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Post by purifyweirdshard on Jun 16, 2020 1:19:22 GMT -6
The main reason it got its own trailer is because of the star power of the voice actor. It was an important move in getting attention for the game/reminding people that's who played the character. Very effective word of mouth, and again strong advertising/marketing. As fans, we knew what modes and content were coming, they didn't have to tell us. However - "woah, there's a samurai Solid Snake in this game?" - that's big news, especially it being a come-uppance of a property that seemed to be sticking it to Konami, who also left Hayter out in the cold.
That's the kind of thing you want people to know about
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Post by purifyweirdshard on Jun 14, 2020 1:36:35 GMT -6
There's nothing in the trailer that is not in the mode itself Except at the 9 second mark when Zangetstu is shown walking in during a cinematic saying "So the burden falls on me after all" This was before the main game was released so we didn't know him walking in was a cinematic that happens when playing as Miriam Why was that part of the cinematic even shown despite not being in Zangetstu mode other than to mislead us into thinking Zangetstu mode would be more than it was? I think it's fair to say that most fans familiar enough with the game to have seen the launch trailer for that DLC would have seen or played the beta at one point, which has that cutscene in it. If someone remembered anything at all from that, it was probably that scene since it ends right after that encounter. It was a good call to use stuff from the beta or other trailers, too, because otherwise you're spoiling content for the main game or indeed leading people to think that it's unique to Zangetsu (he does have a scene unique to him, though, at the very end vs his final boss). That beta scene was a big deal at the time for another reason as well, because it was the first time we heard David's voice in the game. Now, sure it's entirely possible that someone only started following the game right when the trailers hit and didn't know about what was in the beta - but I'm not sure that would be the fault of the developer either. It was pretty old news by launch, almost exactly a year prior (June 2018). It did its job very well as a trailer, them using what was already available and cutting it together + relevant voice lines. Being misled by it seems more of a combination of hype, not being informed and making an assumption. I would agree that the mode isn't as exciting as the trailer, but not in a specific way where they were misleading about it. That again just means it was a good advertisement
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Post by purifyweirdshard on Jun 10, 2020 10:17:59 GMT -6
Lol nah they're being modest, I think they're just catching up to this (as you can see the date on that picture you posted is exactly two months ago) and 1 is the milestone you celebrate. Steam and PS4 combined by themselves are likely over 1 million from those links I show.
Remember - the Steam number hit 500k-1m in a week, and the charts there show a graph of steady increase of a following since then. There are 310k PS4 accounts with the game.
Regardless of how close or far off this is, let's not pretend that announcing 1m is reflective of anything bad or that they were under estimate. Iga's video says otherwise, and refer to the sales of his previous games above.
edit: Oh and it's probable that their sales numbers don't include backers. My figures would
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Post by purifyweirdshard on Jun 9, 2020 4:06:39 GMT -6
Funded already, with a bit of a different atmosphere than the usual dark metroidvanias we've seen lately.
They actually contacted me about their project, and it certainly looks promising. Please give your support if you are interested!
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Post by purifyweirdshard on Jun 8, 2020 14:40:15 GMT -6
I'm going to assume one of my posts was among those moved, even though I can still see it. I apologize for losing my temper and rising to bait. No, Mike didn't move any of yours - no users including the author are be able to see posts that are moved. To speak on the issue myself, I think it's a reach to say that the trailer is "false advertising" per se, but it was timed oddly. I think the intention certainly was to have him out much earlier, but as we know, that didn't work out. There's nothing in the trailer that is not in the mode itself, but some assumption could be made if you didn't already know from past games about story, equipment, more dialogue, etc - because the trailer and information given out did not explicitly say "hello this is our new thing coming, but it specifically does not have xyz things in it btw". That's not how you would market anything, though. You show the best of what something has, which it did - not what it doesn't have. Bloodstained in general has had a lot of expectations drawn beyond what was actually shown to its followers, all along. Probably the biggest and most obvious example is how it was and still is so often penned as being "the spiritual successor to SotN" (this is what almost any news outlet will call it), which places on it the weight of everyone's nostalgia for that game. The intention was to deliver another game like Iga's that began with SotN and ran all the way through OoE, not to dethrone SotN's nostalgia throne - but that is exactly the space so many people put it in. There are just so many gamers out there who have *only* played SotN and have had a clamoring for years for "SotN 2" or a remake, and wanted this to be it, and so Bloodstained was pushed to at least address that as much as it could. For some it succeeded, and others not, and for most this itch will never be scratched.
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Post by purifyweirdshard on May 26, 2020 18:21:23 GMT -6
Just did some quick/additional research to what I already follow in a response to a question that I often see: did this game sell/do well? And is it enough to warrant a series/sequels? Short answer: absolutely yes. Long answer: I track and follow this stuff myself, because I'm really into knowing the success of the game and how far it's going. So here are some sales estimations - After just a week of the Steam release, it hit the 500k-1m owners mark. That's still the range it has on Steam Spy/steamdb, but since it's been a year later, probably closer to the 1m side now. Every once in a while, I go over there to see if it's past that yet. steamdb.info/app/692850/graphs/For PS4, we have things like gamstat: gamstat.com/games/Bloodstained_Ritual_of_the_Night/Currently, that's at about 310k, but it's players of the game rather than sales/owners. That could be lower or higher, but it's a rough idea of where it is compared to other things. The Switch version, it famously outsold all the other versions in the UK, so it's safe to assume it's at least somewhere around where the PS4 sales are, if not higher. We'll give that another 310k. The Xbox and GOG sales will make up the smallest part, and I have no data at all on that, but I'll throw out maybe 50k combined between them. Add all this together, you get (conservatively) 1.17m - 1.67m for Ritual of the Night. With them being more independent now and not Konami salary workers, the game was probably pretty profitable and perhaps most importantly, far and away the single highest selling game Iga has ever made. These numbers are all I could dig up for older Castlevania game sales, from a user on neogaf (this does not seem to include re-releases and reprints mind you): My response to these numbers (I just saw them when I was looking around for the data on this post) was basically disbelief. I'd seen something over 1m for SotN before, and I think that may at least be the case when you count PS1 OG and GH, XBL and PSN re-releases. But I'm not done, let's look at some other stuff related to this and sales/success for this project: CotM. This game in its first 10 days was celebrated to receive 100k downloads officially by the Inti Creates social media accounts. It was at that time the best selling game on the Switch eshop. A subsequent tweet with a graph broke that down further to: Platform sales: Switch – 56% Steam – 19% PlayStation 4 – 17% 3DS – 4% PlayStation Vita – 4% Xbox's version wasn't released yet at that time. Currently, SteamSpy estimates 100k-200k for CotM on Steam alone. steamdb.info/app/838310/graphs/If that's still around 19% of the sales, then Switch probably has something more like 300-500k, PS4 itself a 100k, etc. So, CotM now in total would be more like 500k-1m by itself. What's funny in comparison to CotM is something priced exactly the same that has probably sold about as many copies: Iga's Back Pack. I think it's entirely possible that this $10 DLC sold to around 500k of Ritual of the Night's user base, which would put both its cost and sales similar to the $10 CotM. Now, Curse of the Moon is an Inti Creates product and Iga/ArtPlay gets those profits only in part, but it's similarly the case with 505 Games, WayForward and others for Ritual of the Night + paid DLC. In either case, though, a better situation than with Konami. Konami was generally never impressed with Castlevania's sales under Iga. So, the tl;dr here is that Bloodstained as a project has been *very* successful and its sales are impressive. My prediction pre-release was that it would hit 2 million, and I don't think we're far off. I was serious then and I am now, but I got just laughs and doubters back then ;p edit: I should note, I think I'm lowballing Switch a bit. The gap for CotM platform sales there is huge - and I doubt RotN's sales are 3x higher on Switch than the others, but probably a good bit higher than the 310k I give it here. Something like this itself could push it to 2m, though.
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Post by purifyweirdshard on May 24, 2020 17:52:15 GMT -6
I can bet IGA is pissed at his team. Moderators should stay out of this coversation since they are too BIAS. Nah I have every right to speak, sorry lol. To be clear if someone isn't informed, I'm a fan volunteer. I'm not going to remove myself from the conversation just because I care about the project a lot. Also, about the cut content thing, it's true - we just know much more about RotN's cut content because we've had a look inside the game's development for its entire dev cycle. Iga's last game like this, for instance (OoE), we only knew that game existed period a few months before it was released. We had a long look behind the curtain for the whole way, were given some inches, and tried to take or demanded miles with RotN's dev. Just like this above example where on the forum we encourage criticism to be spoken and heard - it doesn't mean that positivity is thrown away to silence. I thought Zangetsu was boring too until I got about halfway through Hard mode and it got more challenging. Beating the final boss (which is not Bael if you didn't know) was a pretty legit challenge. He does get more than Richter mode since he levels up, so it's more like Albus mode from OoE - which itself is an improvement on all the other single character modes from the other games. I certainly do think that Dawn's Julius Mode is better than Zangetsu, but I didn't expect that anyway since it was just him.
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Post by purifyweirdshard on May 18, 2020 13:31:46 GMT -6
you can replace "discord user" with just "member" or in general people who may have completed it already
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Post by purifyweirdshard on May 14, 2020 14:34:58 GMT -6
Ashtar Richter is my favorite character too, of all time, CV or otherwise. Male at least ;p
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Post by purifyweirdshard on May 12, 2020 11:55:57 GMT -6
I'd say that on average, at least if you're able to do his special moves reliably and have familiarity already with the castle and how the enemies work, Zangetsu should at standard be played on Hard mode.
However, if you're someone that struggled with the techniques and something like chaining his invincible moves isn't something you feel like you can really do, Normal should be about right.
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Post by purifyweirdshard on May 12, 2020 11:13:01 GMT -6
anonthemouse No, I'm not directing this at you specifically. I actually cross-posted this between here and a Facebook group I'm in charge of to shotgun a response to all of the doom and gloom about Zangetsu and randomizer - and of the general feeling that the game is dead, the content took too long and doesn't matter now, it's not good enough, doesn't revitalize the game enough, whatever. I don't the time or ability to respond to all of those things individually and to individuals anymore, so this is how I went about it, just picking one of the threads here. Could have gone in one of the other ones about him and the release, but this one was conveniently focusing on the topic in the title.
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Post by purifyweirdshard on May 11, 2020 19:44:16 GMT -6
That dark blue is super nice
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Post by purifyweirdshard on May 11, 2020 16:17:33 GMT -6
I think there's much more weight given to this little bit of content than necessary. I barely touched the extra character modes in Castlevania games of the past, just fiddled with them a bit and knew they mostly weren't for me, as I was already satisfied and moving on. With the nature of the Kickstarter being how it is, and this as the first content being delivered after almost a year, pressure was on it to be amazing/standout when it's just a tiny portion of what we're to have.
Zangetsu/Randomizer was never going to really "turn things around" or save the game from the trouble it's had, to the people who see the game in monumentous amounts of trouble.
Zang/rando might not be what some of us want or enjoy. Maybe it is/was just the main game that did it for you, or it'll be everything done as a complete package that finally can let some people say "okay this is good now". Some of us should probably take a step back and look at things for what they are rather than Bloodstained needing to be saved from a status of failure. It mostly just has that in your headspace, and no single pieces of content out of 15 are going to change your mind if your approach to evaluate it is colored like that. Long story short, you might just need to play something else for a while, and come back to this when it seems like something is in it you want to do; if that happens. If not, totally fine - you probably already beat it.
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Post by purifyweirdshard on May 11, 2020 15:43:26 GMT -6
caer that could be said for pretty much all of these games, couldn't it? They're just not challenging for some fans unless you often impose arbitrary challenge upon yourself. Having access to all manner of silly things is how all of Iga's games work out in the end. Zangetsu is static so he starts there.
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Post by purifyweirdshard on May 8, 2020 13:57:13 GMT -6
This thread is an accompaniment to the new channel on the Discord server for sharing Bloodstained: RotN Randomizer mode seeds. This thread is for more long-form discussion and more quickly accessible tips and strategy on seeds, as well as more quickly finding screen shots and images. You can freely talk about your seeds and experiences with them here, as well as submit them using this template for a pinned compilation of community seeds (in the discord channel and here):
The template to submit a new seed is as follows
1. Name you would give this seed, and/or quick reference acronym nickname 2. Seed # 3. Why seed is noteworthy 4. Tips, suggestions or warnings for seed (you may put this behind spoiler tags) 5. Completion times by member
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Post by purifyweirdshard on May 4, 2020 19:05:20 GMT -6
You guys should create a poll about what people want in the game instead just throwing in ramdom stuff that the people that make the money that buys the game might not like, there isn't a survey or nothing like that especially for a game that was created with the funds of people and not your own. I am just saying Such a poll has actually been done - and it is not accurate at all to say they're coming up with random stuff. These things are the free stretch goals that were promised with the campaign. I don't believe it would be a good idea in any stretch of the imagination to just not do them.
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Post by purifyweirdshard on Apr 26, 2020 18:34:42 GMT -6
Oh my understanding was that it was Japan + Canada, but instead it was just Canada? That's pretty odd...either way, I'm asking around for some more confirmation/info. This started from some Japanese/LATAM accounts talking about it, so there may be some language confusion. It's entirely possible I guess that the JP guy was just like "it isn't out still " and we're interpreting that as it was there before but removed edit: Yo lai I just heard back from who told me about this (who also speaks Spanish) and the account above misunderstood. You're right, nothing has changed. That's good news
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Post by purifyweirdshard on Apr 26, 2020 1:22:10 GMT -6
It looks like GoS has been taken down on the Japanese app stores. Let me know if anybody hears anything more about this.
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Post by purifyweirdshard on Apr 23, 2020 14:25:22 GMT -6
Another year, another question. I just recently noticed that there are two Bloodstained forum sites: bloodstainedfanforums.com/ (not secure) and bloodstained.forums.net/ (secure) Now that I've noticed it, I'll make a mental note to login via the https version. Have there always been two versions and if so, why? The answer is in your question, heh. The former URL was not secure, so we started using forums.net's standard one which is. We tried to direct everyone to the forums.net URL with a thread and notifications, and updated as many links and resources we could think of that had the old URLs. Here's a thread Mike made about it: bloodstained.forums.net/thread/3830/update-bookmark-siteBut I guess a thread title more specific than "update your bookmarks" might have helped, like "For security purposes, use new URL for us here" or something. There was also a profile notification sent out to everyone, but I imagine it was cleared and forgotten pretty fast.
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Post by purifyweirdshard on Apr 20, 2020 13:36:28 GMT -6
They were working from home for two weeks at ArtPlay, but were back at the office starting last week. 505 is WFH. lol, thanks for the concern for their safety though What does WFH stand for? Glad to know they have been working from home WFH = work from home
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