfireside Chat 132: Dead Cells
Added 2019-03-24 19:06:24 +0000 UTCIt plays wonderfully and it looks fantastic. However, we believe it's undercut by its structure. Listen in to hear why Dead Cells is compared to the Souls games, and why that comparison is fraught.
Comments
Would love to hear this revisited, given the endless updates and attention the devs have given the game :)
Morgan
2022-08-06 19:54:17 +0000 UTCSo, I've been a patron for a while but just upped to the level where I get BSC episodes -- is there a way to add the new locked content to a feed-reader app or do I have to go through the Patreon page to listen to them? edit - never mind. Maybe I should check my Inbox for exactly that sort of thing before posting. I'll leave this up as a cautionary tale for others. :)
Miguel Duran
2019-03-27 18:28:49 +0000 UTCI feel like if they cut the cost of everything by half, it still wouldn't be enough.
Adam Bucceri
2019-03-26 21:08:54 +0000 UTCYou guys totally hit the nail on the head with this one. It looks and sounds great, and combat and especially movement are some of my favorite in a 2D ever... and I never pick it up anymore. I'd played a ton of it in an earlier iteration: the eyeball boss was the final boss, scrolls worked differently, and there were fewer biomes, paths, and items. I picked it back up more recently and just couldn't bring myself to go back through and collect blueprints and grind out unlocks again - even with the clock tower and its great new boss, I just wasn't having as much fun as I'd had in the earlier incarnation, and even on runs that were cakewalks by virtue of the pickup combinations I'd gotten, I'd get completely smeared by the end boss with almost nothing to show for it. I mind the procedural generation less than you did, and though I know it'd be against the spirit of roguelikes, even something like a checkpoint system to restart levels or something would go a long way toward making the loops more satisfying, at least for me. 100% agree on the item pool pollution as well - I know that conventional wisdom at one point was to keep two game saves - one for first pass unlocks to test things out, and one where you only unlocked good items (oops, all death orbs!), but no way in hell am I going to grind out TWO fucking playthroughs. I'm also not sure how to fix it, which is a bummer because there's so much I do like and damn does it feel good in your hands.
Rick
2019-03-26 19:16:01 +0000 UTCYou're right, I went back and checked. Wishful thinking i guess?
Joshua Kane
2019-03-26 16:58:27 +0000 UTCIf so, I couldn't see how to do it.
Duckfeed.tv
2019-03-26 02:11:38 +0000 UTCI haven't gone back to the game for quite a while, but I thought you could remove unwanted items from the pool? Is that something they removed or am I imagining things?
Joshua Kane
2019-03-26 02:02:03 +0000 UTCI definitely had a good time and got my value out of Dead Cells, but once I got to the point where I could beat the Hand of the King consistently on the default difficulty that was when I felt done with the game.
Samuel Bair
2019-03-25 19:22:38 +0000 UTCYou guys touched on it at the end, but the fluidity of character animation in this game is phenomenal. The player avatar was built and animated in 3d, then rendered in low resolution to achieve a pixel-art look. The devs wrote about the technique for Gamasutra.
Justin Gutt
2019-03-25 19:00:22 +0000 UTCI was obsessed with Dead Cells for about two weeks, until I beat the final boss. Then I hit the "I get it," button, and never went back. They have updated the game though, and I don't know if it's worth revisiting.
Bob Witz
2019-03-24 20:17:22 +0000 UTC
