General Gaming Mortal Shell - Information Thread, update: "The Virtuous Cycle" DLC free until August 23

[Bloodporne]

8 minutes ago, skillzdadirecta said:

 Sounds pretty similar to Bloodborne's to be honest in that it rewards taking risks. Doesn't seem that bad to me.

It says one of those mushroom healing items only gradually restores health over 60 seconds or so and that's the typical healing item to be found. There doesn't appear to be an instant heal type of item at all unless I'm missing something in that video. The guy himself seems pretty baffled by this. It's later in the video.

 

Ah here's the time stamp:

 

[heydude93]

Was looking forward to this, but not if healing takes that that much time. I'll definitely need to get better at the combat systems in these games before picking this up.

[skillzdadirecta]

27 minutes ago, Bloodporne said:

It says one of those mushroom healing items only gradually restores health over 60 seconds or so and that's the typical healing item to be found. There doesn't appear to be an instant heal type of item at all unless I'm missing something in that video. The guy himself seems pretty baffled by this. It's later in the video.

 

Ah here's the time stamp:

 

 

18 minutes ago, heydude93 said:

Was looking forward to this, but not if healing takes that that much time. I'll definitely need to get better at the combat systems in these games before picking this up.

 

Here is the other way to heal yourself that rewards skillfull play. .

 

 

There's also bits of food on the ground too that heals you instantly. I'm not worried about the healing mechanic at all.

[heydude93]

There's quite a few mechanics that haven't appeared in any Souls games before. A lot of the challenge will be adapting to them but it's still kinda difficult to know for sure how balanced it is or isn't. Hopefully the beta playthrough footage will give a clear impression soon.  

 

[skillzdadirecta]

 

Custom Combos

 

 

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

The preview articles posted today:

 

Mortal Shell hands-on: the best and worst of Souls-likes (PC Gamer)

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I especially like how each shell is the body of a major character, and how every upgrade comes with a new voiced line detailing major events in their past. Items, too, are packaged with a vague description pointing to off-screen histories, cultures, and structures that make a spooky forest feel like part of something much bigger. How elegantly those pieces fit into the context of the whole, however, remains to be seen. 

 

Souls-likes are often talked about in terms of difficulty, but the subgenre wouldn't exist without Dark Souls' impeccable world building. And Mortal Shell just might be on track to deliver a fascinating story of its own. It just needs to find a better alignment between the difficulty and fiction, a challenge that props up the tension and narrative themes rather than a challenge that exists just because. Mortal Shell is on the cusp of being so much more, and maybe it's already greater than the parts I've seen, but my first, admittedly small taste, has me as worried as I am excited, and I'm pretty damn excited. 

 

 

Mortal Shell reminds you how you felt on your first Dark Souls run (PCGamesN)

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After playing dozens of Souls-like games over the past several years, I went into Mortal Shell fairly skeptical. Too many games attempt to capture the magic of Souls simply by aping its mechanical systems or by employing the occasional cruel prank that wipes out forward progress. Mortal Shell is uncompromising but not unfair, and while its combat demands your full attention, it isn’t pointlessly difficult.

 

Instead, it manages to balance out a brilliant tension between drawing you forward into a beguiling world and filling you with a healthy sense of dread over what might be lurking around the next corner. It may in fact be the Dark Souls of Souls-likes, and I can’t wait to see more.

 

 

Mortal Shell is a body-hopping Dark Souls tribute act, with wicked lute solos (Rock, Paper, Shotgun)

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I dread any ‘soulslike’ game arriving in my inbox, as it normally means having to make a video based on the first fight shot from different angles, as I couldn’t get any further. So it speaks to the appeal of Cold Symmetry’s Mortal Shell that I persevered long enough to put together an entire video preview, and find a delightful lute to jam on in the middle of a swamp. Less loot, more lutes: the campaign starts here.

 

 

Mortal Shell preview – the right kind of Souls-like (VG 24/7)

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I wish there was more than combat on display here, but what I played nonetheless left me very excited about Mortal Shell. I still have so many questions about build variety, level design, playstyles and the extent to which the game relies on class-switching. I also want to see how the different weapons will play – the demo had only one!

 

My biggest worry right now, though, is general animation polish. One of the hurdles early on was getting used to how slow animations are. Everything from rolling to swinging a weapon has lengthy starts and windups to their animations. Even at 60fps, rolling and recovery felt perceptibly clunky. Like I mentioned, it’s nothing you can’t get used to, but I’d love to see them smoothed out come launch.

 

Outside of that, the demo hits all the right notes, and tells me Mortal Shell is going to be among the best of the subgenre, and one for Souls fans to watch.

 

 

Mortal Shell Hands-On Preview: Finding Its Own Souls-Like Voice (IGN)

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It’s impossible to look at Mortal Shell and not immediately draw the parallels between it and the Dark Souls series, which is fine! If there’s one thing that is incredibly apparent after spending about four hours playing and replaying a demo build of Mortal Shell, it is that developer Cold Symmetry has a deep love and understanding for not just the Souls series, but the entire Souls-like genre. Your character moves like a Dark Souls character, NPCs talk like Dark Souls NPCs, there are item descriptions in the loading screens, combat is impactful and deliberate, and so on and so forth.

 

But what’s most impressive about Mortal Shell is that for as much as it borrows from the Souls-like formula, it also introduces its own ideas into the mix. They’re ideas that dramatically change how the game is played, and in doing so, Mortal Shell breaks out of its own Souls-like shell and becomes its own beast.

 

 

Mortal Shell Hands-On Preview: Hardened By Dark Souls (Gamespot)

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And all those elements work to make Mortal Shell deliberate, strategic, and calculating in a way that's similar to, but not the same as, From Software's games. The fact that you can't heal instantly means you have to be extremely cautious, but the fact that you can harden your body to absorb a blow in an emergency or as part of a battle strategy allows you to find other ways to recover. Mortal Shell is a tough and punishing game like those that inspire it, but in the short preview we played, it found ways to take elements of the Dark Souls formula and recombine them into something new.

 

What I'm most interested in with Mortal Shell, though, is its strange and seemingly vast world. I have no idea yet who the spirit-like player character is, or the identity and role of Sister Genessa, or what this world is supposed to be, or who lives there. I want to know more about Harros and Tiel, their histories, and their seemingly untimely deaths.

 

And I definitely want to know what I can do with that lute.

 

[skillzdadirecta]

Yeah all of the impressions I've seen so far have been VERY positive.

[Greatoneshere]

3 hours ago, skillzdadirecta said:

Yeah all of the impressions I've seen so far have been VERY positive.

 

But the boss fight in that one trailer looked lame! So . . .  

 

I remain very interested by comparison. 

[skillzdadirecta]

They've gotten some push back for how they are distributing Beta codes... they were being a little too cute with how they were distributing them and folks were getting pissed. I don't understand why they just didn't send them out to people who signed up for them. All of these "watch all of our social media channels to snag one of 25 codes that we release randomly every hour" is bullshit.

[Bacon]

19 minutes ago, skillzdadirecta said:

They've gotten some push back for how they are distributing Beta codes... they were being a little too cute with how they were distributing them and folks were getting pissed. I don't understand why they just didn't send them out to people who signed up for them. All of these "watch all of our social media channels to snag one of 25 codes that we release randomly every hour" is bullshit.

Huh. Lol. Saw the email an hour after I received it and I was like fuck this shit. I was like "I ain't gonna be playing these kinds of games for a fucking beta code." Like, that email I received was enough to just say fuck the beta. Like, a beta isn't a prize. Or at least it isn't the prize they are making it out to be. Glad they are getting push back. 

 

Spoiler

 

[skillzdadirecta]

3 minutes ago, Bacon said:

Huh. Lol. Saw the email an hour after I received it and I was like fuck this shit. I was like "I ain't gonna be playing these kinds of games for a fucking beta code." Like, that email I received was enough to just say fuck the beta. Like, a beta isn't a prize. Or at least it isn't the prize they are making it out to be. Glad they are getting push back. 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

Yeah I think they're just gonna send codes out to people who signed up with the email. I got the email with the beta codes  and was on the epic game store within seconds. I copy and pasted the LAST code and it was already used  They are getting lit up in their discord chat right now so they are going to change it.

[Xbob42]

17 hours ago, Greatoneshere said:

 

But the boss fight in that one trailer looked lame! So . . .  

 

I remain very interested by comparison. 

The one preview above that actually talked about combat specifically pointed out how slow and clunky the animations were. Weird, almost like that's exactly what we all said.

[skillzdadirecta]

58 minutes ago, Xbob42 said:

The one preview above that actually talked about combat specifically pointed out how slow and clunky the animations were. Weird, almost like that's exactly what we all said.

That's one preview out of how many? (I'm not even sure which one you're talking about) Every preview and impression I've seen on Discord has talked about how great the combat feels and plays... of course these folks only played the game so what do THEY know? 

[Xbob42]

16 minutes ago, skillzdadirecta said:

That's one preview out of how many? (I'm not even sure which one you're talking about) Every preview and impression I've seen on Discord has talked about how great the combat feels and plays... of course these folks only played the game so what do THEY know? 

The only one that actually went into even a little bit of detail on the combat. At least from what was posted here.

 

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I wish there was more than combat on display here, but what I played nonetheless left me very excited about Mortal Shell. I still have so many questions about build variety, level design, playstyles and the extent to which the game relies on class-switching. I also want to see how the different weapons will play – the demo had only one!

 

My biggest worry right now, though, is general animation polish. One of the hurdles early on was getting used to how slow animations are. Everything from rolling to swinging a weapon has lengthy starts and windups to their animations. Even at 60fps, rolling and recovery felt perceptibly clunky. Like I mentioned, it’s nothing you can’t get used to, but I’d love to see them smoothed out come launch.

 

Outside of that, the demo hits all the right notes, and tells me Mortal Shell is going to be among the best of the subgenre, and one for Souls fans to watch.

It's not like anyone with functioning eyeballs could look at the combat and determine in 0.2 seconds that it's slow and clunky. Not like we all haven't been played Souls-like games for over a decade now. Nah, you gotta get your hands on it to feel it for yourself to really confirm if it is in fact slow and clunky. 

 

Combat animations being slow and clunky isn't some minor detail in a game like this. It's core to the experience. Most of the praise has been for the world and general setting of the game and the new mechanics it adds, with combat typically being mentioned in passing, which is REALLY bizarre for this type of game where combat is like 80% of the experience.

 

Anyway, y'all silly motherfuckers act like we haven't been through this song and dance a million times. I have yet to be amazed by a game that magically felt a million times better than it looked in a raw gameplay video. But this is also the forum where people swore up and down that Red Dead Redemption 2 had no perceptible input lag so even playing the game means I can't get a reliable read from you kids.

[Greatoneshere]

1 hour ago, Xbob42 said:

The one preview above that actually talked about combat specifically pointed out how slow and clunky the animations were. Weird, almost like that's exactly what we all said.

 

Yeah, I was just making a joke. And I think it looks better than you say, slow and clunky or not.

[Xbob42]

4 minutes ago, Greatoneshere said:

 

Yeah, I was just making a joke. And I think it looks better than you say, slow and clunky or not.

That's fine. I just want people who can actually influence the game's design to make a stink about it so that hopefully it gets smoothed over. We've got enough "almost great" Souls-likes. Would be wonderful if someone actually hit a home run for once.

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

SFLUFAN Hot Take: the combat in practically all the Souls-like games looks identical to me.

 

No, I'm not kidding about that.

[skillzdadirecta]

6 minutes ago, Xbob42 said:

The only one that actually went into even a little bit of detail on the combat. At least from what was posted here.

 

It's not like anyone with functioning eyeballs could look at the combat and determine in 0.2 seconds that it's slow and clunky. Not like we all haven't been played Souls-like games for over a decade now. Nah, you gotta get your hands on it to feel it for yourself to really confirm if it is in fact slow and clunky. 

 

Combat animations being slow and clunky isn't some minor detail in a game like this. It's core to the experience. Most of the praise has been for the world and general setting of the game and the new mechanics it adds, with combat typically being mentioned in passing, which is REALLY bizarre for this type of game where combat is like 80% of the experience.

Where are you seeing this? Every video I've posted has been about the gameplay and what it adds to the Souls experience. I mean this dude goes into an INSANE amount of detail about the depth of the combat and he isn't the only one

 

 

I'm just not seeing the impressions you're seeing outside of the one comment you pulled but whatever.

[skillzdadirecta]

15 minutes ago, Emperor Diocletian II said:

SFLUFAN Hot Take: the combat in practically all the Souls-like games looks identical to me.

In fairness from the outside looking in... they DO look pretty similar. That's why actually PLAYING the game and getting a feel for it is so important. Countless people have the game in hand now and while they are saying that it is different than Dark Souls and may be harder, the combat is NOT a major complaint. The healing mechanic seems to be the major bone of contention.

 

@Xbob42 Of the Souls games you played so far which one would you say had combat similar to what you think this one's is. I always thought Lords of The Fallen's combat was pretty slow... thankfully that game wasn't that hard though which is why I was able to beat it.

 

 

[Xbob42]

26 minutes ago, skillzdadirecta said:

Where are you seeing this? Every video I've posted has been about the gameplay and what it adds to the Souls experience. I mean this dude goes into an INSANE amount of detail about the depth of the combat and he isn't the only one.

Uhh, I dunno where you got "insane detail" but that was a 10 minute tips and tricks video for the basic flow and function of combat. The features they're bringing do sound neat, harden in particular, which no one has disputed. But the entire time I was just watching the animations and... something about the camera moving when doing combos and it made me even more worried. Nothing I've seen from anyone has made me think the combat has a good flow to it or that the animations aren't a problem.

 

In fact, seeing more of the details about harden makes me think they did this intentionally so that you'd be forced to use harden mid-combo to negate attacks, which seems like the absolute wrong way to go about it.

 

You guys can be as excited as you want about this, no one's stopping you, but slow and clunky combat animations remain my #1 concern by far.

[skillzdadirecta]

Anywhoo... they are REALY taking a hammering on how they handled distributing the Beta keys. They seem to be legit taken aback by the response. I wonder who's idea it was to pass the Beta keys out the way they have. Probably some social media company that they regret hiring 

[SimpleG]

 

[skillzdadirecta]

2 hours ago, SimpleG said:

 

Yeah this guy did a live stream yesterday where they gave out Beta codes... The other comment I've heard is that at least the level design for the level in the Beta isn't as good as the Souls games. Not shortcuts unlocked or anything like that.

[Brian]

This is my toaster strudel. 

[skillzdadirecta]

The PC Beta is open to everybody now... Beta runs till Friday.

[Bacon]

Just saw the email. Gross that I have to DL the EGS, but I can delete it afterwards. 

[skillzdadirecta]

I just played a little bit... only played with the one shell. The hardening mechanic takes some getting used to and the combat is definitely slower and more deliberate (especially after just finishing Sekiro) so adjusting myself to this game's combat will be interesting. Game looks amazing so far though. I think the levels are fairly linear (at least the ones in the beta are). I'll dive into more of this later though.

[Keyser_Soze]

7 hours ago, Bacon said:

Just saw the email. Gross that I have to DL the EGS, but I can delete it afterwards. 

 

It says it in that Email you quoted. I was wondering if you were even going to bother.

[Keyser_Soze]

Are you guys sure this is a "souls-like" and not a straight up rip off of Dark Souls? I mean the life and stamina meter are pretty similar. The font, the death screen. The loading screen is identical to Dark Souls.

[Mr.Vic20]

6 hours ago, Keyser_Soze said:

Are you guys sure this is a "souls-like" and not a straight up rip off of Dark Souls? I mean the life and stamina meter are pretty similar. The font, the death screen. The loading screen is identical to Dark Souls.

Maybe its Dark Souls Hollow form?

[Mr.Vic20]

OK, played the demo. Boy oh boy do i suck at this!  I love the look and as @Keyser_Soze suggested, its more than just a souls like, fonts have been stolen people!  The combat is not bad IMO, but I am to shit so far to really gauge if its mechanics are "fair" to its own world rules, so I'll reserve judgement there. The hardening mechanic is interesting. I was really confused as to how it actually benefited me at first. Now I use it to end a flurry of strikes so that I can recover stamina while being struck in hardened mode. strike, strike, harden, break, dodge seem to work for me. Again, very pretty game, looks great in 4K ultra! I hope the dev pays close attention to feedback though as its still a little rough. I am interested though. 

[skillzdadirecta]

11 minutes ago, Mr.Vic20 said:

OK, played the demo. Boy oh boy do i suck at this!  I love the look and as @Keyser_Soze suggested, its more than just a souls like, fonts have been stolen people!  The combat is not bad IMO, but I am to shit so far to really gauge if its mechanics are "fair" to its own world rules, so I'll reserve judgement there. The hardening mechanic is interesting. I was really confused as to how it actually benefited me at first. Now I use it to end a flurry of strikes so that I can recover stamina while being struck in hardened mode. strike, strike, harden, break, dodge seem to work for me. Again, very pretty game, looks great in 4K ultra! I hope the dev pays close attention to feedback though as its still a little rough. I am interested though. 

Did you kill any of the bosses? You can max out the shells in the demo if you start NG+... I'm not sure, but I think there's more shells in the demo that you can discover. I'm still trying to figure out combat as well, but I only played for a couple of minutes yesterday. A lot of helpful info in the discord for the Beta about the gameplay FYI.

[Mr.Vic20]

4 minutes ago, skillzdadirecta said:

Did you kill any of the bosses? You can max out the shells in the demo if you start NG+... I'm not sure, but I think there's more shells in the demo that you can discover. I'm still trying to figure out combat as well, but I only played for a couple of minutes yesterday. A lot of helpful info in the discord for the Beta about the gameplay FYI.

Not even close! 

[skillzdadirecta]

5 minutes ago, Mr.Vic20 said:

Not even close! 

The Combat takes some getting used to... whatever else , the combat isn't a rip-off of Dark Souls.

[Keyser_Soze]

I was watching Max play the game. If you parry the bosses it seems they go down pretty quickly. Go hollow to avoid big damage if you know the enemy is going to deliver the blow.