LAST EDITED ON Jun-30-24 AT 07:38 PM (EDT)
 
I understand a lot of people are into this for whatever reason, and I respect their choices, but for me, I really kind of dread how into Dark Souls-like games a lot of vtubers are. How is watching the same boss fight 500 times an entertaining streaming experience? I don't get it.

--G.
this musing not sponsored by Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

LAST EDITED ON Jul-01-24 AT 01:58 AM (EDT)
 
It's watching them suffer and rage and yet eventually overcome, I think. A streamers audience is perpetually on the line of "yesss, I crave your misfortune and embarrassment" and "we love you and want the best for you, you've got it". And it's usually from the actual same people and not just the two sides of any group.

There's also an element of community backseating, which is more or less desirable depending on the streamer. Souls-like games are generally pretty popular, so there's a reasonable chance the audience knows the game better than the streamer.

This may be actually less likely when everyone is playing Erdtree on launch, but when Fauna and Gura were doing their Dark Souls 1 race (and their follow-up streams recently), LARGE portions of the audience could tell them what to do if they so chose.

>It's watching them suffer and rage and yet eventually overcome, I
>think. A streamers audience is perpetually on the line of "yesss, I
>crave your misfortune and embarrassment" and "we love you and want the
>best for you, you've got it". And it's usually from the actual same
>people and not just the two sides of any group.

I think I get this, but there's a question of degrees. These things go on for hours and hours, and I'm past the point where I could respect something just because it's grueling. I mean, shit, Sekiro reduced Bae to actual tears of exhaustion and misery last week. Anybody who enjoys watching that is a sociopath. There, I said it.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

The aesthetic angle has already been covered, but the specific kind of lethal challenge also matters a lot. I am much, much more into watching people play precision platformers than I am into watching them play Souls-likes, despite both belonging to the same "railway construction"† meta-genre.

†: One metric that can be applied to pushing a railway through a mountainous region like BC is "deaths per mile of track". At least 600 Chinese workers died in BC building the CPR (4 d/mi); the usual estimate is 800 (5.3 d/mi), but the number could be as high as four thousand (26.7 d/mi). Irishmen were also treated as fairly disposable.

Floor doko?

I will say there's one benefit to seeing a collection of talents all attack the same game at the same time (even if the gameplay isn't enjoyable from a viewer's standpoint); if you're interested in the game, you get a sense of how hard it will be for you if you choose to play it.

In my case, I beat Elden Ring (even Malenia, no summons!*), so I've been keeping an eye on Erdtree- and it looks "doable, but a hell of a lot of work", which for me means waiting until the kids are back in school.

Specifically for Erdtree, watching Biboo who's normally good at Souls games go "bweh!" a lot as the bosses curbstomp her has been pretty funny, but that's the sort of special enjoyment you can only get if you know the game well enough to see the train coming . . .

Overall, I totally get where you're coming from with all your favorite streamers diving into a game you're not into.

*for the uninitiated, Malenia is considered the hardest boss in Elden Ring. And the "hardcore" crowd considers using Elden Ring's ash summons to be cheating, although how using a mechanic built into the game is cheating is never quite defined. In the specific case of Malenia, summons tend to make the fight harder imo, as she has lifesteal on every attack, so she tends to treat your summons as a tasty mid-battle refreshment
"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

That’s a good point too on the wide range of players. If your only comparison for an FPS type shooter or horror games difficulty or scariness is Botan, and she’s having an easy time of it, well, that’s a kinda supremely unhelpful. If she IS having trouble, well, that’s just beyond mortal Ken. Same but opposite problem if your only comparison is, say, Gura. (Unless it’s a rhythm game)

The girls all seem to have their niche, and it’s only when they leave it en masses for a big release like this that you can really get an impression of things.

Basically, shooters Botan is an outlier and shouldn’t have been counted

>I understand a lot of people are into this for whatever reason, and I
>respect their choices, but for me, I really kind of dread how into
>Dark Souls-like games a lot of vtubers are. How is watching
>the same boss fight 500 times an entertaining streaming experience? I
>don't get it.

Yeah, it's already difficult to keep up with streaming when you work the graveyard shift, it becomes worse when the channels that are active either during your waking hours or on your days off are all playing the same game that tends to lead to long moments of silence punctuated by loud swearing. About the only bright spot this week in a storm of vtubers taking the "try hard" approach to Erdtree was watching Gooba and Fauna playing Souls 1 at their own pace rather than racing against each other. It was more refreshing to watch someone who's not a fan of the series making jokes as they get skewered by a great sword than someone watching someone like Ironmouse or Zentreya muttering darkly as they tried for the seven thousandth time to beat the last boss. Likewise watching HoloJustice getting their footing* as they wait out the collab ban and the vShojo crowd (and friends) playing yet another "fun-filled" night of Mario Kart have been nice reprieves.

*Crazy Taxi for the win!

This is the power of VODS; when Sinder has (well, had) a little too much trouble with one of the bosses in Another Crab's Treasure I can just reach over and... into the future!

... But yeah, I don't really get it. I generally like watching (and reading about, and, and) people succeeding; repeated failure becomes, like the name suggests, repetitive.

Admittedly I also find most of the games in that genre that I'm aware of somewhere between bleagh and repulsive in visual terms, so that's also a factor. ACT's the first one I found visually interesting enough to actually pay attention to someone playing one unrandomized.

-IA.

(i would probably feel very conflicted if there was a soulslike that looked like an atelier game)

>(i would probably feel very conflicted if there was a soulslike that
>looked like an atelier game)

Good(?) news- there's Little Witch Nobeta, which is both Souls-adjacent and also very cute. Here's IRyS giving it a go.

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

Enhhh... there's more to it than cute. I might be willing to watch someone play it (but even there it's visually on the edge of f-this-bleagh territory), but it's not really that interesting looking.

-IA.

(received information not interpretable)

>Admittedly I also find most of the games in that genre that I'm aware
>of somewhere between bleagh and repulsive in visual terms

Yeah, that's another thing I feel like I'm missing a gene for. Mori keeps talking about how good she thinks Elden Ring looks, and every time she says it I'm thinking, "What? It looks like if Mount & Blade was restricted to the color palette of the original Quake and populated by monster designs that didn't make it into The Witcher." I fully admit that this is at least partly unfair on my part. I just really don't resonate with the aesthetic sensibilities of FromSoft. Elden Ring, Dark Souls, Sekiro, it all just looks fucked-up for fucked-uppedness' sake to me.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

If asked to give a serious evaluation of Elden Ring's graphics (or, like now, just doing it spontaneously), I would probably have to say that in formal terms, it does look good. The people making it clearly were going for a certain look and executed it well.

But it doesn't matter how well the executed it, I still don't like the kind of thing they're doing, so I still don't want to look at it for an extended period of time.

-IA.

(received information not interpretable)

You're not entirely off base with the fucked-up-for-fucked-upedness-sake, but it's a very FromSoft aesthetic and also one keyed to induce despair. Much like how I talked about the original presentation of No Mans Sky as a dying universe just waiting for somebody to shut the lights off, these worlds they make are at deaths door, and some folks just like that. It's in no means for everybody, or even most people, I'd say - What kind of weirdo actually likes being in places that make them sad and lonely and depressed and feel like you're crawling on some gigantic beast that's already beginning to rot even before it breaths its last?

Well, that's pretty much everything FromSoft has ever made that wasn't contract work, all the way back to Kings Field. Even Armored Core has a lot of that, just Techno-corpo-dystopia'd up rather than wizards and skeletons and mad kings.

Speaking of things I don't want to dignify with the term 'masochism' because that might suggest someone actually enjoying it, I would very much like to not see any more vtubers who do not like hot sauce consuming things with hot sauce on them.

-IA.

(at first i thought that was just a filian thing but it seems to have breached containment)

>Speaking of things I don't want to dignify with the term 'masochism'
>because that might suggest someone actually enjoying it, I would very
>much like to not see any more vtubers who do not like hot sauce
>consuming things with hot sauce on them.
>
>-IA.
>
>(at first i thought that was just a filian thing but it seems to have
>breached containment)

The only "tasting" streams I generally like are ones involving two or more streamers/vtubers from different regions/countries. Whether it's spicy food tasting or bizarre foods, it's usually a hoot to see somebody forced out of their comfort zone. It's pretty much a right of passage now in Hololive to subject talents from the EN branch to various spicy foods when they visit Japan.

Of if they've been naughty, Haachama Cooking.

I imagine Raora will start subjecting everybody to actual Italian food, now, like how Bae would make folks try Vegemite.

>Of if they've been naughty, Haachama Cooking.

Yeah, emphasis on bizarre.

>I imagine Raora will start subjecting everybody to actual Italian
>food, now, like how Bae would make folks try Vegemite.

The pink panther has actually set a challenge for her chattini: 1m subs and she'll eat "Hawaiian" pizza, 2m subs and she'll make it herself. 2 weeks in and she's already at nearly 275k subs, so look forward to a tasting stream sometime around the holidays.

As for Bae, after my last post, I rewatched the time she tried Ghost Pepper noodles with Oga and Ollie and immediately remembered why it's always a mistake for any EN or JP mem to challenge an ID mem to a spicy food tasting. The results were totally predictable: Bae was dead, Oga was not far behind, and Ollie was laughing her ass off.

And speaking of Vegemite, I suppose that means Elizabeth can break out the Marmite and pass it around. Why yes, I am looking forward to an Aussie/Brit collab, why do you ask?

Marmite versus Vegemite.

I think one or both of them might prefer a Bloody Awful than have what the other has on offer.

Ehhhhhhh...

Like, I'm fine with settings where there's the possibility that someone could find themselves enjoying a new experience. What I'm not a fan of is the ones where no one expects - or, by the sound of things, gets - anything but suffering.

-IA.

(received information not interpretable)

Another random observation, but I'm noticing that as time goes on, Hololive seems to be following the example of newer vtuber agencies in loosening the rules on collabs. It still feels like it wasn't too long ago that a Holomem collabing or even mentioning a vtuber from a competing agency or an indie was verboten.

Today's example: YT served me up a clip from Shiori and Kiwawa's off-collab where they played around with a Ouija board. And after querying the board as to the identity of the spirit haunting Holo HQ, the phoenix declared that the planchette landing on "M" meant the spirit must be...Mint Fantome (aka Maid Mint).

>Another random observation, but I'm noticing that as time goes on,
>Hololive seems to be following the example of newer vtuber agencies in
>loosening the rules on collabs.

It's uncommon, but the earliest time I can remember seeing a holomember collab with someone from outside the agency was not long after Advent came out of their post-debut collab embargo, when Nerissa played Lethal Company with a group that included Zentraya from Vshojo. Kiara used to do stuff occasionally with Pomu from Niji, too, before the latter graduated.

>the phoenix declared that the planchette landing on "M" meant the
>spirit must be...Mint Fantome (aka Maid Mint).

... And well, y'know. Kiara and Mint go back a ways. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

They also took the time to throw shade on AlphaOmega~

>They also took the time to
>throw shade on AlphaOmega~

As the comments point out, Omega always felt like an exec or manager was trying to elevate themselves to the same level in the Hololive lore as A-chan and it backfired instead.

And whoever it was also had nowhere near the level of respect from the talents as she does, which is why they've become a joke while she'll have a permanent spot in the hearts of staff and fans.

That's more an EN thing. JP has always had its oldest members collaborating with whoever they want, typically NijiJP or VSPO or certain old indies, if they know each other.