Also the thing about Gourmand is that his story isn’t actually real. If you give moon a firebug egg, she makes it clear that you are just playing as the legend of a slugcat passed down and exaggerated with time. It’s weak, but explains away the unrealistic elements of the campaign.
Yeah I can appreciate what they were going with with gourmand being a story told to slugcats upon returning, but the official stance from the dev commentary being “yeah none of this is real” doesn’t feel great. Feels like a cop out to avoid making the abilities fit with the world.
@@tarot3078 the stories are definitely real but i believe that gourmand isn't that is exaggerating them, it's actually the slugcats that are exaggerating them as what we can see is that gourmand is wise he would never lie to his people, the reason why they exaggerate it is probably because... well, yeah the world is pretty harsh and it rains basically all the time, so for gourmand to return and magically have no scars they think is that he is pretty much G O D, so it would be reasonable to think he is pretty strong
please note: five pebbles may get more annoyed with the slugcats later on the timelline due to the amount of previous slugcats. for example, fp says he ignores his overseers but says he pays attention to his overseers because artificer is earlier on the timeline than hunter.
@@Mroziukz Spoiler Warning: FP Gourmand Dialogue (after hunter): In return I ask that you encourage your community, through whatever method of communication you choose to employ, to also go west. Off into the wastes below, far away from me and my work. FP Monk Dialogue (after survivor and gourmand): I am growing increasingly impatient with the traffic of your kind through me and my premises.
Well, 5P's changing attitude seems pretty normal if you count that the storyline is stretched across thousands of years and they WERE basically a teenager at the start.
I think the Iterators being more humanized makes tons of sense lore wise tbh. They were gods that literally had no agency, to the point where most even gave up the purpose they were built for. Them talking like discords mods is what they quite literally are. Powerful beings beyond purpose and very bored.
For me it's kind of a "Holy crap, two cakes!" situation. I absolutely love the og game, but I also was able to see the dlc as it's own thing, a passion project by tons of modders as a love letter to the game. It had it's flaws, like with the dialogue and story (maybe a bit too fan-fictiony at times lol) but it honestly was just a ton of fun and it even made me see the og game in a better way.
I think a big part of the problem, which I only learned after making this video, is that downpour is marketed as an improvement on the first cake and not a separate cake. I remember people getting very passionate about arguing that Downpour was NOT a collection of mods made official, and the fact that it’s an alternate universe with a separate canon was not made clear at all never sat well with me. If the latter fact was well communicated, I would’ve taken the story and character changes more kindly.
@@sorbetcafe this reminds me of a friend saying that downpour probably should have stayed in the oven for a little bit more which i agree, i feel like it could have been part of the main cannon is the downpour devs were told the game lore before launch so they could made it fit in it, and made spearmaster and riv campaign second part more the just a fetch quest, spearmaster especially since the second part of his campaign is kinda annoying with only being able to use one hand and not being able to use one of spearmaster ability to hold two spears
I think for this reason it's very important to have people play Rain World as a basic game, and ideally all the base slugcats before even touching downpour. The tonal dissonance is crazy. I personally really enjoy Downpour but I very much understand the dissonance.
@@snezor2783 while I understand saying that they should do all the base slugcats first, honestly doing hunter before any of the dlc slugcats is incredibly rough. I know there’s more impact to doing the hunter campaign earlier but the game knowledge needed to pull off a hunter run is honestly not worth grinding over just playing some of the other dlc scugs and coming back for hunter later.
I think the biggest tell that Downpour is a fan project first and foremost is how centralized it is around the iterators, who - frankly - did not really need additional stories, but so much fanon was about them because they're the only real "characters" in the game, so... ...also, while I understand the critiques around FP's dialogue, based on comms pearls in the basegame, a lot of the other iterators were already written a lot more human than him - in fact, FP and - what I think escaped the Downpour devs - Moon, have the most stilted and uncanny dialogue, even when talking to other iterators. Moon's actually a lot meaner than downpour wanted to write her, lol. I do think the whole vibe of "iterator to iterator comms as discord chats" was intentional, though I totally agree that the billion and a half spearmaster broadcasts were overkill. But I think downpour shines brightest when it's focusing less on the iterators and more on the slugcats themselves and, especially, the world - hence Saint's campaign generally being the one held in highest regard compared to the others. Also yeah hunter is still the most fun slugcat you are 100% right there.
I think Iterators would have been more interesting if they wrote them to have more flaws/act in a way that reflects an inherently different view of life. Such as spearmaster being a tool to be used, not a beloved pet that SRS loves. That was what I was getting at with the humanization/loss of their alien nature of being. Five Pebbles was the example I chose because he's the only iterator we have large amounts of pre- and post-downpour dialogue for, so comparing the changes felt most appropriate there.
Great video, very glad the tonal shift is being talked about. Been passionately modding the game for almost 3 years, and I can very much appreciate downpour as a mod. Hard to appreciate it as a DLC. This, however, is not at all the downpour devs' fault. What was originally a mod made with love and passion was rushed by the publisher's deadlines into a janky DLC that is easy to be read as canon, despite the devs stating it is an alternative universe. Mods having a tonal shift is 100% fine, it is, afterall, a mod and not an official extension. Downpour was not made with becoming a DLC in mind, and I do not blame the devs for taking up the opportunity to become a DLC. The state of the DLC is rooted in a series of unfortunate events rather than bad developer decisions. Much respect to the team, and I feel bad that they got their project a little gutted by the publishers. I can't say I have positive experience with downpour, but I respect and appreciate it regardless.
@@sorbetcafeThat's the issue, not many people know this because it isn't really stated anywhere, devs just said it on some social media platforms / forums and that's it I think. It is not meant to be canon to the base game, but the marketing makes it read as such. This also lead to the tonal shift in the whole community, because most believe downpour is canon. Makes it hard for some people (including me) to interact with the new influx of community members that came with downpour, because they see the game completely differently
@@thedarkking6568Sure, if the expansion was to be designed around becoming an official DLC, I agree. They didn't know they're gonna get such an opportunity, and I don't blame them for taking it. Mods usually *are* just extra content. If someone didn't like the mod, they can just not play it and accept it as a mod. It's harder to see an official DLC as an alternative universe. I do agree the stories bring nothing new to the table and only explore either what we knew or answer the questions that were left intentionally ambiguous by the base game, and that's what I found beautiful about it. Barely anything was explained to the player, and that leaves you wondering and thinking, coming up with possible answers yourself, but never knowing if you're even close to the truth. Ambiguity is powerful, rain world took advantage of it, and downpour kinda shut that down
Thanks for commenting, at least they mentioned that it isnt canon. You are being very respectful in these comments, and i appreciate that... Downpour and how the new fanbase overshadows the old one, and their videos on youtube, fill me with such sadness... i would have worded things quite differently. :) On steam, the watcher is called the fourth slugcat, i wonder if that means it will be like the vanilla cats, or that the marketing team is just very clever.
I do appreciate Downpour making the game feel more… mainstream, if that’s the right word. Yes it doesn’t deliver nearly the same kind of experience as the base game, but it also makes it more accessible for much larger of an audience. And though not as frequent, I did have the occasional moment of something 'clicking' without the game having to explicitly state it. For example, after I first ascended Five Pebbles, I died before I could hibernate and save. I was slightly frustrated and went over to do it again, only to find him completely limp. I was confused for a moment before I realized, "Oh, I ASCENDED him. He's GONE." It was a cool, chilling little moment for me. I also enjoy the larger story, though you did bring up a good point with Five Pebbles actually being ultimately useless to some of the campaigns he was essential in. Spearmaster and Rivulet are cool in the way that they're basically lap cats for godlike beings and do actually play a larger part in the story, but neither Artificer nor Gourmand needed that. They're the center focus of their own stories, not that of the larger narrative, and that probably could have been committed to better. I do have to say though that I absolutely loved that Monk and Survivor were given a new ending with the DLC. And gosh, did it get me. The survivor staring blankly at the empty tree where it once lived a simple yet enjoyable life with its parents, where it had assumedly not yet felt the cruelty the world was capable of dealing. All of that security was ripped away in an instant, and the little creature, then all alone, was forced to provide comfort, shelter and food for itself, with every moment of perceived safety capable of being shattered in an instant. There was no more illusion of safety, no more companions to protect it. Even the lizards that can be tamed can only provide so much companionship, that of which doesn't measure up to what it had before. When the survivor does find more of its own kind, (as Monk's cutscene implies it canonically does, at least in this ending), they're just tiny pups. It has companionship now, but IT is now the guardian. IT is now the provider, the one responsible for providing safety and security, for keeping a creature alive, just for it to have the luxury of being carefree. Those same pups are still carefree once they return home; to them, this is a new place to explore. To the survivor, its a husk of a memory, every second spent there a cruel reminder that what he once had, what he had fought so hard to return to, was gone. But then Monk, a character who I find to actually be quite admirable but cursed with an extremely boring campaign, returns as well. He too had faced nearly identical hardships, not out of a tragic accident like his brother, but out of selfless compassion. All along his journey, Survivor truly did have someone looking out for him like he had with his whole family. It was not truly lost. They may be the only ones remaining, but they remain together. Monk got what he wanted by reuniting with his brother. Survivor, although not reuniting with his old family, did still get his desire. He had *A* family. The comfort and familiarity of the past in his brother, and his two new pups, who just like him, had been separated from their original families. All of them lost, and then found in each other. None of which requires interfering with the passing of random gods to achieve. I love it.
I'm glad you can still upkeep your tone of genuine criticism while trying to get across your points. I'll admit, I think you are too attached to the idea of a maximum difficulty experience upholding OG Rainworld's view of vague, hardly visible story points that put off a large number of people from the game; I don't agree with a large portion of the things you say, but what I can agree with fully is that you're aware of what purpose Downpour had in giving more to the community and breathing life into it. You're aware of the purpose it has served to the game, and you enjoyed it with your criticisms in hand. Good takes.
Yeah, it's difficult going from the "best game I wouldn't recommend" to a game that I can have an easier time telling people to play because it's more approachable, but find less enjoyable due to those changes. I know that the perspective I have isn't going to be universal, but I also know I'm not the only person with that perspective and it's something I very rarely see addressed.
@@sorbetcafe Kudos to you for sharing that perspective. As someone who has very little issue with Downpour and more with the base game, I find it legitimately refreshing and enjoyable to see these takes due to how uncommon or often stifled it is. Keep up the good work
I like Downpour, and agreed with most of your points as well. It is tonally distinct from the base game, the new slugcats are very powerful and not really a part of the ecosystem in the same way the base game slugcats were, and _maybe_ some of Five Pebbles' dialogue could have been more consistent too. I also never even noticed that they forgot to implement the lineage system into all of the new regions, that's probably the biggest problem mentioned in this video that I agree with. That said I still would like to nit-pick for a while, particularly about the iterator dialogue. The human-like style of dialogue that you attribute to Downpour is present in much of Moon's base-game dialogue and in the Sky Islands pearls, and Moon, SRS, and one other unnamed iterator even use tildes. So really all Downpour does is follow what is already established in the base game, it didn't invent anything new. Five Pebbles' dialogue just seems to be an anomaly. Furthermore I would argue that NSH in particular is actually _more_ complex in Downpour than he is in the base game, not less. He does crack many jokes as he does in the base game, but he also clearly shows a lot of care for Moon, even threatening Five Pebbles in one particular broadcast.
Tbh I really liked the dlc. I learned about the game not so long ago, shortly before the release of downpour, and perhaps due to my lack of maturity, I absorbed all the content with great pleasure and did not see any shortcomings. But after watching the video... I don’t completely agree with the statements, but it opened my eyes to many problems of the Dlc that I had completely ignored, although I still adore the game both before and after the downpour Thanks for sharing your opinion (Sorry if there are mistakes here, I don’t know English very well)
I think the criticisms here are valid, but it doesnt change the fact that I enjoy downpour significantly more than the base game. I think the fact that downpour deviates from the tone of the original game is absolutely a good thing, like you said theres no exploring this world blind and discovering the iterators, echoes, ect for a second time. At the end of the day any work of art needs to evolve over time instead of rehashing the same beats over and over in a futile attempt to recreate the original. I think taking time to explore the story of the iterators was a great direction for rain world's DLC, however i think after downpour its time to somewhat move on from the iterators. I'd like to see future DLCs or mods expand more on the games ecosystem and build up the world more outside of the ancients and iterators. PS Your perspective on the downpour scugs being too overpowered is bcs you are a god gamer 😂
yeah i realized it might be moreso because I can use the slugcats to their full potential, which is MUCH higher than hunter. Artificer's parry, once you know how to use it, is disgusting and makes you nigh unkillable as long as you aren't overheating. As far as enjoyment, I've gotten more playtime out of downpour, but personally the most enjoyable times I've had in the game have been as the 3 base game slugcats. I still have a fun time going back and replaying them, whereas the only times I've replayed the downpour campaigns were for this video and when I did them on a dancepad.
I don't think the iterators way of speaking is caused by them being machines. It just reflects the culture of their creators, the ancients, who are extremely pompous and verbose in their Pearl messages. The iterators are actually less officious than ancients when they talk, although that's probably because the context of communication. Instead of making iterator dialogue more stilted and computer-like like you suggest I'd rather it would be more reflective of ancients alien cultural quirks, like their naming conventions, hemaphroditism, contradictions between their ambition and wanting to escape the cycle, and so on.
TRUE! I think it’s a mix of both, more in that being a machine is bound to cause some disconnect between them and the culture of the ancients, but yessss yes absolutely.
Very potent video! I agree with the broader points, but I wanted to add my 2 cents on the artificer endings anyways; I've always felt like the ascencion for artificer wasn't the correct path, the actions the scavengers take is clearly overblown for what is clearly a child and the scavengers ARE clearly intelligent, at least, intelligent enough to hopefully understand that children should not be literally KILLED for a misunderstanding such as this, choosing to forgive them has always felt wrong, and I choose violence every time I play her
@@thedarkking6568 Artificer's abilities also seems like the most "they are there just because they are cool" out of all the slugcats. The abilities of Gourmand and Saint are strange too, but I think the environment and story could somewhat excuse it in their cases. I think the karma works well for Artificer's story though. The "intended path" of going after the chieftain shows Artificer becoming completely absorbed by the karma of rage and violence.
Artificer's children were murdered by a single toll tribe in Garbage Wastes, not the entire scavenger species. Do you really believe that they all *deserve to die* because of what one tribe did? Consider that the scavengers probably have children too, and even if Artificer only kills the adults, the children will surely die without their parents' protection. The ones outside Garbage Wastes might not even know why Artificer is attacking them, the Garbage Wastes scavs could have easily kept it a secret out of shame.
@@thedarkking6568 in the game when you lose a slugpup, if they die and you save, you do not get them back. Same thing for tamed lizards even back in the base game if I remember correctly? Could just be a gameplay thing, but since a big theme of the game is reincarnation and seemingly each death is meant to have actually happened in your run, maybe each creature just has its own separate cycle. Doesn’t Moon say something like “our cycles will meet again” to Saint? That may be why Artificer doesn’t see her young again, even if they aren’t fully dead. They just aren’t with her anymore. I also think the overkill is kind of the point. The game doesn’t hide the fact that Artificer is the bad guy. Pebbles of all people is appalled with her way of life. The echo in Metropolis tells her to stop. The ending art of the campaign is done purely in red tones, most of them being dark. That isn’t how you portray a hero. She’s a grieving mother, yes, and her pain is not something to be taken lightly, but she takes it out on EVERYONE. She just keeps going and going. The path she took was a conscious decision. She chose vengeance. She chose to be a monster. And now there is no turning back because the entire scavenger population rightfully sees her as a threat to all of their lives, but she wouldn’t want to go back anyways. She’s morally horrible and I love her.
Honestly for artificer I do think it's a case of both sides being at fault. The scavengers are clearly intelligent as is demonstrated by their graffiti, tolls, crafting etc. However they also do not necessarily have morals that are anywhere near similar to human morals due to the subjectivity of such a thing. They are shown to be very to the point with their loyalties and affections. If you help them you are friend, but if you disrespect their authority kill and steal you are enemy. In terms of justification imo artificer lost theirs when they went on a multi region rampage, bathing the land in scavenger blood. Arti's campaign ends up feeling like they are a tragic villain of sorts, since in response to a painful tragedy they end up taking revenge, and then go on to bring what they experienced hundredfold onto uninvolved innocents to satisfy their own undulating rage.
Something that I think really distinguishes the base and downpour slugcats that wasn't brought up in this video is that the downpour slugcats are still very or at least fairly effective using just their body with no items: - Gourmand without items can either cough up random items or use their body as a weapon - Artificer without items can still blast at high speeds and sort of use their body as a weapon through concussive blasts and mauling - Rivulet without items can still go high speeds, being able to ignore the already non-threatening (except for the rain in the first half of the campaign) ecosystem - Spearmaster without items can fairly quickly become Spearmaster with 2 spears (Again body as a weapon) - Saint without items can still swing at high speeds, though this is the least extreme example because items do become more important in close-quarters where Saint's tongue isn't as useful With Base slugcats, whether or not you had access to a spear, rock, cherrybomb, suidcada, etc. would have a large influence on how you went about dealing with a problem, but with Downpour slugcats, you always have an at least fairly strong option to use or fall back on no matter what your inventory or immediate surroundings are. Also, thanks for this video! It really resonated with me, and many of the points made were good ways of wording thoughts that were either consciously or subconsciously in my mind.
Very interesting video. With more niche communities I think people can be quite enthusiastic about the object of their love and blind to its flaws, plus feeding lovers of human character interaction and such (scugs as iterators' pets) is generally going to get people more hyped as opposed to critical. People really like the "iterators as god-teenagers on Discord" thing and it's a valid concept on its own, but tonally disparate from what others may have loved about (and from what one of the creators intended for) the base game. This reminds me of those few who loved the original No Man's Sky and found that the changes, almost universally praised, drove it away from what they had found good. But forever, vanilla is canon to downpour and downpour is not canon to vanilla. A mod to change some of the game's writing could be interesting, though, although from the looks of it you'd want for some campaigns, like Rivulet's, to be entirely different? Five Pebbles feeling remorse is a tough one-it's narratively satisfying, but perhaps not faithful to his character. I'll think about this. Also thanks for not taking from real iterator RPs (don't know if it actually happens, presumably it does?), your point was still made interestingly without having to harp on some server randoms just passionate about a story. I would call Downpour an AU-and AUs are valid. Downpour is a story of the tragedy of hubris, how if you do not consider others you may bring yourself down along with them, of god-machines obsessed with death and the ultimate humanity they found in the darkest of their moments. I think people find this more compelling than the base game's story, simply about being a creature in a lonely world where they are nothing more than a creature, where life is hard and unforgiving and part of a great cycle. The latter is rare and unique and I think we shall not see something like it for a long time, but I can understand why people love the former-I do too.
The main campaigns I would want to be tweaked are spearmaster, artificer, and gourmand. Rivulet’s story itself isn’t bad at all, for better or worse the role of the slugcat is now what it is. The dialogue feels off, though, and the interesting quirk of short cycles shouldn’t be turned off once you get your most powerful tool. It’s also just hard to balance rivulet’s world with their mobility, the lack of a meaningful ecosystem is kind of unavoidable. Something like spearmaster has bad dialogue and a story that feels meaningless, artificer I felt would be a more impactful journey without an iterator (I had the concept of the scav chieftain instead being a matriarch to echo artificer’s own story, with the final act being killing her children and becoming the tragedy that made artificer in the first place. A point for the player to truly reflect on their actions and decide whether the vengeance is actually worth it), and gourmand getting the mark just to be called fat never sat right with me, especially as a mandatory story event. > Five Pebbles feeling remorse is a tough one It’s not so much that he feels remorse, more so that the way he expresses it doesn’t feel true to his character. The point I was making there was more that Five Pebbles was rewritten to be a very different character in downpour, which isn’t necessarily bad, but he lost the unique traits that made the character more interesting.
Downpour isn’t only the story of hubris, it also shows how not wanting to hate is almost as worse as hating everything. It’s implied Moon had the power to stop FP from stealing the groundwater supply, but she never seemed to wanted to hate him, even if for a bit. Her own kindness was taken advantage of, and she collapsed. She still retains her will to live, because she still has hope in what remains. Five Pebbles desired an escape because he hated the world. And the world hated him back. (seeing as how moon’s broadcast came at the right time, the right place to make him fail) His own animosity towards everything ruined his own world for him, and sparked the decision in the first place. Then the consequences of his actions catch up to him, and he collapses. Unrelated: I’ve had the moon situation happen to an online friend. It’s good to be empathetic. It’s good to be kind, but please set boundaries.
If i recall, all of the dialouge between Suns and NSH were written by a fan of rainworld, being let onto the team for downpour. I am not saying this in a negative way, i always think its great when fans get to help contribute to media they love.
The mod-turned-dlc itself is written by fans and superficially revised by the devs to fit a mold it was never trying to fill in the first place. The end result is years of community AU fanfiction very hastily attempted to be bent into a vaguely base narrative-coherent shape to appease deadlines
Very well made video and very cathartic for me. I spent hundreds of hours in Rain World pre-Downpour. Speedrunning, doing challenges, lore scavenging and the like. (Now forgive me for complaining but I will get around to some praise at the end) Downpour's tonal and direction changes completely killed my passion for the game after I 100% it. If there is one thing I would say that makes downpour detract in it's emotional power and original direction, besides some very exceptional moments... is that Downpour is way too arcade-y. It feels too much like I'm playing a game and not an incredible emotional and spiritual journey. I played Rain World originally with everything spoiled and yet every single part of the journey had me fully immersed and left me with chills reaching Five Pebbles and the entire depths sequence. It feels like slugcats are the center of this universe and everything revolves around them as their super powered abilities just shatter the naturalist feel of the original despite being in an almost entirely industrial world as we are causes, or a least directly present, for a lot of massive events that really don't matter to the slugcat but matters to the player (more immersion breaking). Saint was phenomenal until it turns out you are basically god, sent to bring about a new age. There could be some really cool exploration of "redeemer" type figures but it just feels like the cherry on top for everything being so op now. The slugcats feel too intelligent at times, even if purposed organisms; beings that really just feel like they are the iterators' favorite pets. It makes no practical sense that they are the iterators chosen messengers now, when you could just send a vulture to deliver something (and Spearmaster's pearl is said to guide the slugcat so the argument of "vultures are too animalistic to work" doesn't make sense (same with saying slugcats *aren't* animalistic)). That heightened intelligence made the line "always the same blank expression" said by Five Pebbles to Rivulet, not work at all. Ecosystem balance was very ??? for me with how much they just orange lizard spammed to make the game more difficult because the slugcats are so op. An egregious example is the Miros Vulture, it just feels so out of place and just added in to have some new great threat that isn't original at all (which is true with a lot of the new creatures). Downpour could be so much better (or at least much more aligned with vanilla Rain World) if it was more focused on exploring new lands and not stuck with Iterator high school angst fanfiction with super powered slugcat pets. A very meme-y way of saying it but I believe it to be true. There is some really good parts Outer Expanse is great, even if the rooms feel very weird (but I can just believe it's terraforming from Ancients/Rain issues) Saint is so well done, especially undergrowth. It's just becoming god that's such an issue to me and I would like to see a *few* less creatures in the world/cold but that's a small thing The actual gameplay of the new slugcats are fun, even at the price they bring in terms of lore and world building issues. Rain World is more talked about, but I just wish the original greatness was highlighted more than "omg cute slugcat" and "iterators ahhhhhhhhhh" Ugh, why does every positive have a caveat, it's so hard to like this dlc Tangent over, probably makes no sense or sounds like elitist og player gatekeeping but yeah. I don't hate the devs or anything, it's understandable when you have modded content being made into official DLC. It's great as a mod but as official content? It's rough. Especially when everyone takes it canon when it's officially not. The shift in the community since Downpour is noticeable and makes it hard to interact with for me when so many new people see the game in a completely different way than I do.
finally someone with a similar opinion about the tonal shift from the lost, dying, or scared slugcats to the absolutely broken downpour ones. Don't get me wrong, I love all of the new areas besides pipeyards, and I love the new stories. Some of the changes and additions to the map and world make the base slugcats feel more complete. The downpour cats are just so strong in comparison to hunter or survivor, and I dreamed up my own mod as a response to that. While brainstorming for new slugcat traits and abilities I went to Daszombes server to get more creative opinions, but what I really got was feedback that completely missed the point of the original game and the vision for my project, "Your character isn't unique enough, give it actually good abilities." The Mutant is the lone survivor of a mutated and deformed litter, radiation poisoning kills the parents. Out of X mutant slugpups, one is chosen at random as the start of the campaign. Half blind but with super hearing abilities, or an extra, cumbersome, arm that can only hold small objects. These are the only two concepts that I have a complete vision for so far. I was originally only going to have debuffs that would force some new kind of situation or playstyle, but prompted by the feedback I thought up small buffs to make the characters feel slightly more fair. This project actually is in development, but we are still 4 years away from finishing the regions, and we don't have anyone who is currently able to program new enemies or the unique implementations of some of the mutations. There's still a lot of play testing and things that I want to do to ensure the quality of the mod. This is absolutely a pipe dream, and one that I need to finish for my own sake. Your analysis of the way the base game conveys narrative is extremely useful. I want my mod's narrative to be conveyed well, but I lack experience. The only thing I can do is discuss, analyze, and imitate what the base game does so well.
The thing is with the iterators, they’re ai, with artificial emotions a d artificial thoughts. They were made to do a specific task but having normal conversations would be expected of something that will get bored. They talk to eachother because they want to, not only to solve the problem they were made to solve
I think downpour did a great job in illustrating the past, present and future of its world, some regions are different from another depend on the timeline. And also, downpour had the best campaign I’ve ever played: Saint :D
Thank you so much for taking the time to make this. You have perfectly encapsulated so many of my misgivings with Downpour. Like you, I admire it immensely as a work of love and effort, but it's held back by what is simply a lack of understanding of game design that that the original Rain World demonstrated so well: 'Cool' is not as important as restraint. 'Powerful' is only rewarding if you are also sometimes weak. 'Fun' is not always the right choice for every moment, especially if you're trying to make people feel something, and create an experience than stays with someone. What really breaks my heart is how CLOSE some of the aspects got, only to miss the mark. Like, Gourmand would have been a cool 'alt-slugcat' if he just had the increased spear power and stomping attack, in conjunction with his exhaustion mechanic and smaller jump. But to that we add meals..? Crafting...? Gah... In some respects, Downpour's biggest weakness is the same as Elden Ring's: It could be improved so much simply by subtracting things from it. Less dialogue. Fewer directives. Smaller superpowers. So many of Rain World's best moments were when there wasn't anything flashy going on: the long and tense swims in Shoreline, the careful outwitting of a lone lizard, the satisfaction of filling your belly after living on the brink of starvation for several cycles. Give me more space for Rain World to be Rain World.
Around the end of 2022, I sat down to do another playthrough of rain world after not playing for a while. Erased save data, new survivor campaign, let's go. I didn't get out of outskirts before I got bored and quit. The main flaw with rain world is also its main strength. The feeling of your first playthrough is carried SO hard by that sense of wonder and the unknown. It really works to their advantage. The problem is, once you know everything that happens, without that sense of wonder, the game is. Kind of dull if I'm being honest. There's only so many self imposed rule sets and challenges you can do. One thing I will give downpour is that it brought that initial feeling back. As flawed as it is, it really helped in briefly rekindling that curiosity. Now I'm in the same situation as I was before downpour, just burnt out and bored. I hope so much that the rumours of more new content are true (but only if the devs HAVE actually learnt from the downpour mistakes) since mods really aren't the same. Downpour isn't perfect by a long shot, but it managed to make the game feel a bit new for a while, so I still think it's a net win
Also not many people seem to know but downpour was almost entirely fanmade. It was originally meant to be a mod, and only became official towards the end of the development process
on one hand, i would absolutely love another slug which felt like the base game with new wonders. But on the other, i feel as though the entire story of rainworld has been masterfully wrapped up and it would be kind of strange to keep it going.
After reading a lot of the comments, I think people didn’t fully understand the lore of the base game before going into downpour. The iterators are exceptionally “human”. The way they communicated with each other was familiar and informal. I loved downpour and yes I loved the story too.
This is a great video, and I agree with pretty much everything in it! I share your stances and Jimmy McGee’s about the fundamental disconnect between what made the original game such a magical experience and what downpour was. I think he put it best when he said downpour was “about as good as it could have been”, knowing that deviations would happen, but still enjoying it for what it is. It makes me a bit nervous about the upcoming updates to the base game, but I hope videocult hears these critiques and takes them to heart to make the expansion just as magical to new players as the original game.
Yeah, I mostly made this video because more updates are planned, and I'd like to see those updates not make some of the same decisions. I still get emotional reading through Hunter's dialogue, particularly Moon saying "I hope... this was meaningful for you. It was for me." That, to me, is absolutely beautiful, as are her lines immediately after waking up, in a way that nothing in Downpour accomplishes. Downpour ruins a lot of impactful moments with things like the "And as your Big Sis, you know how protective I am of you!~" line. I have no doubt that future updates will be fun. But I want to see more of Rain World, not more of Downpour. I fell in love with art, not a platformer.
Cool video! While playing through downpour I couldn't help but feel something was wrong, and I sympathise quite a lot with this video. Imo, most of the new content added misses the themes of the base game, kinda dumbing rain world down to another platformer with some expansive lore. Before, I felt rain world didn't give you all the answers, and didn't appeal to fan service, leaving a lot of things up to the player to interpret, wheras downpour takes this away. For example, as cool as saint's campaign is, I don't particularly like the finality of it: the base game would've let you interpret what happens in the future, without you being there to see it, which i feel also ties into the theme it set up that the world will move on without you, and that as slugcat, you don't matter. Same with the carefully crafted ecosystem, which was one of the main reasons i first picked this game up: downpour doesn't give much care to it, giving all the new slugcats overpowered abilities as if they're above everything else. Videocult put a lot of effort into making a believable environment that you were apart of, whereas downpour suffers from making the slugcats gods. I appreciate the effort put into downpour from the devs: you can tell the whole team had a lot of love for rain world, and admittedly, I enjoyed a lot of the expansion for a while. But looking back in retrospect, it really steps over a lot of what made rain world truly special. I'm glad (even if they didn't made it obvious) that the team clarified downpour isn't canon to the base game, so I can carry on playing as survivor and hunter without a worry. At the end of the day, it's my opinion tho and everyone has their personal preferences.
Pretty harsh at times but I agree. To be fair gourmands crafting of a singularity bomb is VERY hard to find and craft, you need two karma flowers to craft one bomb. I loved your restructure of artificer. I have never had much lag or crashes. Mods change that making it pretty unstable. Overall good video, and something that needed to be said.
I very much enjoyed this thoughtful analysis and it brought up many points. However, with regards to Five Pebbles and Looks to the Moon: They are people. They might be very alien, but things are only ever alien until you learn more about them. I acknowledge a few inconsistencies, but overall, I don't see a problem with revealing more of the lore. I do admit that some of the lore is more obvious that it once was, but I like that it reveals things that were previously speculation. It answers some of the questions we had about it, and that allows us to understand more of the situation of the iterators in a way we never could before.
While I agree with some of the stuff you've said, I have a large disagreement on what you've said about the iterators. Especially the five pebbles section. Though it makes little sense for spearmaster to have any idea what's going on with the iterator comms, I still enjoy them and I think the iterator discord chats are mostly in character for everything I understood about the iterators pre-downpour. From what I've heard in relation to Five Pebbles, I believe I've seen a developer mention how pretty much all of the Five Pebbles dialogue in downpour was first sent to Joar, the original writer of Five Pebbles, and essentially given an A+. A large issue of downpour for me is already stated in another comment, the unclear nature of the DLC, its story, and its separation from vanilla rain world, as well as some of the internal development issues I've heard about it. It annoys me to no end that I've seen, and continue to see, a large amount of confusion over Downpour being separate from Rain World, as well as the canon status of a certain challenge. Another issue that feels a bit lesser is my incredible suspicion of akupara games, Buddy, and whatever was going on in the development of Downpour. I recall a time when the server was up in flames with developers claiming about a lack of communication from Akupara and the lead dev, as well as some issue about trading cards being awkward and containing creature spoilers such as Daddy Long Legs, back before or just after downpour released. I'm not sure what to make of it though as I'm not nearly as active in the RW discord anymore, and it all just seems to have been swept under the rug with Buddy going like "This is my reaction to all this: ._.". I've also seen a few others still complain about Akupara Games. EDIT:I'd also agree somewhat on narrative diversity. While I loved downpour and its stories and gameplay, I do dislike how almost every campaign (except saint) ended up being "Go find Five Pebbles." I do dislike how his the entire movement of the story. He gives you the pearl to give to moon as Spearmaster, he fixes your drone and tells you to go kill scavengers as artificer, he opens the gate to outer expanse as gourmand, and he tells you to get the rarefaction cell as Rivulet. I do hope that in any future stories they rekindle the exploration from survivor and saint where the plot isn't just "Go find local iterator and do what they say."
34:44 Challenges? Absolutely not. These were absolute worst part of entire game. I'm not kidding or exaggerating. These were the most rage inducing and miserable experience with very small exceptions. If anything it reveal so many flaws of game mechanics + controls and lack of play testing. Aimed for most sweatiest players out of there. A lot of them unfair, sadistic or near impossible.And some require wiki or internet search cuz how obscure solutions are
What is exactly your issue with iterators being basically humans operating a giant supercomputer facility? That has always been the case. In one of the Sky Islands pearls (pre-downpour, mind you) Suns reassures Pebbles about *every* iterator being frustrated with the search for the solution to the great problem. Moon tells that many go insane in their cans. I doubt a cold unfeeling machine would be able to experience something like that. Story-wise, iterators being human-like is *integral* to the chain of events that has happened. Pebbles getting frustrated with his predicament and isolating himself or Sig trying to aid his dear friend and creating a messenger. Iterators are individuals who can and do care about each other Iterators have always been kind of silly with each other in the group chats, you either didn't really care about the pearl dialogues or straight up didn't mention them on purpose for whatever reason and your examples feel unnecessarily nitpicky at times, on top of calling them "fanficcy" edit: typo; irrelevant point removed, i was wrong
meh, i dont think artificer is that unbalanced at all. she is literally just a death machine for everything else, but her campaign is pretty heavy in scavenger combat, which to be honest, already has people whining about the difficulty in metropolis, and if it was something like just regular survivor then it would be completely unfair. everything else in this video is super valid though. there's even dev commentary saying writing dialogue for FP was a real struggle. broadcasts as spearmaster are implemented very weirdly yes, but i can't help but feel they were just there as an extra lore dump. like, you encounter like 2 if you're not actively hunting for them. I guess for that they could just add more pearls but i cant imagine the pain of having a region with 7+ colored pearls. I'm shocked this video did not bring up rubicon.
I never really had strong thoughts on rubicon, it was just kinda there, never had much trouble with it and very rarely end up there since it’s not in expedition and I very rarely play Saint. It’s weird for lore and it feels very odd in terms of gameplay, but everything in Saint is a fever dream anyway.
I'd argue artificer is unbalanced, since the only thing to really check your power is scavenger spam, and everything else is just free food. The regions themselves are varying levels of suited to interesting scavenger combat, with some rooms like the garbage industrial transition rooms just being unfair. But metropolis is imo the worst for the scav spam since it is mostly just flat planes and plafforms on various elevations making the combat kind of boring and frustrating. Scavengers being a lesser spammed enemy in the roster would already be interesting while you brave through hunter spawns, atleast if artificer wasn't so busted with their abilities and crafts.
I agree with you on some points, but I think you're too harsh on the dlc. Keep in mind you're anything but an average player btw ^v^ I think the dlc slugcats are well made. The difficulties vary, but I think every slug is hard or enjoyable in some way. The double jump of Artificer, unlimited spears of Spearmaster, and tongue of Saint are all very useful movement abilities that don't feel wrong to me in a world where there are lizards with telepathy and explosive propulsion systems that seem to have evolved somewhat naturally. Artificer, Gourmand, and Rivulet have abilities that open up new higher level play. My favorite campaign was Spearmaster, because of the story of the Itorators. I think the characterization of them all is certainly different, but not bad. They're more human, and I think that's good. It's as if after all the time you spent with them in the base game, you get to know them better. Seven Red Suns in particular is interesting. They speak in a foreign way to others. They're more empathetic, in a sense, but still a god that is isolated from socialization. I agree with you about a lot though. Gourmand and Saint do feel like gods at a certain point. Gourmand is a folk hero who is a casual 4th wall break. Saint's ascension powers and whole plot are both unsatisfying and ungrounded. They both feel like utter jokes, and I did not enjoy them. I did however, cry a lot during Saint's campaign lol. Rivulet's rain timer disappearing, and Artificer's cutscenes, were things I didn't love, but didn't hate. Now that you brought them up though, I do agree that they should've been different. I don't think the Artificer cutscenes were up to the downpour team though. It feels like they would've done art if the could. Maybe I'm just crazy though. I wanted to point out that there are some big decisions you can make that the game doesn't tell you about, too. Ascending Pebbles or Moon was an option in Saint's campaign that never even occurred to me honestly. The confrontation between Artificer and the Scavenger Chieftain felt right to me in a similar way too. Finally, I didn't know about the lineage system being completely unutilized! That honestly makes me really mad! Thanks for voicing your opinion! I appreciate it as a fan of the channel ^v^
I didn’t really mean to come off as harsh on the DLC, but I wanted to be able to properly talk about the issues in it without having to sugar coat it. It often feels like there’s a near universal love of everything in downpour and there’s a stigma around criticizing it, which leads to the need to articulate criticisms very clearly and firmly rather than vague “I didn’t really like this,” statements. Most of the video is formatted as “here is a change that was made, here is proof of that change, here is why I don’t like that change.”
your criticisms of saint upset me greatly because they are easily the best DP 'campaign' due to its nature of being a love letter to the game itself rather than a 'story'. At least... to me.
My criticisms of Saint mostly revolved around saints actual mechanics and not the story/world. I didn’t mention Saint much in this video aside from that. Saint’s ascension in particular is REALLY jarring and tonally odd, it’s like playing with dev tools. Is that a necessary part of the love letter? Is saint’s campaign better for having it? Personally, I thought saint’s campaign was all downhill after hitting the last echo. That doesn’t mean Saint is bad, or the campaign is bad. A criticism of something you love isn’t black and white. Finding flaws in a good thing doesn’t make it a bad thing. @@elshelalu2027
@@sorbetcafe - One thing I think a lot about (with sadness) is how much more moving and effective the Saint's ascension mechanic would be if it didn't include the 'fly' and 'sniper scope' elements. You know what would have been perfect? Have the Saint ascend things by grasping onto them. Rather than gunning down Looks to the Moon, you simply embrace her and send her into the next world. It does double duty by allowing the endgame to maintain any sort of challenge.
Overall a very good and balanced critique. I agree with most of your smaller criticisms, though they don’t impact my enjoyment of the mod much. It was intended to be a mod with a separate canon from the base game, and - while I wish they would have made that intention clearer to the community - that clear separation allowed me to be perfectly content with the different goals of the DLC. I must say that I do think your criticism of the story, and particularly the handling of the iterators, was dramatically overblown. Yes, the dialog of the DLC is generally of lower quality than that of the base game, which conveyed its themes far better and generally had superior prose; these are certainly valid critiques. However, you spent a lot of time talking about how the DLC made the iterators into people, when in the base game they were dehumanized supercomputers. This definitely misses the mark. In the base game, the pearl dialog is filled with very human interactions between iterators, some of which you even show on screen but gloss over. I would argue that the iterators were very much intended to have human personalities and dispositions. Pebbles, certainly, acted very high-and-mighty with the slugcats, as you might expect from an inhuman supercomputer, but this was representative of his tragic flaw, the arrogance that had him believe he could escape his fate and ultimately led to his decay and the death of Moon. The DLC didn’t retcon the iterators by giving them personalities, it merely expanded on the slivers of the personalities we were shown in the base game (though whether the directions they took each iterator's character, and the extent to which they developed them, were any good is another story entirely). I would agree, however, that the base game absolutely makes the player _feel_ like they are dealing with an unfathomable alien god when they encounter and speak with Pebbles without diving deeper into the lore, and the DLC does not maintain this feeling in the slightest. Granted, I don't think it would have worked well with the very different goals the DLC had in mind, so that really comes back to whether you agree with those goals in the first place. One thing I'm very surprised you didn't mention was the story change that was the most aggravating to me by far: the idea that Hunter's illness was the Rot, through the introduction of the Hunter Long Legs. This is aggravating to me for many reasons, all exacerbated by the fact that now everyone in the community writes or draws Hunter as having Rot, and I can't stand it. Well, this comment ended up being quite long… sorry about that. Long story short, overall good video, though I do disagree somewhat with your interpretation of the base game.
In all honesty pacing change was needed. Hunter campaign already provides "vanilla but harder" experience. Therefore making slugcats with unusual abilities is necessary for providing sth new and interesting, and not just another hunter. Though i fully agree Slugcat abilities especially gourmand and artificer are absolutely overtuned. Gourmand abilities are just soo goofy, crafting system is weird and feels unreal. At least there is hint gourmand story is just that, an overexagerated story. For artificer idk, it just doesnt feel right. We get terminator of a slugcat with 0 explanation for those insane combat abilities and campaign tries to balance that by drowning player in scavs making everything absolutely chaotic. (large scav groups function really badly from both immersion and their ai standpoint). Definitelly needed some more work here.
i adore both the base game and the dlc, but i think the base game is still better. It is specifically tuned to created an ecosystem, and wildly succeeds in doing so. Downpour is focused on being more of a game, not necessarily throwint away the ecosystem, but noting it down eitherway. they're both still incredible though and i have absolutely no regrets spending the 15 dollars each on them.
@@ranninotfromeldenring2832 each? Wdym I buy the base game for like 25 bucks.. This is why I think the downpour is so worth and fun compared to the base game that only gives you 3
My own thoughts (please note I started playing AFTER downpour released so my arguments are littered with bias): -Downpour is just a bunch of fans making a story for the game, I wouldn’t think of it as definitively canon but most people (including me) tend to gravitate towards it because it adds more to the characters we love -Iterator dialogue in communications broadcasts and data pearls are meant to be silly chats between them, I wouldn’t expect them to be as cold. I do have to agree that as computers they seem too alive, but as biologically engineered creatures it makes sense for them to have personalities. -You seem to push the new slugcat abilities very far out of proportion. Spearmaster has infinite spears, but they can’t store anything, they are forced not to prepare and use battle instincts to survive. Artificer is not just an infinite bomb cat, she is hunted by a creature found almost everywhere and needs her combat and mobility skills to survive that. Gourmand is quite powerful, but struggles to use those abilities due to exhaustion. Rivulet is just more athletic than everyone else, they don’t seem too godlike when you realize they just go fast. Saint’s ending ability is quite overpowered, but before that they are relatively well-balanced in terms of enemy types, going up against ranged enemies like spitter spiders and flying enemies like centiwings. When you think about it these are just interesting gimmicks that are expanded upon. To add to that, -The mystery of the original game was great, but without downpour replayability seems stale after you’ve explored it all. I feel like downpour wanted to create new mystery by opening new paths, for example the ancients, by giving us just a little bit more about them the community has gone wild, I believe there’s an hour long video talking about just the ancients and what their culture could have been like. I do wish they kept more for new players. -I have to agree the “visit pebbles, go somewhere” formula is a LITTLE bland, but it is the same for the vanilla slugcats as well. -Overall, I loved the downpour DLC. The new slugcats are more like new classes to me. I think the environmental storytelling is still great, Saint’s bridge moment the greatest I remember. I’m glad more artists are on the team, but I wish the character select screens’ art styles mirrored the originals better. I loved learning every new thing about the world and each campaign left me with questions I was eager to find the answer to. As a community-driven project it won’t be the same as the original, but they did a good job making their own sort of sequel to rain world. It seems the DLC had more focus on story than gameplay, but I think that’s okay because the gameplay is already great. 11/10 I have played again
I love downpour to death but, the killer to me is the loading tips, they are the worst thing added to this game. Also I feel that each slugcat should have a creature that is common in there caimpaign that completely counters its abilities and makes you more like survivor. Arti has cyans which are just as maneverable though I feel something with explosion resistance would be better. Saint has zooplizards which I think are absolutely perfect for it, besides their rarity. The rest of them however, have nothing to counteract there otherwise kinda broken abilities. Also I think riv should have always had short shelter cycles. And regions like drainage and lower industrial, shaded, and garbage waste should be more flooded. And for the iterator Dialogue, I like it. To me at least, they seemed more human than the game lets on, they are very biological and clearly have personality. The whole point of five pebbles was him not wanting to be a bug, a cog in the machine which is what caused the chaos in the game. Of course, some of the dialogue could be reworked. Like what you mentioned, gourmand could have been, more rude like survivors and moon shouldn’t have as much of an immediate liking to riv and shouldn’t have told them how to get into submerged, that’s what pebbles overseer should have done moon should have told him to try and return it to where they got it and it should have been the player who choose to help her. Artis dialogue is fine imo five pebbles can relate to her a ton having an anger unable to be quenched due to his circumstances arti is like an outlet for his own struggles. And for the general tone throughout the caimpaign makes sense if you think of them as more human than robot. He’s growing as a character, however his growth comes after it matters, if he had his mindset he does in riv in let’s say arti it would have completely changed his fate. And his distain for everything in spear and his general, teenage audited makes sense for one of the youngest iterator with everyone talking down on him. Some things definitely could have gone better like creature spawns and some of the dialogue. Though most of it isn’t that bad and it’s still an amazing update even if what I said was moot.
Love the essay! Personally I've always disliked how Downpour became a story about iterators, when my favorite part of the original game was always about the slugcats and the ecosystem they exist in (it's telling that FP was my least favorite region in the og game due to the lack of interesting flora and fauna and ecosystem-like elements I fell in love with) I do appreciate how much replayability Downpour added, but I absolutely agree that Expeditions are the most interesting form of that. The new slugcats are too OP to rlly enjoy just living amongst the ecosystem. Not to mention how most of the campaigns are just fetch quests for... you guessed it, iterators! (Someone make a dialogue skip mod, please...) It's a totally different experience trying to live it out in a region with one of the downpour scugs compared to trying to live it out with Survivor, Monk, and Hunter. And god yeah glad somebody said it. Downpour dialogue is agonizingly cringeworthy, you can tell amazing coders made up the DP team but not great writers... like what is that dialogue when spearmaster comes into pebbles' chamber the first time with MoC. "Hmm SRS sent me a pearl okay I guess I'll read it aloud bc why not?' The blatant fanservice is physically painful sometimes
In general I agree with your video. The dialogue is definitely a bit iffy at points, there's a lot of "here's the full context, do exactly this" lines. Though I was mostly ok with Rivulet/SM's story being so iterator focused due to Hunter also being iterator focused. Iterators acting out like members of a Discord server is good but not great, as it is not beyond my own expectations of how hyper intelligent AI stuck in boxes for eternity would act like. For better and worse, Hunter normalized the idea that slugcats can have immense power when dealing with what are essentially gods, and I think all of the DLC campaigns took inspiration mostly from Hunter in terms of narrative. The hardest and most intriguing campaign of them all is Survivor IMO, because it's when you know nothing. Monk and Hunter reusing the regions made sense, they represent easy and hard difficulties. But I think the major flaw of the DLC is that they added all 5 slugcats at once. In a more normal dev cycle, each slugcat would be added one after the other, giving time for each to be tailored with more attention and detail. But because their attention was divided, all of the slugcats reuse the same regions and creatures with very few differences (I'd argue that even the Saint's variants are too similar in most cases). It makes sense to me that they made the DLC slugcats OP, because otherwise the player would have to spend significantly more time retreading through the same base regions just to get to the interesting new regions.
This might be my brain which has rain world as a core piece of it as of now, but i love downpour so much, of course theres a few flaws, but, i just love it. I've only gotten into rain world in early 2023, thats a good thing about that year for me. Sorry for rambling, i have many thoughts.
here before the video leaves the target audience or inevitably blows up cuz it's very well made. :D you've pretty much put my general thoughts in video even though there is some stuff i disagree with. i gen think the reason why rain world got so popular with the dlc was due to the main meaning/core message of the game being diluted/overshadowed by the fancontent of the DLC leading people to believe vanilla is "incomplete" and a canvas for "a bigger story"; i wanted to get the dlc because i could support the game, the devs and the modders; i just wish they made it more clear this was an AU and fancontent (not just because of the narrative shift issue but also because the og moders/devs that were brought in deserve literally everything in the world
I dont really have the same feeling with the OP of slugcats. You still get one shot and the one time you have a double jump you have an entire tribal species praying on your downfall so its balanced. But for rivulet, yeah shes just fuckin op when you remove the energy cell. With gourmand he isnt really a real "Slugcat" and instead is a depection of what the slugcats thought of him (mostly why his entire campaign only opens a gate) Saint is frail and unable to eat meat and cant almost store food for the next cycle. He also has to deal with intenser spawns a cold climate that freezes you to death but because hes "Sorta" fast its balanced (Atleast in my eyes) As for the spearmaster dialoge, I dont mean to start an arguement but you kinda said them in a very VERY annoying voice in order to show how bad there dialouge is, now this isnt bad its just that you used it ALL THE TIME even in the nice dialouge that I liked! and yes they are massive organic supercomputers but that doesnt mean that they dont have personalites if you locked even albert einstin in a room for 500 years he would go insane! The supercomputers talk like this because they are ORGANIC and have a sense of humor mostly because the ancients wanted that. Main reason why he plays his pearl at the end of rivs campaign
I haven’t watched the full vid yet cus work. BUT! I agree with everything so far except, i feel some of characters aren’t OP enough for the DRASTIC difficulty increase there put in. That being Hunter, Artificer, Spear Master. I got no problem with the rest of the characters. But what i call the ‘combat focused’ campaigns are just too harsh for me. In a game of 1 shots, they throw like 3 times the enemies at you, that are all much stronger or more annoying to deal with. Giving near the only option “get gut” & beat the enemies. Also i’ll say. Downpour added laggy or even game crashing situations in the game. That caused COUNTLESS deaths or ‘quits’ that aren’t really my own fault. Where as the base game ran smooth as butter for me. I in a way prefer base game. But i liked what they did with big boy, Riv, & saint. But i also agree. They coulda done things differently.
Honestly, the only part of downpour that really just.. didn't click for me, was artificer's whole campaign. Like, it feels NOTHING like rain world. From the story to the gameplay. It's like an edgy furry oc that someone just put into the game. It adds almost nothing to the major lore, with the small exception of letting us see 5P's stances on the lore pearls. The gameplay is less of trying to survive and more just combat. It feels more like hotline miami than rain world. Not to mention how absurd the whole story is. Gourmand's campaign get the excuse of it clearly being an exagerated story to be told to the slugpups in the colony, but artificer's story is straight up just a 14 year old's edgy oc. It kinda tries to redeem itself with the dreams and echo dialogue, but it just feels extremely out of place in rain world.
Glad to see these points articulated in such a clear and thorough way. I find it really sad that Rain World was only able to get popular because the integrity of its original vision was eroded, even if it was in the name of more content and accessibility. When new downpour fans call the survivor campaign an "incomplete story" or act like it's just a bland stepping stone to the dlc I feel disappointed; the original Rain World is one of the most meaningful artistic experiences I've ever had and it feels almost as forgotten as when the game was in obscurity.
I did start playing this game after the DLC and I did find Survivor/Monk campaigns a pretty weird story wise. Like, you are looking for your family at the start, even overseer points you towards other slugcats, but then suddenly your direction changes and now you are helping some random godlike beings and then proceed to take a dip in the soul dissolving pool. An animal with simple desires, not the advanced Ancients who were fed up with their lives. This was weird and I am glad DLC added alternative endings for them.
@SSpeed2000 The overseer tricks you into trying to help moon, it shows you other slugcats to make you follow it. It then directs you to neuron flies. It doesn't actually care about you at all, or you ascending, it's solely motivated by getting Moon neuron flies and keeping you alive to that end.
@@SSpeed2000 The restlessness the ancients felt is communicated pretty well to the player through the gameplay, and the experience of going from a lonely, tortured animal to someone who's let go of the expectation of meeting their family and accepts the world as unfair and full of pain reflects the game's Buddhist themes really well imo and is a really genius example of using gameplay to tell a story. There's a really good article by lesliebyvivrebrooks that goes into how pretty much all of the original game is designed to reinforce the Buddhist themes present in the narrative. I can understand how it can seem a bit jarring, though.
Loved the analysis. Couldn’t agree more. I did not even pick up on the tonal shift in 5P’s communication so this was quite eye-opening. Also, I’ve 100%ed the game and its’ DLC and I still consider Hunter to be my favorite slug… so **fist bump**
The DLC is like Avatar 2, it tells you everything at the beginning and the sense of surprise disappears. The correct way to do it was leaving more to the player interpretation, to leave the comminity make assumptions or theories about what is happening or why. One thing that rainworld did gorgeously was the ancients. The game only give you hints about them, but does not throws to your face everything about them. The game allowed the community to imagine how do they look, why did they use that architecture, what did they eat, what language did they speak, how did they build their iterators, like, how? I would loved to have seen moon more different than five pebbles in the spearmaster campaign, showing it's deprecated and old technology, with redundant systems or even robots. That moon facility had the tools to repair machines and that the main difference between pebbles and moon would be the use of bio-engineering and robots, respectively. The thing I liked less about rainworld was the dialog between iterators in spearmaster. I would prefered that those weren't in the game. And I hate that the developers leaved a lot of stuff in their discord than on the game, making the casual player unable to know that stuff, even making misinterpretations about the lore, for example, that the challenge 70 was not canon. I liked more about the assumptions that I make on my own about why moon died, how did pebbles kill her, why did he made that such a horrible thing; and not that he was being an annoying emo teenager. Or how pebbles got the rot, something like doctor House applying an alternative way to reconstruct the tissue in his leg knowing the possible consequences and ended up with cancer tumors. I would liked that five pebbles were more like doctor House in behavior, that even fits with the organic supercomputer thing. I don’t know if I can actually apply that changes to the game with a mod or something. It would be pretty cool if I can. (Sorry for the broken english, I tried my best)
Have you seen the mod for additional hunter endings? Lolight2 did a review recently of the endings and i feel the characterization of NSH is exactly what your looking for. would be interested in your thoughts.
that mod literally turns hunter into another downpour style campaign with a lot of flashbacks into yet another iterator... its the kind of thing this video is complaining about. Art is impressive tho, they are fairly close to Del northern's draws
@@jevmenyt3422 I take your point about the structure of the campaign. my question was about the characterization of the iterator. NSH seemed closer to a supper computer than downpours characterizations. However where the most mystery was the fandom was bound to explore so its unsurprising what we got. (Downpour originally being mods)
This is a nice perspective to get as someone who bought rain world like three or four years before downpour came out, never played it, and then got super into rain world after watching a bunch of let's plays on UA-cam
as a long time rain world player, downpour and its affect on the community have only got worse for me as time has gone on. i was so eager to enjoy it, but it was completely kneecapped by akus greed and impatience, and ive lost all faith that theyll bring anything positive to the community
Same tbh, whenever I play the game I think about this but not just when I play the game but even when I look at the community and modding scene and how they have changed since 1.5. It really feels like Downpour made it a different game, but it shouldn't, Downpour is a separate story.
Halfway through the video and yeah, I mostly agree with your points, as much as I love Downpour. I really don’t like most of the broadcasts, however, there is some neat info in some of them that characterizes SRS and NSH, which I do like (even if it’s written poorly). Maybe they could have like had the broadcast thingy they do in game but when you try to see it it turns into a pearl that you need to bring to Moon? And like, only 5 or so are necessary, not the whole bunch we got. Of course, they would still differ heavily from base game, as we barely got any personality for any other iterators other than Moon and Pebbles, and even then it’s not nearly as in your face as it is in downpour, but I do like seeing the more “human” side of them. Also yes I hate how wall breaky they are which is why I think that would work better. And maybe Rivulet still does the rarefraction cell thing, but is could characterized as more of a nomadic slugcat who likes to go on little journeys instead of just the slugcat that “fixed the bond between two god like entities” or whatever Moon’s dialogue is written as (kind of like how Gourmand and Artificer are characterized?). Oh and maybe they’re slower on land actually but to compensate they’re faster underwater and there are even more floods in than there are in downpour. And the gravity cell can’t actually be used, it’s just like a giant pearl you have to carry (not actually a pearl but like it’s useless to you while moving through the land). And maybe to up the difficulty the floods DO become less frequent after you take the cell and it’s harder for you to navigate because you’re slower on land. Edit 1: Ahhh I saw you dislike the human aspects of them, which I do like, even if I think a lot of the dialogue isn’t great Edit 2: Oh yes, I think the cutscenes should have been art, and I think your Spearmaster Dream idea is better than my broadcast pearl idea. Maybe we could see Suns slowly getting more closer to Spearmaster, and maybe one dream where Spearmaster peers over and sees Suns talking to NSH (because I do like the fact that they are made friends in Downpour) and maybe we see Suns looking somber when inserting the message into Spearmaster’s chest to know yes they do feel *very* guilty but less in your face. And I love the art at the end of Rivulet, if they had more of that in Riv that would’ve been amazing. And cut the Moon broadcast at the end it totally ruins the art cutscene that comes after
It's not that I outright dislike the human aspect, it's just that I preferred the feeling of them being more alien/strange. It's different, which isn't necessarily bad, but I find it less interesting,
@@sorbetcafeFair enough. I feel like there could’ve been away to make them mechanical and “human” at the same time (like how you mentioned Pebbles shows respect for Hunter and a small bit of care for Moon by helping them “aid in their rescue mission” so he definitely does care in base game it’s just not nearly as obvious as they make it in Downpour)
When Pebbles met Monk he gave him the mark to comment on his non importance and on how to off himself (aka, f off from his structure) When Pebbles met Gourmand he gave him the mark to comment on his 'roundness' and on how to f off from his structure (literally) Seems pretty close to me. Although the video as a whole is on point
Downpour is a fantastic game. Rain World is a fantastic *story.* I still liked and even LOVED the story Downpour told. But the way I see it, Downpour is about the Iterators. Which were, if anything, more of a backdrop to the basegame of Rain World. I still firmly believe Rain World and RW:DP being two seperate canons is what is best. I recognise that it feels less like an artful story that feels like windchills after rain, and more like a series of mythological tales you'd read in school or something
Regarding the different campaigns... Gourmand is basically a joke. However, I really loved the exhaustion mechanic. It really felt like something that belonged for a slugcat! (I hope to someday make my own modded slugcat that combines Gourmand's exhaustion mechanics with Hunter's ability and illness.) But the idea that Gourmand is just a story is kinda broken by his actions having a direct effect on the campaigns of Monk and Survivor... It's a sloppy mistake. But I like Gourmand as an easier alternative to Hunter. It does that well. Artificer... I hate Artificer... her abilities are stupid, and killing stuff every second gets tiring and it's so luck-based that you die constantly no matter how skilled or cautious you are. Spearmaster - I totally agree with your analysis. The only thing I disliked was the broadcasts. That was so stupid. Everything else was great. Rivulet was just too stupidly fast. And I thought Pebbles asking for his power supply to be disconnected was perfectly fitting for him! It feels so in-character. However, the idea that this power supply can be used to almost entirely revive Moon was silly. Saint was amazing. His tongue is unfairly overpowered (they should've made it not launch you upwards when retracting it), but his world was very well polished. And seeing 5P like that... amazing. And I think Saint's ridiculous "god mode" powers worked pretty well considering he seems to be an echo merely dreaming that he was able to help everything in the world with totally fake powers.
I paused and went frame by frame to read the iterator discord channels that shit was hilarious to read. I need more private dms between NSH and SRS. Good video
You are the only person I have ever seen to complain about stability in Downpour. I play on a disgusting potato laptop, i3 with fucking integrated graphics. I have finished the entire game, every campaign, every pearl, every broadcast, every bullshit challenge, I have 200+ hours. I am being %100 honest when I say this: I haven't experienced A SINGLE crash or major lag issue throughout it all. Is this really an important widespread problem like you make it out to be?
I also experience crashes, and quite regularly. Compared to the 1.5 era, when the game never really crashed for me, the stability of 1.9 has not been great. But I never experienced lagging. I also see many experiencing crashing, and they also crash regularly. I find it a surprise to see someone who never had the game crash on 1.9.
rubicon was one of my least favorite regions, and one of the biggest reasons was the fact that guardians and miros vultures on the same screen would cause my game to drop from 60 to like 20 fps. i have an i7 and 3070, so a lot of things were clearly not very well optimized, beyond the more common crashes from my experience.
@@soloraceschannelvery interesting. It's been around a year since I last played the game, so maybe a bad patch came out that messed things up some time? Never had the game before Downpour so I can't say anything about stability for earlier versions.
i'd like to say that i don't think it's a hellish world and you just naturally don't want to be there- if you did you wouldnt play the game at all. there are cases where that's not true though. i know that in the game its not because you want to escape but because you have given up on finding your family and are now lost and searching for a purpose
back when i just started playing rainworld which is earlier this year i know nothing about every slugcat even the downpour slugcats i dont even think they are op but rather a slight adjustment for their difficulty which brings variation to the game
i have no reason to tell you this neither can i blame you for this, but one of your mods ruined my life. don't think anyone will even read this nor care and not caring is probably the best thing to do(it's so stupid that i am even saying this because in reality i am just being incredibly petty and can't move on). overall pretty great video and it strongly reminds me of the difference between dst and original. don't starve together isn't quite the "uncompromising" experience it describes itself as. most characters don't have really major downsides but they have absolutely massive upsides. the closest thing to the uncompromising experience is Wormwood or Wilson. because they don't offer something ridiculous like double damage at the cost of eating slightly more and stronger sanity drain when you kill everything twice as fast. all downsides are basically overriden by the damage multiplier. and this applies basically to every character because all of them feel like Wilson but stronger(something that looks like an incredibly common thing in Rain World too). or newer bosses which mostly look like... someone's fursonas rather than a don't starve creature. especially some parts like Charlie after ancient fuelweaver which looks like she was ripped out of a different game. you can even see the direct difference in just short animations. the first one having this gritty aesthetic and the last ones which idk, just look more like a normal cartoon or smth. i think it's probably a common thing for the original artistic vision to just get lost overtime. haven't both of these games basically existed for years already? Rain World itself is like 7 years old and downpour is only 1 year old. it always sucks but i think it's just something that happens. though i still think the random insane power creep isn't something that naturally happens. i rarely play dst due to how the game is balanced making it boring and multiplayer actually being barely functional. and sorry for randomly guilt tripping you for no good reason. also the point about feeling powerful is so like uhh, idk but characters like Wormwood can feel incredibly powerful while still offering the uncompromising experience. they could in my opinion retain that feeling while still making characters feel strong. in fact i had a lot of moments where i felt strong as Survivor just because i killed 2 white lizards at once. you aren't straight up overpowered but the feeling of outsmarting, outmaneuvering, and overpowering a creature supposed to kill you feels incredibly satisfying even if it's probably entry level stuff. you can thrive and it's very much possible in both games but it always feels different to kill a boss as Wormwood rather than Wolfgang. and for extra clarification ignore me mentioning the admin thing. i do many stupid things
I started playing about a day before Downpour came out, and I guess I never really took the time to consider most of the stuff you bring up in this video... and now that I have, honestly I agree with you. It really does feel much more linear for everyone but Saint, and loses a lot of the charm of exploring that alien world and having your own free choices. Also holy hell yeah that new Hunter description is a crime, and so's the lack of lineage. I have complained about the dreams(or lack thereof) from my first playthrough of a Downpour scug though, so at least I'm not totally ignorant I guess lol
Maybe there was too much dialogue so they stopped bothering with the wording being the same style as before. Also with downpour crashes they've literally only happened to me if 1. I die or 2. After hibernating but it saves progress most of the time.
Oh and I was watching a friend play at one point and she was getting crashes every hour or two mid-cycle as survivor, made it really hard for her to play
@@sorbetcafe yeah might vary, I always thought it's because i have some mods on and I'm mostly thinking it's the vestiges mod but I don't remember karma gates getting bugged out on anything except trying to go to submerged superstructure while playing an enemy randomizer mod. Like i haven't played the downpour slugcats in a while so it could be worse now, I did get a crash every hour or two while playing the erratic pulse mod slugcat so maybe it's the same for others but it still was mainly on death.
As much as I loved downpour and it's story I have to agree with a lot of the points you made here. Pebbles' and Moon's downfall to me, is a story about god-like super computers getting humbled by the passage of time and their environment. They are not exceptions to the cruelty of the world, and through it they learn to look for comfort towards each other in their disheveled state and even acknowledging the lower life forms they've disregarded as a nuisance. But the way they executed it in the game though is ehm. The dialogue. Good lord the dialogue. It could've had more impact if they were more cold and calculating like you said. There's just too many tell not show which, in a game like Rain World of all things, where environmental story telling is one of its selling point, is not good. And they HAD good show not tell moments [SPOILERS] like the bridge from chimney canopy to the wall being absent in Saint's campaign, or the fact that the Chieftain scavenger having the mark of communication and a citizen ID drone. I really don't mind the scugs being like lap cats for them and having these cool abilities, I just wish they weren't treated like these special creatures favored by the iterators. None of DP scugs ever felt too OP for me (probably because I suck at the game) but the gameplay of go to moon->go to pebbles-> they tell you what to do-> go to new region to do the thing is just verry repetitive and takes out the whole being lost in a dangerous world aspect of the base game. I was also disappointed that Rivulet's short cycles was just gone towards the end of the campaign. The challenge was just not there anymore. But man does the repetition work so well when you get to Saint's campaign and it gets subverted. Which I won't spoil but damn was it the best part of downpour for me. Despite all it's flaws and how it didn't really capture the magic of the base game, I can't help but to love downpour because it was a source of joy for me in a stressful time. It clearly comes from a place of passion from the modders and I was able to enjoy it for what it is. This makes me want to see a mod that makes downpour more in line with the original. I tend to avoid discussions about criticism on it because it just becomes a whole argument on who's right and comes from a lack of maturity from both sides of the argument. Which is just the nature of the internet I guess.
Co op in the game is also really really unstable there are some regions you actually cant enter because it crashes as soon as you enter the karma gate pipe entrance and well a loooooottttt of other glitches im genuinely surpised they havent patched the bugs yet and are instead working on another dlc???
I agree that the dialogue in Downpour was.... messed up. I think spearmaster's campaign would have been better without the broadcasts, they add literally nothing. Everything about SRS they were trying to convey, about him caring about spearmaster, was conveyed in the menu picture once you finished spearmaster's campaign. I think they tried to humanize the iterators a little too much instead of leaving them a little more ambiguous. I like how Ruffles saved FP, but Moon's dialogue was too... childish. I also think that Artificer and Gourmand should have been left out of Downpour, especially Artificer, I will die on that hill. Saints campaign felt complete, but Ruffle's and especially Spearmaster campaign was lacking the emotion that the visuals and scant dialogue in the base game provided. The time that went into Artificer and Gourmand should have gone into the other three campaigns, and it really wouldn't have changed that much! I do want to remind people though that the iterators are still biological, and do have emotions. While i think that they ended up too childish in Spearmaster's campaign, I don't think that FP acted correctly in Ruffle's campaign. He is broken. He destroyed himself and others around him, and he is guilty now. He has no reason to maintain a god-like persona. Loved this video.
Downpour campaigns,expept for gourmand and saint are designed around you speedrunning the game to get to the new regions which are 4 times more difficult saint is weird,getting out of sky islands is very hard,cc is hard after it you just run through the entire game,even silent construct is pretty ez
this made me think a lot, i really liked how dp focused on iterators more, they were and are my favorite part of the universe, and i enjoyed how we got more of a perspective on their every day affairs. on the other hand i do see now how dp changed them. i dont think they should have been completely so alien and computer like like you seem to suggest, but i definietly think downpour made them too much like fanfiction. the line "no *human* talks like this" really resonated with me on this point. theres probably a middleground somewhere that makes them relatable and more human, yet still makes it clear that these are beings like no other. on the topic of gameplay i tend to disagree more. i cant imagine any version of downpour that added 5 unique and distinct slugcats without inherently making them overpowered. especially since the game would also start getting easier and easier for players after they've already beaten the game. i think at a certain point players are just so good at the game that by nature the ecosystem starts being irrelevant. I think moving on from that element of rainworld for the tradeoff of more fun campaigns was a good move. everything else im more or less in agreance with. id especially add that i hate how downpour ditched the evolution of creatures through time. in the og game , you could see entire species like centipedes and red lizards go extinct from hunter to monk, but now they just start reaperaing for no clear reason. thats just dumb and removes a really cool part of the base game. overall though, i think and hope that a lot of this can and will be allieviated with the watcher. with what seems like an entirely new world with entirely new creatures(something even the devs have said dp was lacking in) it could bring back that same sense of uneasiness and confusion. playing rw for the first time gives you this very unique feeling, where it seems like the very nature of the universe you live in is now unlike what you could ever grasp. im hoping the watcher can replicate that feeling, but i guess time will tell. tldr good video made me think :)
According to the devlogs one of the devs has a whole presentation on the progression and migration of the different creatures, so no, they didn't ditch that, there is a logic that we just don't know of
this is just hate, I get that you are nostalgic of the first campain, but you don't keep in mind that the timeline changes, iterators are semi organic living beings, they grow as living beings and change, they suffer from the wait and try to help each others deal with it, and gameplay wise, most of the downpour slugcat are NOT op at all, abviously if you just describe their abilities, they seem OP, artificer is OP, but her campain is filled with scavengers ready to kill you at any time, gourmand has great damage, but at the cost of exhaustion, his crafting mechanic makes sense, I mean, you don't expect him to build bombs but you expect hunter to walk a very long path from NSH to FP??? it's like 30 regions apart. Slugcats are intelligent and gourmand is just trying to find food for his colony, so obviously he's not dumb, rivulet is weird, it's one of the few slugcat that are truly lost, abviously by now you know that you need to go talk to pebbles, but you don't know who sent you, and you're just trying to understand the new and dangerous world state, spearmaster is an absolute masterclass, it's probably the most intelligent slugcat, and it is specifically said that SRS chose not to give it the mark of communication, it is a messenger, and clearly knows it, at this point in the timeline you live right before moon's collapse, so obviously you interact a lot with iterators. and OMG I respect that you have your own opinion on saint, but how can you forget to mention literally 80% of its campain? obviously it has a tongue to escape predators, it's a vegetarian pacifist, and it can't throw spears, the whole world state is stunning, the dialogues are phenomenal, and the way five pebbles just seems like his own shadow is beautiful. you can't just say that saint randomly gains the ability to one shot everything, it's just untrue, you have to meet every echo in the world, forcing you to visit every new region, and finally, out of curiosity, you go in depth, and realise nothing's here, so you fall, and have to walk your way up the rubicon, throughout all of the regions you have already visited, and eventually, you realise it was all a cycle, and it didn't matter. please, next time you criticise a game, know what you're talking about and don't say shit out of context.
I agree with you for the most part. I however do agree that Gourmand and Saint go too far. I would have much preferred if Gourmand's crafting was more grounded and Saint wasn't the Buddha.
@@soniaserval454 Yeah gourmand should not be able to create mass rarefaction singularity bombs that's for sure 💀but honestly saint being wise and shit isn't that bad, especially with the ending, I was thinking the same thing before doing the campain, but the idea behind saint reaching ascension and having to ascend every living creatures forever is great, HOWEVER, why did they have to make the sleep screen so buddhist???? ;(
@@soniaserval454 lore wise, yes, but in game? not at all, even with the ascension powers, you still get obliterated by some miros vulture. and eventhough saint is a god, I think it still feels right to play because saint is both, completly out of the food chain, and in a way, is the most "inside the food chain" imaginable. I feel like its powers are godlike, but its mission seems to have been given to it by gods, and it seems like a victim of its own wiseness
I get that you’re upset, but criticism is not hate. If anything, the most valid criticisms usually come from those that do like something and can see the flaws in it despite that. Artificer’s parry and weapons makes every predator a joke. You can parry out outrun miros birds. Vultures and KVs, combined with unlimited exploding spears, are very easy. I killed every DLL in underhand and FP without dying. Scavengers are only difficult if you don’t know how to fight them, and maybe that’s the issue here, I understand how to fully utilize the downpour slugcat abilities to be overpowered. No, I don’t expect gourmand to create life at will and craft singularity bombs, fire eggs, neuron flies, and similar items. >you can't just say that saint randomly gains the ability to one shot everything That would be why I didn’t say that, you added the word randomly in there.
@@hollowknightenjoyer bro can't you take a joke ? And still, he's part of the lore. Based on your logic should we exclude hunter cuz "he's just hardmode" ?
you lost me on the iterator dialogue section. absolutely lost me. the iterators always used tildas!! your favorite campaign is hunter so you know that NSH especially doesnt speak very formally. plus everything sounds stupid when you say it stupidly, i very much hope you arent fooling anyone with this because you definitely arent fooling me.
yeah no im not getting through the whole of this video lmao you're exaggerating every change as if its the end of the world because its not how *you* would have done it and i dont want to watch through that
Saint only gets the accension abilities once he reaches karma ten Gourmand is a legend but tires out when it throws a spear Artificer has a giant bounty on his head and can die when exploding to much Yes these guys are overpowered but they arent gods you still have survive
I totally agree, the dialogues in downpour are horrid. When I finished rivulet and hear moon call herself a "Big Sis" of Five Pebbles I was so thrown off, the immersion was immediately thrown out of the window. That's not how an iterator, a giant, extremely inteligent machine is supposed to talk. That's something a human would say. They got way too emotional in the DLC. I guess it could be explained by their extreme age, maybe being conscious for such a long time transformed them into something closer to their creators, the ancients. But I don't know, seems like a stretch.
i have my criticisms of downpour as well but just so you know, "big sis moon" is a nickname that she canonically used for herself in iterator chat messages in the vanilla game. they didn't make it up just for downpour. it can be seen in some of her pearl readings
Iterators don’t have to be inhuman. They have always had emotions and are partially organic. Given how they speak and look I’d say the iterators were more human-like than the ancients who built them, and that makes it easier to relate to them. I personally don’t interpret the iterators as extremely intelligent, because they don’t act like it. Rather it makes sense to me that the puppets are kinda regular in intelligence but have access to a vast wealth of processing power for resolving simulations and mathematics. And as the other guy said, big sis moon is not new.
what i do to enjoy downpour and make it make sense in the base games world is just ignore almost all DP dialog, it actually keeps the world meshed together pretty well if you do that (fuck you rivulet)
Also the thing about Gourmand is that his story isn’t actually real. If you give moon a firebug egg, she makes it clear that you are just playing as the legend of a slugcat passed down and exaggerated with time. It’s weak, but explains away the unrealistic elements of the campaign.
Yeah I can appreciate what they were going with with gourmand being a story told to slugcats upon returning, but the official stance from the dev commentary being “yeah none of this is real” doesn’t feel great. Feels like a cop out to avoid making the abilities fit with the world.
@@sorbetcafeI don’t think that it’s not real. I think it’s just gourmand who is exaggerating his stories.
@@tarot3078 the stories are definitely real but i believe that gourmand isn't that is exaggerating them, it's actually the slugcats that are exaggerating them as what we can see is that gourmand is wise he would never lie to his people, the reason why they exaggerate it is probably because... well, yeah the world is pretty harsh and it rains basically all the time, so for gourmand to return and magically have no scars they think is that he is pretty much G O D, so it would be reasonable to think he is pretty strong
@@tarot3078 plague knight be like
please note: five pebbles may get more annoyed with the slugcats later on the timelline due to the amount of previous slugcats.
for example, fp says he ignores his overseers but says he pays attention to his overseers because artificer is earlier on the timeline than hunter.
and he gets more annoyed with survivor than with hunter due to hunter being way, way before survivor.
Your point doesnt make sense
@@Mroziukz wouldn’t you get annoyed if the same guy showed up at your door 8 times
@@Mroziukz
Spoiler Warning:
FP Gourmand Dialogue (after hunter):
In return I ask that you encourage your community, through whatever method of communication you choose to employ, to also go west. Off into the wastes below, far away from me and my work.
FP Monk Dialogue (after survivor and gourmand):
I am growing increasingly impatient with the traffic of your kind through me and my premises.
Well, 5P's changing attitude seems pretty normal if you count that the storyline is stretched across thousands of years and they WERE basically a teenager at the start.
thank you
thank you
thank you
thank you
We technically don’t know how long it’s been, since cycles don’t have concrete canon lengths, but it HAS clearly been a long time
I think the Iterators being more humanized makes tons of sense lore wise tbh. They were gods that literally had no agency, to the point where most even gave up the purpose they were built for. Them talking like discords mods is what they quite literally are. Powerful beings beyond purpose and very bored.
For me it's kind of a "Holy crap, two cakes!" situation. I absolutely love the og game, but I also was able to see the dlc as it's own thing, a passion project by tons of modders as a love letter to the game. It had it's flaws, like with the dialogue and story (maybe a bit too fan-fictiony at times lol) but it honestly was just a ton of fun and it even made me see the og game in a better way.
I think a big part of the problem, which I only learned after making this video, is that downpour is marketed as an improvement on the first cake and not a separate cake.
I remember people getting very passionate about arguing that Downpour was NOT a collection of mods made official, and the fact that it’s an alternate universe with a separate canon was not made clear at all never sat well with me. If the latter fact was well communicated, I would’ve taken the story and character changes more kindly.
@@sorbetcafe this reminds me of a friend saying that downpour probably should have stayed in the oven for a little bit more which i agree, i feel like it could have been part of the main cannon is the downpour devs were told the game lore before launch so they could made it fit in it, and made spearmaster and riv campaign second part more the just a fetch quest, spearmaster especially since the second part of his campaign is kinda annoying with only being able to use one hand and not being able to use one of spearmaster ability to hold two spears
I think for this reason it's very important to have people play Rain World as a basic game, and ideally all the base slugcats before even touching downpour. The tonal dissonance is crazy. I personally really enjoy Downpour but I very much understand the dissonance.
@@snezor2783 while I understand saying that they should do all the base slugcats first, honestly doing hunter before any of the dlc slugcats is incredibly rough. I know there’s more impact to doing the hunter campaign earlier but the game knowledge needed to pull off a hunter run is honestly not worth grinding over just playing some of the other dlc scugs and coming back for hunter later.
“These slugcats are, if you’ll excuse me, godlike in comparison” i giggled . yeah literally
I think the biggest tell that Downpour is a fan project first and foremost is how centralized it is around the iterators, who - frankly - did not really need additional stories, but so much fanon was about them because they're the only real "characters" in the game, so...
...also, while I understand the critiques around FP's dialogue, based on comms pearls in the basegame, a lot of the other iterators were already written a lot more human than him - in fact, FP and - what I think escaped the Downpour devs - Moon, have the most stilted and uncanny dialogue, even when talking to other iterators. Moon's actually a lot meaner than downpour wanted to write her, lol. I do think the whole vibe of "iterator to iterator comms as discord chats" was intentional, though I totally agree that the billion and a half spearmaster broadcasts were overkill.
But I think downpour shines brightest when it's focusing less on the iterators and more on the slugcats themselves and, especially, the world - hence Saint's campaign generally being the one held in highest regard compared to the others.
Also yeah hunter is still the most fun slugcat you are 100% right there.
I think Iterators would have been more interesting if they wrote them to have more flaws/act in a way that reflects an inherently different view of life. Such as spearmaster being a tool to be used, not a beloved pet that SRS loves. That was what I was getting at with the humanization/loss of their alien nature of being.
Five Pebbles was the example I chose because he's the only iterator we have large amounts of pre- and post-downpour dialogue for, so comparing the changes felt most appropriate there.
hunter IS the best campaign, hell yeah
Great video, very glad the tonal shift is being talked about. Been passionately modding the game for almost 3 years, and I can very much appreciate downpour as a mod. Hard to appreciate it as a DLC. This, however, is not at all the downpour devs' fault. What was originally a mod made with love and passion was rushed by the publisher's deadlines into a janky DLC that is easy to be read as canon, despite the devs stating it is an alternative universe. Mods having a tonal shift is 100% fine, it is, afterall, a mod and not an official extension. Downpour was not made with becoming a DLC in mind, and I do not blame the devs for taking up the opportunity to become a DLC. The state of the DLC is rooted in a series of unfortunate events rather than bad developer decisions. Much respect to the team, and I feel bad that they got their project a little gutted by the publishers. I can't say I have positive experience with downpour, but I respect and appreciate it regardless.
Downpour is canonically an AU? This is the first I’ve heard of this
@@sorbetcafeThat's the issue, not many people know this because it isn't really stated anywhere, devs just said it on some social media platforms / forums and that's it I think. It is not meant to be canon to the base game, but the marketing makes it read as such. This also lead to the tonal shift in the whole community, because most believe downpour is canon. Makes it hard for some people (including me) to interact with the new influx of community members that came with downpour, because they see the game completely differently
@@thedarkking6568Sure, if the expansion was to be designed around becoming an official DLC, I agree. They didn't know they're gonna get such an opportunity, and I don't blame them for taking it. Mods usually *are* just extra content. If someone didn't like the mod, they can just not play it and accept it as a mod. It's harder to see an official DLC as an alternative universe. I do agree the stories bring nothing new to the table and only explore either what we knew or answer the questions that were left intentionally ambiguous by the base game, and that's what I found beautiful about it. Barely anything was explained to the player, and that leaves you wondering and thinking, coming up with possible answers yourself, but never knowing if you're even close to the truth. Ambiguity is powerful, rain world took advantage of it, and downpour kinda shut that down
Thanks for commenting, at least they mentioned that it isnt canon. You are being very respectful in these comments, and i appreciate that... Downpour and how the new fanbase overshadows the old one, and their videos on youtube, fill me with such sadness... i would have worded things quite differently. :)
On steam, the watcher is called the fourth slugcat, i wonder if that means it will be like the vanilla cats, or that the marketing team is just very clever.
In my opinion, downpour made rainworld less... of an echosystem and more a normal game due to all the new tips and stuff
it turn people into killing machine
Me when the echoes form a system:
it really makes rain world less weird and more gamey. Charm of the vanilla is how unconventional it is in relation to your average video game design
Me when I yell something through an empty system:
why are you mad more people can ejoy it???
I do appreciate Downpour making the game feel more… mainstream, if that’s the right word. Yes it doesn’t deliver nearly the same kind of experience as the base game, but it also makes it more accessible for much larger of an audience. And though not as frequent, I did have the occasional moment of something 'clicking' without the game having to explicitly state it. For example, after I first ascended Five Pebbles, I died before I could hibernate and save. I was slightly frustrated and went over to do it again, only to find him completely limp. I was confused for a moment before I realized, "Oh, I ASCENDED him. He's GONE." It was a cool, chilling little moment for me.
I also enjoy the larger story, though you did bring up a good point with Five Pebbles actually being ultimately useless to some of the campaigns he was essential in. Spearmaster and Rivulet are cool in the way that they're basically lap cats for godlike beings and do actually play a larger part in the story, but neither Artificer nor Gourmand needed that. They're the center focus of their own stories, not that of the larger narrative, and that probably could have been committed to better.
I do have to say though that I absolutely loved that Monk and Survivor were given a new ending with the DLC. And gosh, did it get me. The survivor staring blankly at the empty tree where it once lived a simple yet enjoyable life with its parents, where it had assumedly not yet felt the cruelty the world was capable of dealing. All of that security was ripped away in an instant, and the little creature, then all alone, was forced to provide comfort, shelter and food for itself, with every moment of perceived safety capable of being shattered in an instant. There was no more illusion of safety, no more companions to protect it. Even the lizards that can be tamed can only provide so much companionship, that of which doesn't measure up to what it had before. When the survivor does find more of its own kind, (as Monk's cutscene implies it canonically does, at least in this ending), they're just tiny pups. It has companionship now, but IT is now the guardian. IT is now the provider, the one responsible for providing safety and security, for keeping a creature alive, just for it to have the luxury of being carefree. Those same pups are still carefree once they return home; to them, this is a new place to explore. To the survivor, its a husk of a memory, every second spent there a cruel reminder that what he once had, what he had fought so hard to return to, was gone.
But then Monk, a character who I find to actually be quite admirable but cursed with an extremely boring campaign, returns as well. He too had faced nearly identical hardships, not out of a tragic accident like his brother, but out of selfless compassion. All along his journey, Survivor truly did have someone looking out for him like he had with his whole family. It was not truly lost. They may be the only ones remaining, but they remain together. Monk got what he wanted by reuniting with his brother. Survivor, although not reuniting with his old family, did still get his desire. He had *A* family. The comfort and familiarity of the past in his brother, and his two new pups, who just like him, had been separated from their original families. All of them lost, and then found in each other. None of which requires interfering with the passing of random gods to achieve. I love it.
Completely agree, couldn't have said it better.
I'm glad you can still upkeep your tone of genuine criticism while trying to get across your points. I'll admit, I think you are too attached to the idea of a maximum difficulty experience upholding OG Rainworld's view of vague, hardly visible story points that put off a large number of people from the game; I don't agree with a large portion of the things you say, but what I can agree with fully is that you're aware of what purpose Downpour had in giving more to the community and breathing life into it. You're aware of the purpose it has served to the game, and you enjoyed it with your criticisms in hand.
Good takes.
Yeah, it's difficult going from the "best game I wouldn't recommend" to a game that I can have an easier time telling people to play because it's more approachable, but find less enjoyable due to those changes.
I know that the perspective I have isn't going to be universal, but I also know I'm not the only person with that perspective and it's something I very rarely see addressed.
@@sorbetcafe Kudos to you for sharing that perspective. As someone who has very little issue with Downpour and more with the base game, I find it legitimately refreshing and enjoyable to see these takes due to how uncommon or often stifled it is. Keep up the good work
I like Downpour, and agreed with most of your points as well. It is tonally distinct from the base game, the new slugcats are very powerful and not really a part of the ecosystem in the same way the base game slugcats were, and _maybe_ some of Five Pebbles' dialogue could have been more consistent too.
I also never even noticed that they forgot to implement the lineage system into all of the new regions, that's probably the biggest problem mentioned in this video that I agree with.
That said I still would like to nit-pick for a while, particularly about the iterator dialogue. The human-like style of dialogue that you attribute to Downpour is present in much of Moon's base-game dialogue and in the Sky Islands pearls, and Moon, SRS, and one other unnamed iterator even use tildes. So really all Downpour does is follow what is already established in the base game, it didn't invent anything new. Five Pebbles' dialogue just seems to be an anomaly.
Furthermore I would argue that NSH in particular is actually _more_ complex in Downpour than he is in the base game, not less. He does crack many jokes as he does in the base game, but he also clearly shows a lot of care for Moon, even threatening Five Pebbles in one particular broadcast.
Tbh I really liked the dlc. I learned about the game not so long ago, shortly before the release of downpour, and perhaps due to my lack of maturity, I absorbed all the content with great pleasure and did not see any shortcomings. But after watching the video... I don’t completely agree with the statements, but it opened my eyes to many problems of the Dlc that I had completely ignored, although I still adore the game both before and after the downpour
Thanks for sharing your opinion
(Sorry if there are mistakes here, I don’t know English very well)
I think the criticisms here are valid, but it doesnt change the fact that I enjoy downpour significantly more than the base game. I think the fact that downpour deviates from the tone of the original game is absolutely a good thing, like you said theres no exploring this world blind and discovering the iterators, echoes, ect for a second time. At the end of the day any work of art needs to evolve over time instead of rehashing the same beats over and over in a futile attempt to recreate the original.
I think taking time to explore the story of the iterators was a great direction for rain world's DLC, however i think after downpour its time to somewhat move on from the iterators. I'd like to see future DLCs or mods expand more on the games ecosystem and build up the world more outside of the ancients and iterators.
PS Your perspective on the downpour scugs being too overpowered is bcs you are a god gamer 😂
yeah i realized it might be moreso because I can use the slugcats to their full potential, which is MUCH higher than hunter. Artificer's parry, once you know how to use it, is disgusting and makes you nigh unkillable as long as you aren't overheating.
As far as enjoyment, I've gotten more playtime out of downpour, but personally the most enjoyable times I've had in the game have been as the 3 base game slugcats. I still have a fun time going back and replaying them, whereas the only times I've replayed the downpour campaigns were for this video and when I did them on a dancepad.
I don't think the iterators way of speaking is caused by them being machines. It just reflects the culture of their creators, the ancients, who are extremely pompous and verbose in their Pearl messages. The iterators are actually less officious than ancients when they talk, although that's probably because the context of communication.
Instead of making iterator dialogue more stilted and computer-like like you suggest I'd rather it would be more reflective of ancients alien cultural quirks, like their naming conventions, hemaphroditism, contradictions between their ambition and wanting to escape the cycle, and so on.
TRUE! I think it’s a mix of both, more in that being a machine is bound to cause some disconnect between them and the culture of the ancients, but yessss yes absolutely.
Very potent video! I agree with the broader points, but I wanted to add my 2 cents on the artificer endings anyways; I've always felt like the ascencion for artificer wasn't the correct path, the actions the scavengers take is clearly overblown for what is clearly a child and the scavengers ARE clearly intelligent, at least, intelligent enough to hopefully understand that children should not be literally KILLED for a misunderstanding such as this, choosing to forgive them has always felt wrong, and I choose violence every time I play her
@@thedarkking6568 Artificer's abilities also seems like the most "they are there just because they are cool" out of all the slugcats. The abilities of Gourmand and Saint are strange too, but I think the environment and story could somewhat excuse it in their cases.
I think the karma works well for Artificer's story though. The "intended path" of going after the chieftain shows Artificer becoming completely absorbed by the karma of rage and violence.
Artificer's children were murdered by a single toll tribe in Garbage Wastes, not the entire scavenger species. Do you really believe that they all *deserve to die* because of what one tribe did? Consider that the scavengers probably have children too, and even if Artificer only kills the adults, the children will surely die without their parents' protection. The ones outside Garbage Wastes might not even know why Artificer is attacking them, the Garbage Wastes scavs could have easily kept it a secret out of shame.
@@thedarkking6568 in the game when you lose a slugpup, if they die and you save, you do not get them back. Same thing for tamed lizards even back in the base game if I remember correctly? Could just be a gameplay thing, but since a big theme of the game is reincarnation and seemingly each death is meant to have actually happened in your run, maybe each creature just has its own separate cycle. Doesn’t Moon say something like “our cycles will meet again” to Saint? That may be why Artificer doesn’t see her young again, even if they aren’t fully dead. They just aren’t with her anymore.
I also think the overkill is kind of the point. The game doesn’t hide the fact that Artificer is the bad guy. Pebbles of all people is appalled with her way of life. The echo in Metropolis tells her to stop. The ending art of the campaign is done purely in red tones, most of them being dark. That isn’t how you portray a hero. She’s a grieving mother, yes, and her pain is not something to be taken lightly, but she takes it out on EVERYONE. She just keeps going and going. The path she took was a conscious decision. She chose vengeance. She chose to be a monster. And now there is no turning back because the entire scavenger population rightfully sees her as a threat to all of their lives, but she wouldn’t want to go back anyways. She’s morally horrible and I love her.
@@thedarkking6568respawns are not canon, outside of in their own timelines. Her children would have been reborn somehow but not in Arti’s timeline
Honestly for artificer I do think it's a case of both sides being at fault. The scavengers are clearly intelligent as is demonstrated by their graffiti, tolls, crafting etc. However they also do not necessarily have morals that are anywhere near similar to human morals due to the subjectivity of such a thing. They are shown to be very to the point with their loyalties and affections. If you help them you are friend, but if you disrespect their authority kill and steal you are enemy. In terms of justification imo artificer lost theirs when they went on a multi region rampage, bathing the land in scavenger blood. Arti's campaign ends up feeling like they are a tragic villain of sorts, since in response to a painful tragedy they end up taking revenge, and then go on to bring what they experienced hundredfold onto uninvolved innocents to satisfy their own undulating rage.
Something that I think really distinguishes the base and downpour slugcats that wasn't brought up in this video is that the downpour slugcats are still very or at least fairly effective using just their body with no items:
- Gourmand without items can either cough up random items or use their body as a weapon
- Artificer without items can still blast at high speeds and sort of use their body as a weapon through concussive blasts and mauling
- Rivulet without items can still go high speeds, being able to ignore the already non-threatening (except for the rain in the first half of the campaign) ecosystem
- Spearmaster without items can fairly quickly become Spearmaster with 2 spears (Again body as a weapon)
- Saint without items can still swing at high speeds, though this is the least extreme example because items do become more important in close-quarters where Saint's tongue isn't as useful
With Base slugcats, whether or not you had access to a spear, rock, cherrybomb, suidcada, etc. would have a large influence on how you went about dealing with a problem, but with Downpour slugcats, you always have an at least fairly strong option to use or fall back on no matter what your inventory or immediate surroundings are.
Also, thanks for this video! It really resonated with me, and many of the points made were good ways of wording thoughts that were either consciously or subconsciously in my mind.
In a sense, Saint's campaign somewhat loops back to the desolation of the base game. Man, the ending is a hell of a surprise.
Very interesting video. With more niche communities I think people can be quite enthusiastic about the object of their love and blind to its flaws, plus feeding lovers of human character interaction and such (scugs as iterators' pets) is generally going to get people more hyped as opposed to critical. People really like the "iterators as god-teenagers on Discord" thing and it's a valid concept on its own, but tonally disparate from what others may have loved about (and from what one of the creators intended for) the base game. This reminds me of those few who loved the original No Man's Sky and found that the changes, almost universally praised, drove it away from what they had found good.
But forever, vanilla is canon to downpour and downpour is not canon to vanilla. A mod to change some of the game's writing could be interesting, though, although from the looks of it you'd want for some campaigns, like Rivulet's, to be entirely different?
Five Pebbles feeling remorse is a tough one-it's narratively satisfying, but perhaps not faithful to his character. I'll think about this.
Also thanks for not taking from real iterator RPs (don't know if it actually happens, presumably it does?), your point was still made interestingly without having to harp on some server randoms just passionate about a story.
I would call Downpour an AU-and AUs are valid. Downpour is a story of the tragedy of hubris, how if you do not consider others you may bring yourself down along with them, of god-machines obsessed with death and the ultimate humanity they found in the darkest of their moments. I think people find this more compelling than the base game's story, simply about being a creature in a lonely world where they are nothing more than a creature, where life is hard and unforgiving and part of a great cycle. The latter is rare and unique and I think we shall not see something like it for a long time, but I can understand why people love the former-I do too.
The main campaigns I would want to be tweaked are spearmaster, artificer, and gourmand.
Rivulet’s story itself isn’t bad at all, for better or worse the role of the slugcat is now what it is. The dialogue feels off, though, and the interesting quirk of short cycles shouldn’t be turned off once you get your most powerful tool. It’s also just hard to balance rivulet’s world with their mobility, the lack of a meaningful ecosystem is kind of unavoidable.
Something like spearmaster has bad dialogue and a story that feels meaningless, artificer I felt would be a more impactful journey without an iterator (I had the concept of the scav chieftain instead being a matriarch to echo artificer’s own story, with the final act being killing her children and becoming the tragedy that made artificer in the first place. A point for the player to truly reflect on their actions and decide whether the vengeance is actually worth it), and gourmand getting the mark just to be called fat never sat right with me, especially as a mandatory story event.
> Five Pebbles feeling remorse is a tough one
It’s not so much that he feels remorse, more so that the way he expresses it doesn’t feel true to his character. The point I was making there was more that Five Pebbles was rewritten to be a very different character in downpour, which isn’t necessarily bad, but he lost the unique traits that made the character more interesting.
Downpour isn’t only the story of hubris, it also shows how not wanting to hate is almost as worse as hating everything.
It’s implied Moon had the power to stop FP from stealing the groundwater supply, but she never seemed to wanted to hate him, even if for a bit. Her own kindness was taken advantage of, and she collapsed. She still retains her will to live, because she still has hope in what remains.
Five Pebbles desired an escape because he hated the world. And the world hated him back. (seeing as how moon’s broadcast came at the right time, the right place to make him fail)
His own animosity towards everything ruined his own world for him, and sparked the decision in the first place.
Then the consequences of his actions catch up to him, and he collapses.
Unrelated:
I’ve had the moon situation happen to an online friend. It’s good to be empathetic. It’s good to be kind, but please set boundaries.
If i recall, all of the dialouge between Suns and NSH were written by a fan of rainworld, being let onto the team for downpour. I am not saying this in a negative way, i always think its great when fans get to help contribute to media they love.
And that's why it's called fanfiction
The mod-turned-dlc itself is written by fans and superficially revised by the devs to fit a mold it was never trying to fill in the first place. The end result is years of community AU fanfiction very hastily attempted to be bent into a vaguely base narrative-coherent shape to appease deadlines
Very well made video and very cathartic for me.
I spent hundreds of hours in Rain World pre-Downpour. Speedrunning, doing challenges, lore scavenging and the like.
(Now forgive me for complaining but I will get around to some praise at the end)
Downpour's tonal and direction changes completely killed my passion for the game after I 100% it.
If there is one thing I would say that makes downpour detract in it's emotional power and original direction, besides some very exceptional moments... is that Downpour is way too arcade-y. It feels too much like I'm playing a game and not an incredible emotional and spiritual journey. I played Rain World originally with everything spoiled and yet every single part of the journey had me fully immersed and left me with chills reaching Five Pebbles and the entire depths sequence. It feels like slugcats are the center of this universe and everything revolves around them as their super powered abilities just shatter the naturalist feel of the original despite being in an almost entirely industrial world as we are causes, or a least directly present, for a lot of massive events that really don't matter to the slugcat but matters to the player (more immersion breaking). Saint was phenomenal until it turns out you are basically god, sent to bring about a new age. There could be some really cool exploration of "redeemer" type figures but it just feels like the cherry on top for everything being so op now.
The slugcats feel too intelligent at times, even if purposed organisms; beings that really just feel like they are the iterators' favorite pets. It makes no practical sense that they are the iterators chosen messengers now, when you could just send a vulture to deliver something (and Spearmaster's pearl is said to guide the slugcat so the argument of "vultures are too animalistic to work" doesn't make sense (same with saying slugcats *aren't* animalistic)). That heightened intelligence made the line "always the same blank expression" said by Five Pebbles to Rivulet, not work at all.
Ecosystem balance was very ??? for me with how much they just orange lizard spammed to make the game more difficult because the slugcats are so op. An egregious example is the Miros Vulture, it just feels so out of place and just added in to have some new great threat that isn't original at all (which is true with a lot of the new creatures).
Downpour could be so much better (or at least much more aligned with vanilla Rain World) if it was more focused on exploring new lands and not stuck with Iterator high school angst fanfiction with super powered slugcat pets. A very meme-y way of saying it but I believe it to be true.
There is some really good parts
Outer Expanse is great, even if the rooms feel very weird (but I can just believe it's terraforming from Ancients/Rain issues)
Saint is so well done, especially undergrowth. It's just becoming god that's such an issue to me and I would like to see a *few* less creatures in the world/cold but that's a small thing
The actual gameplay of the new slugcats are fun, even at the price they bring in terms of lore and world building issues.
Rain World is more talked about, but I just wish the original greatness was highlighted more than "omg cute slugcat" and "iterators ahhhhhhhhhh"
Ugh, why does every positive have a caveat, it's so hard to like this dlc
Tangent over, probably makes no sense or sounds like elitist og player gatekeeping but yeah.
I don't hate the devs or anything, it's understandable when you have modded content being made into official DLC. It's great as a mod but as official content? It's rough. Especially when everyone takes it canon when it's officially not. The shift in the community since Downpour is noticeable and makes it hard to interact with for me when so many new people see the game in a completely different way than I do.
finally someone with a similar opinion about the tonal shift from the lost, dying, or scared slugcats to the absolutely broken downpour ones. Don't get me wrong, I love all of the new areas besides pipeyards, and I love the new stories. Some of the changes and additions to the map and world make the base slugcats feel more complete. The downpour cats are just so strong in comparison to hunter or survivor, and I dreamed up my own mod as a response to that. While brainstorming for new slugcat traits and abilities I went to Daszombes server to get more creative opinions, but what I really got was feedback that completely missed the point of the original game and the vision for my project, "Your character isn't unique enough, give it actually good abilities."
The Mutant is the lone survivor of a mutated and deformed litter, radiation poisoning kills the parents. Out of X mutant slugpups, one is chosen at random as the start of the campaign. Half blind but with super hearing abilities, or an extra, cumbersome, arm that can only hold small objects. These are the only two concepts that I have a complete vision for so far. I was originally only going to have debuffs that would force some new kind of situation or playstyle, but prompted by the feedback I thought up small buffs to make the characters feel slightly more fair.
This project actually is in development, but we are still 4 years away from finishing the regions, and we don't have anyone who is currently able to program new enemies or the unique implementations of some of the mutations. There's still a lot of play testing and things that I want to do to ensure the quality of the mod. This is absolutely a pipe dream, and one that I need to finish for my own sake.
Your analysis of the way the base game conveys narrative is extremely useful. I want my mod's narrative to be conveyed well, but I lack experience. The only thing I can do is discuss, analyze, and imitate what the base game does so well.
The thing is with the iterators, they’re ai, with artificial emotions a d artificial thoughts. They were made to do a specific task but having normal conversations would be expected of something that will get bored. They talk to eachother because they want to, not only to solve the problem they were made to solve
FINALLY someone talking about this
I think downpour is cool as a mod, but not so much as a part of Rain World
Yeah, it’s something I’ve realized over the past couple months, but I expect a lot of people to misunderstand what I’m saying out of blind love for it
@@sorbetcafeYeah :( It's not like you're saying you hate it either, just that it just doesn't really fit as a DLC for the og
I think downpour did a great job in illustrating the past, present and future of its world, some regions are different from another depend on the timeline.
And also, downpour had the best campaign I’ve ever played: Saint :D
Thank you so much for taking the time to make this. You have perfectly encapsulated so many of my misgivings with Downpour. Like you, I admire it immensely as a work of love and effort, but it's held back by what is simply a lack of understanding of game design that that the original Rain World demonstrated so well: 'Cool' is not as important as restraint. 'Powerful' is only rewarding if you are also sometimes weak. 'Fun' is not always the right choice for every moment, especially if you're trying to make people feel something, and create an experience than stays with someone.
What really breaks my heart is how CLOSE some of the aspects got, only to miss the mark. Like, Gourmand would have been a cool 'alt-slugcat' if he just had the increased spear power and stomping attack, in conjunction with his exhaustion mechanic and smaller jump. But to that we add meals..? Crafting...? Gah...
In some respects, Downpour's biggest weakness is the same as Elden Ring's: It could be improved so much simply by subtracting things from it. Less dialogue. Fewer directives. Smaller superpowers.
So many of Rain World's best moments were when there wasn't anything flashy going on: the long and tense swims in Shoreline, the careful outwitting of a lone lizard, the satisfaction of filling your belly after living on the brink of starvation for several cycles. Give me more space for Rain World to be Rain World.
Around the end of 2022, I sat down to do another playthrough of rain world after not playing for a while. Erased save data, new survivor campaign, let's go.
I didn't get out of outskirts before I got bored and quit.
The main flaw with rain world is also its main strength. The feeling of your first playthrough is carried SO hard by that sense of wonder and the unknown. It really works to their advantage.
The problem is, once you know everything that happens, without that sense of wonder, the game is. Kind of dull if I'm being honest. There's only so many self imposed rule sets and challenges you can do.
One thing I will give downpour is that it brought that initial feeling back. As flawed as it is, it really helped in briefly rekindling that curiosity. Now I'm in the same situation as I was before downpour, just burnt out and bored.
I hope so much that the rumours of more new content are true (but only if the devs HAVE actually learnt from the downpour mistakes) since mods really aren't the same.
Downpour isn't perfect by a long shot, but it managed to make the game feel a bit new for a while, so I still think it's a net win
Also not many people seem to know but downpour was almost entirely fanmade. It was originally meant to be a mod, and only became official towards the end of the development process
on one hand, i would absolutely love another slug which felt like the base game with new wonders. But on the other, i feel as though the entire story of rainworld has been masterfully wrapped up and it would be kind of strange to keep it going.
After reading a lot of the comments, I think people didn’t fully understand the lore of the base game before going into downpour. The iterators are exceptionally “human”. The way they communicated with each other was familiar and informal. I loved downpour and yes I loved the story too.
This is a great video, and I agree with pretty much everything in it! I share your stances and Jimmy McGee’s about the fundamental disconnect between what made the original game such a magical experience and what downpour was. I think he put it best when he said downpour was “about as good as it could have been”, knowing that deviations would happen, but still enjoying it for what it is. It makes me a bit nervous about the upcoming updates to the base game, but I hope videocult hears these critiques and takes them to heart to make the expansion just as magical to new players as the original game.
Yeah, I mostly made this video because more updates are planned, and I'd like to see those updates not make some of the same decisions. I still get emotional reading through Hunter's dialogue, particularly Moon saying "I hope... this was meaningful for you. It was for me."
That, to me, is absolutely beautiful, as are her lines immediately after waking up, in a way that nothing in Downpour accomplishes. Downpour ruins a lot of impactful moments with things like the "And as your Big Sis, you know how protective I am of you!~" line.
I have no doubt that future updates will be fun. But I want to see more of Rain World, not more of Downpour. I fell in love with art, not a platformer.
@@sorbetcafe that last line is really what it’s all about
37:13 Thats what a scug sees when a lizard is catching up to them in a pipe
idk, I feel like “sliver of slaw L” does a much better job of explaining the problems with downpour
Cool video! While playing through downpour I couldn't help but feel something was wrong, and I sympathise quite a lot with this video.
Imo, most of the new content added misses the themes of the base game, kinda dumbing rain world down to another platformer with some expansive lore. Before, I felt rain world didn't give you all the answers, and didn't appeal to fan service, leaving a lot of things up to the player to interpret, wheras downpour takes this away. For example, as cool as saint's campaign is, I don't particularly like the finality of it: the base game would've let you interpret what happens in the future, without you being there to see it, which i feel also ties into the theme it set up that the world will move on without you, and that as slugcat, you don't matter.
Same with the carefully crafted ecosystem, which was one of the main reasons i first picked this game up: downpour doesn't give much care to it, giving all the new slugcats overpowered abilities as if they're above everything else. Videocult put a lot of effort into making a believable environment that you were apart of, whereas downpour suffers from making the slugcats gods.
I appreciate the effort put into downpour from the devs: you can tell the whole team had a lot of love for rain world, and admittedly, I enjoyed a lot of the expansion for a while. But looking back in retrospect, it really steps over a lot of what made rain world truly special. I'm glad (even if they didn't made it obvious) that the team clarified downpour isn't canon to the base game, so I can carry on playing as survivor and hunter without a worry.
At the end of the day, it's my opinion tho and everyone has their personal preferences.
Pretty harsh at times but I agree. To be fair gourmands crafting of a singularity bomb is VERY hard to find and craft, you need two karma flowers to craft one bomb. I loved your restructure of artificer. I have never had much lag or crashes. Mods change that making it pretty unstable. Overall good video, and something that needed to be said.
You only need 1 karma flower, spicy egg + grenade = singularity bomb
@@sorbetcafe oh right, still though not the easiest out figure out.
I very much enjoyed this thoughtful analysis and it brought up many points. However, with regards to Five Pebbles and Looks to the Moon: They are people. They might be very alien, but things are only ever alien until you learn more about them. I acknowledge a few inconsistencies, but overall, I don't see a problem with revealing more of the lore. I do admit that some of the lore is more obvious that it once was, but I like that it reveals things that were previously speculation. It answers some of the questions we had about it, and that allows us to understand more of the situation of the iterators in a way we never could before.
While I agree with some of the stuff you've said, I have a large disagreement on what you've said about the iterators. Especially the five pebbles section. Though it makes little sense for spearmaster to have any idea what's going on with the iterator comms, I still enjoy them and I think the iterator discord chats are mostly in character for everything I understood about the iterators pre-downpour. From what I've heard in relation to Five Pebbles, I believe I've seen a developer mention how pretty much all of the Five Pebbles dialogue in downpour was first sent to Joar, the original writer of Five Pebbles, and essentially given an A+.
A large issue of downpour for me is already stated in another comment, the unclear nature of the DLC, its story, and its separation from vanilla rain world, as well as some of the internal development issues I've heard about it. It annoys me to no end that I've seen, and continue to see, a large amount of confusion over Downpour being separate from Rain World, as well as the canon status of a certain challenge.
Another issue that feels a bit lesser is my incredible suspicion of akupara games, Buddy, and whatever was going on in the development of Downpour. I recall a time when the server was up in flames with developers claiming about a lack of communication from Akupara and the lead dev, as well as some issue about trading cards being awkward and containing creature spoilers such as Daddy Long Legs, back before or just after downpour released. I'm not sure what to make of it though as I'm not nearly as active in the RW discord anymore, and it all just seems to have been swept under the rug with Buddy going like "This is my reaction to all this: ._.". I've also seen a few others still complain about Akupara Games.
EDIT:I'd also agree somewhat on narrative diversity. While I loved downpour and its stories and gameplay, I do dislike how almost every campaign (except saint) ended up being "Go find Five Pebbles." I do dislike how his the entire movement of the story. He gives you the pearl to give to moon as Spearmaster, he fixes your drone and tells you to go kill scavengers as artificer, he opens the gate to outer expanse as gourmand, and he tells you to get the rarefaction cell as Rivulet. I do hope that in any future stories they rekindle the exploration from survivor and saint where the plot isn't just "Go find local iterator and do what they say."
34:44 Challenges? Absolutely not. These were absolute worst part of entire game. I'm not kidding or exaggerating. These were the most rage inducing and miserable experience with very small exceptions. If anything it reveal so many flaws of game mechanics + controls and lack of play testing. Aimed for most sweatiest players out of there. A lot of them unfair, sadistic or near impossible.And some require wiki or internet search cuz how obscure solutions are
I hope the next DLC captures the feeling of the first game again!
Dude I hate DP Iterator Dialogue so much, good video
Edit update: there is a tilde in non-Downpour dialogue by LTTM, when she recieves a second neuron
What is exactly your issue with iterators being basically humans operating a giant supercomputer facility? That has always been the case.
In one of the Sky Islands pearls (pre-downpour, mind you) Suns reassures Pebbles about *every* iterator being frustrated with the search for the solution to the great problem. Moon tells that many go insane in their cans. I doubt a cold unfeeling machine would be able to experience something like that. Story-wise, iterators being human-like is *integral* to the chain of events that has happened. Pebbles getting frustrated with his predicament and isolating himself or Sig trying to aid his dear friend and creating a messenger. Iterators are individuals who can and do care about each other
Iterators have always been kind of silly with each other in the group chats, you either didn't really care about the pearl dialogues or straight up didn't mention them on purpose for whatever reason and your examples feel unnecessarily nitpicky at times, on top of calling them "fanficcy"
edit: typo; irrelevant point removed, i was wrong
What dialogue did I alter?
@@sorbetcafemy bad i was sure one of the 4 examples had different wording, that's on me
meh, i dont think artificer is that unbalanced at all. she is literally just a death machine for everything else, but her campaign is pretty heavy in scavenger combat, which to be honest, already has people whining about the difficulty in metropolis, and if it was something like just regular survivor then it would be completely unfair. everything else in this video is super valid though. there's even dev commentary saying writing dialogue for FP was a real struggle.
broadcasts as spearmaster are implemented very weirdly yes, but i can't help but feel they were just there as an extra lore dump. like, you encounter like 2 if you're not actively hunting for them. I guess for that they could just add more pearls but i cant imagine the pain of having a region with 7+ colored pearls.
I'm shocked this video did not bring up rubicon.
I never really had strong thoughts on rubicon, it was just kinda there, never had much trouble with it and very rarely end up there since it’s not in expedition and I very rarely play Saint. It’s weird for lore and it feels very odd in terms of gameplay, but everything in Saint is a fever dream anyway.
@@sorbetcafe I think this is the issue; it's just kinda there. it was supposed to be really weird. its only like 50% weird.
I'd argue artificer is unbalanced, since the only thing to really check your power is scavenger spam, and everything else is just free food. The regions themselves are varying levels of suited to interesting scavenger combat, with some rooms like the garbage industrial transition rooms just being unfair. But metropolis is imo the worst for the scav spam since it is mostly just flat planes and plafforms on various elevations making the combat kind of boring and frustrating. Scavengers being a lesser spammed enemy in the roster would already be interesting while you brave through hunter spawns, atleast if artificer wasn't so busted with their abilities and crafts.
I agree with you on some points, but I think you're too harsh on the dlc. Keep in mind you're anything but an average player btw ^v^
I think the dlc slugcats are well made. The difficulties vary, but I think every slug is hard or enjoyable in some way. The double jump of Artificer, unlimited spears of Spearmaster, and tongue of Saint are all very useful movement abilities that don't feel wrong to me in a world where there are lizards with telepathy and explosive propulsion systems that seem to have evolved somewhat naturally. Artificer, Gourmand, and Rivulet have abilities that open up new higher level play. My favorite campaign was Spearmaster, because of the story of the Itorators. I think the characterization of them all is certainly different, but not bad. They're more human, and I think that's good. It's as if after all the time you spent with them in the base game, you get to know them better. Seven Red Suns in particular is interesting. They speak in a foreign way to others. They're more empathetic, in a sense, but still a god that is isolated from socialization.
I agree with you about a lot though. Gourmand and Saint do feel like gods at a certain point. Gourmand is a folk hero who is a casual 4th wall break. Saint's ascension powers and whole plot are both unsatisfying and ungrounded. They both feel like utter jokes, and I did not enjoy them. I did however, cry a lot during Saint's campaign lol.
Rivulet's rain timer disappearing, and Artificer's cutscenes, were things I didn't love, but didn't hate. Now that you brought them up though, I do agree that they should've been different. I don't think the Artificer cutscenes were up to the downpour team though. It feels like they would've done art if the could. Maybe I'm just crazy though.
I wanted to point out that there are some big decisions you can make that the game doesn't tell you about, too. Ascending Pebbles or Moon was an option in Saint's campaign that never even occurred to me honestly. The confrontation between Artificer and the Scavenger Chieftain felt right to me in a similar way too.
Finally, I didn't know about the lineage system being completely unutilized! That honestly makes me really mad!
Thanks for voicing your opinion! I appreciate it as a fan of the channel ^v^
I didn’t really mean to come off as harsh on the DLC, but I wanted to be able to properly talk about the issues in it without having to sugar coat it. It often feels like there’s a near universal love of everything in downpour and there’s a stigma around criticizing it, which leads to the need to articulate criticisms very clearly and firmly rather than vague “I didn’t really like this,” statements.
Most of the video is formatted as “here is a change that was made, here is proof of that change, here is why I don’t like that change.”
@@sorbetcafe I completely agree with you when it comes to that stigma. I'm glad you made this video!
your criticisms of saint upset me greatly because they are easily the best DP 'campaign' due to its nature of being a love letter to the game itself rather than a 'story'. At least... to me.
My criticisms of Saint mostly revolved around saints actual mechanics and not the story/world. I didn’t mention Saint much in this video aside from that. Saint’s ascension in particular is REALLY jarring and tonally odd, it’s like playing with dev tools. Is that a necessary part of the love letter? Is saint’s campaign better for having it? Personally, I thought saint’s campaign was all downhill after hitting the last echo.
That doesn’t mean Saint is bad, or the campaign is bad. A criticism of something you love isn’t black and white. Finding flaws in a good thing doesn’t make it a bad thing. @@elshelalu2027
@@sorbetcafe - One thing I think a lot about (with sadness) is how much more moving and effective the Saint's ascension mechanic would be if it didn't include the 'fly' and 'sniper scope' elements. You know what would have been perfect? Have the Saint ascend things by grasping onto them. Rather than gunning down Looks to the Moon, you simply embrace her and send her into the next world. It does double duty by allowing the endgame to maintain any sort of challenge.
Overall a very good and balanced critique. I agree with most of your smaller criticisms, though they don’t impact my enjoyment of the mod much. It was intended to be a mod with a separate canon from the base game, and - while I wish they would have made that intention clearer to the community - that clear separation allowed me to be perfectly content with the different goals of the DLC.
I must say that I do think your criticism of the story, and particularly the handling of the iterators, was dramatically overblown. Yes, the dialog of the DLC is generally of lower quality than that of the base game, which conveyed its themes far better and generally had superior prose; these are certainly valid critiques. However, you spent a lot of time talking about how the DLC made the iterators into people, when in the base game they were dehumanized supercomputers. This definitely misses the mark. In the base game, the pearl dialog is filled with very human interactions between iterators, some of which you even show on screen but gloss over. I would argue that the iterators were very much intended to have human personalities and dispositions. Pebbles, certainly, acted very high-and-mighty with the slugcats, as you might expect from an inhuman supercomputer, but this was representative of his tragic flaw, the arrogance that had him believe he could escape his fate and ultimately led to his decay and the death of Moon. The DLC didn’t retcon the iterators by giving them personalities, it merely expanded on the slivers of the personalities we were shown in the base game (though whether the directions they took each iterator's character, and the extent to which they developed them, were any good is another story entirely).
I would agree, however, that the base game absolutely makes the player _feel_ like they are dealing with an unfathomable alien god when they encounter and speak with Pebbles without diving deeper into the lore, and the DLC does not maintain this feeling in the slightest. Granted, I don't think it would have worked well with the very different goals the DLC had in mind, so that really comes back to whether you agree with those goals in the first place.
One thing I'm very surprised you didn't mention was the story change that was the most aggravating to me by far: the idea that Hunter's illness was the Rot, through the introduction of the Hunter Long Legs. This is aggravating to me for many reasons, all exacerbated by the fact that now everyone in the community writes or draws Hunter as having Rot, and I can't stand it.
Well, this comment ended up being quite long… sorry about that. Long story short, overall good video, though I do disagree somewhat with your interpretation of the base game.
all fair, downpour was literally a collection of mods made by the community, so that's why they seem so disconnected
In all honesty pacing change was needed. Hunter campaign already provides "vanilla but harder" experience. Therefore making slugcats with unusual abilities is necessary for providing sth new and interesting, and not just another hunter.
Though i fully agree Slugcat abilities especially gourmand and artificer are absolutely overtuned. Gourmand abilities are just soo goofy, crafting system is weird and feels unreal. At least there is hint gourmand story is just that, an overexagerated story.
For artificer idk, it just doesnt feel right. We get terminator of a slugcat with 0 explanation for those insane combat abilities and campaign tries to balance that by drowning player in scavs making everything absolutely chaotic. (large scav groups function really badly from both immersion and their ai standpoint). Definitelly needed some more work here.
Downpour for me is more new players friendly imo because it makes the game feels like a game instead of a failure simulator
i adore both the base game and the dlc, but i think the base game is still better. It is specifically tuned to created an ecosystem, and wildly succeeds in doing so. Downpour is focused on being more of a game, not necessarily throwint away the ecosystem, but noting it down eitherway. they're both still incredible though and i have absolutely no regrets spending the 15 dollars each on them.
@@ranninotfromeldenring2832 each? Wdym I buy the base game for like 25 bucks.. This is why I think the downpour is so worth and fun compared to the base game that only gives you 3
My own thoughts (please note I started playing AFTER downpour released so my arguments are littered with bias):
-Downpour is just a bunch of fans making a story for the game, I wouldn’t think of it as definitively canon but most people (including me) tend to gravitate towards it because it adds more to the characters we love
-Iterator dialogue in communications broadcasts and data pearls are meant to be silly chats between them, I wouldn’t expect them to be as cold. I do have to agree that as computers they seem too alive, but as biologically engineered creatures it makes sense for them to have personalities.
-You seem to push the new slugcat abilities very far out of proportion. Spearmaster has infinite spears, but they can’t store anything, they are forced not to prepare and use battle instincts to survive. Artificer is not just an infinite bomb cat, she is hunted by a creature found almost everywhere and needs her combat and mobility skills to survive that. Gourmand is quite powerful, but struggles to use those abilities due to exhaustion. Rivulet is just more athletic than everyone else, they don’t seem too godlike when you realize they just go fast. Saint’s ending ability is quite overpowered, but before that they are relatively well-balanced in terms of enemy types, going up against ranged enemies like spitter spiders and flying enemies like centiwings. When you think about it these are just interesting gimmicks that are expanded upon. To add to that,
-The mystery of the original game was great, but without downpour replayability seems stale after you’ve explored it all. I feel like downpour wanted to create new mystery by opening new paths, for example the ancients, by giving us just a little bit more about them the community has gone wild, I believe there’s an hour long video talking about just the ancients and what their culture could have been like. I do wish they kept more for new players.
-I have to agree the “visit pebbles, go somewhere” formula is a LITTLE bland, but it is the same for the vanilla slugcats as well.
-Overall, I loved the downpour DLC. The new slugcats are more like new classes to me. I think the environmental storytelling is still great, Saint’s bridge moment the greatest I remember. I’m glad more artists are on the team, but I wish the character select screens’ art styles mirrored the originals better. I loved learning every new thing about the world and each campaign left me with questions I was eager to find the answer to. As a community-driven project it won’t be the same as the original, but they did a good job making their own sort of sequel to rain world. It seems the DLC had more focus on story than gameplay, but I think that’s okay because the gameplay is already great. 11/10 I have played again
I love downpour to death but, the killer to me is the loading tips, they are the worst thing added to this game. Also I feel that each slugcat should have a creature that is common in there caimpaign that completely counters its abilities and makes you more like survivor. Arti has cyans which are just as maneverable though I feel something with explosion resistance would be better. Saint has zooplizards which I think are absolutely perfect for it, besides their rarity. The rest of them however, have nothing to counteract there otherwise kinda broken abilities. Also I think riv should have always had short shelter cycles. And regions like drainage and lower industrial, shaded, and garbage waste should be more flooded.
And for the iterator Dialogue, I like it. To me at least, they seemed more human than the game lets on, they are very biological and clearly have personality. The whole point of five pebbles was him not wanting to be a bug, a cog in the machine which is what caused the chaos in the game. Of course, some of the dialogue could be reworked. Like what you mentioned, gourmand could have been, more rude like survivors and moon shouldn’t have as much of an immediate liking to riv and shouldn’t have told them how to get into submerged, that’s what pebbles overseer should have done moon should have told him to try and return it to where they got it and it should have been the player who choose to help her. Artis dialogue is fine imo five pebbles can relate to her a ton having an anger unable to be quenched due to his circumstances arti is like an outlet for his own struggles.
And for the general tone throughout the caimpaign makes sense if you think of them as more human than robot. He’s growing as a character, however his growth comes after it matters, if he had his mindset he does in riv in let’s say arti it would have completely changed his fate. And his distain for everything in spear and his general, teenage audited makes sense for one of the youngest iterator with everyone talking down on him. Some things definitely could have gone better like creature spawns and some of the dialogue. Though most of it isn’t that bad and it’s still an amazing update even if what I said was moot.
I don't like the fact that tips are activated by default when enabling Remix but you can turn them off
Love the essay! Personally I've always disliked how Downpour became a story about iterators, when my favorite part of the original game was always about the slugcats and the ecosystem they exist in (it's telling that FP was my least favorite region in the og game due to the lack of interesting flora and fauna and ecosystem-like elements I fell in love with)
I do appreciate how much replayability Downpour added, but I absolutely agree that Expeditions are the most interesting form of that. The new slugcats are too OP to rlly enjoy just living amongst the ecosystem. Not to mention how most of the campaigns are just fetch quests for... you guessed it, iterators! (Someone make a dialogue skip mod, please...) It's a totally different experience trying to live it out in a region with one of the downpour scugs compared to trying to live it out with Survivor, Monk, and Hunter.
And god yeah glad somebody said it. Downpour dialogue is agonizingly cringeworthy, you can tell amazing coders made up the DP team but not great writers... like what is that dialogue when spearmaster comes into pebbles' chamber the first time with MoC. "Hmm SRS sent me a pearl okay I guess I'll read it aloud bc why not?' The blatant fanservice is physically painful sometimes
In general I agree with your video. The dialogue is definitely a bit iffy at points, there's a lot of "here's the full context, do exactly this" lines. Though I was mostly ok with Rivulet/SM's story being so iterator focused due to Hunter also being iterator focused. Iterators acting out like members of a Discord server is good but not great, as it is not beyond my own expectations of how hyper intelligent AI stuck in boxes for eternity would act like. For better and worse, Hunter normalized the idea that slugcats can have immense power when dealing with what are essentially gods, and I think all of the DLC campaigns took inspiration mostly from Hunter in terms of narrative.
The hardest and most intriguing campaign of them all is Survivor IMO, because it's when you know nothing. Monk and Hunter reusing the regions made sense, they represent easy and hard difficulties. But I think the major flaw of the DLC is that they added all 5 slugcats at once. In a more normal dev cycle, each slugcat would be added one after the other, giving time for each to be tailored with more attention and detail. But because their attention was divided, all of the slugcats reuse the same regions and creatures with very few differences (I'd argue that even the Saint's variants are too similar in most cases). It makes sense to me that they made the DLC slugcats OP, because otherwise the player would have to spend significantly more time retreading through the same base regions just to get to the interesting new regions.
This might be my brain which has rain world as a core piece of it as of now, but i love downpour so much, of course theres a few flaws, but, i just love it. I've only gotten into rain world in early 2023, thats a good thing about that year for me. Sorry for rambling, i have many thoughts.
here before the video leaves the target audience or inevitably blows up cuz it's very well made. :D
you've pretty much put my general thoughts in video even though there is some stuff i disagree with. i gen think the reason why rain world got so popular with the dlc was due to the main meaning/core message of the game being diluted/overshadowed by the fancontent of the DLC leading people to believe vanilla is "incomplete" and a canvas for "a bigger story"; i wanted to get the dlc because i could support the game, the devs and the modders; i just wish they made it more clear this was an AU and fancontent (not just because of the narrative shift issue but also because the og moders/devs that were brought in deserve literally everything in the world
I dont really have the same feeling with the OP of slugcats. You still get one shot and the one time you have a double jump you have an entire tribal species praying on your downfall so its balanced. But for rivulet, yeah shes just fuckin op when you remove the energy cell. With gourmand he isnt really a real "Slugcat" and instead is a depection of what the slugcats thought of him (mostly why his entire campaign only opens a gate) Saint is frail and unable to eat meat and cant almost store food for the next cycle. He also has to deal with intenser spawns a cold climate that freezes you to death but because hes "Sorta" fast its balanced (Atleast in my eyes) As for the spearmaster dialoge, I dont mean to start an arguement but you kinda said them in a very VERY annoying voice in order to show how bad there dialouge is, now this isnt bad its just that you used it ALL THE TIME even in the nice dialouge that I liked! and yes they are massive organic supercomputers but that doesnt mean that they dont have personalites if you locked even albert einstin in a room for 500 years he would go insane! The supercomputers talk like this because they are ORGANIC and have a sense of humor mostly because the ancients wanted that. Main reason why he plays his pearl at the end of rivs campaign
I haven’t watched the full vid yet cus work. BUT! I agree with everything so far except, i feel some of characters aren’t OP enough for the DRASTIC difficulty increase there put in. That being Hunter, Artificer, Spear Master.
I got no problem with the rest of the characters. But what i call the ‘combat focused’ campaigns are just too harsh for me. In a game of 1 shots, they throw like 3 times the enemies at you, that are all much stronger or more annoying to deal with. Giving near the only option “get gut” & beat the enemies.
Also i’ll say. Downpour added laggy or even game crashing situations in the game. That caused COUNTLESS deaths or ‘quits’ that aren’t really my own fault. Where as the base game ran smooth as butter for me. I in a way prefer base game. But i liked what they did with big boy, Riv, & saint. But i also agree. They coulda done things differently.
Great video! I never looked downpour through this viewpoint 🤔
Honestly, the only part of downpour that really just.. didn't click for me, was artificer's whole campaign. Like, it feels NOTHING like rain world. From the story to the gameplay. It's like an edgy furry oc that someone just put into the game. It adds almost nothing to the major lore, with the small exception of letting us see 5P's stances on the lore pearls. The gameplay is less of trying to survive and more just combat. It feels more like hotline miami than rain world. Not to mention how absurd the whole story is. Gourmand's campaign get the excuse of it clearly being an exagerated story to be told to the slugpups in the colony, but artificer's story is straight up just a 14 year old's edgy oc. It kinda tries to redeem itself with the dreams and echo dialogue, but it just feels extremely out of place in rain world.
Glad to see these points articulated in such a clear and thorough way. I find it really sad that Rain World was only able to get popular because the integrity of its original vision was eroded, even if it was in the name of more content and accessibility. When new downpour fans call the survivor campaign an "incomplete story" or act like it's just a bland stepping stone to the dlc I feel disappointed; the original Rain World is one of the most meaningful artistic experiences I've ever had and it feels almost as forgotten as when the game was in obscurity.
I did start playing this game after the DLC and I did find Survivor/Monk campaigns a pretty weird story wise. Like, you are looking for your family at the start, even overseer points you towards other slugcats, but then suddenly your direction changes and now you are helping some random godlike beings and then proceed to take a dip in the soul dissolving pool. An animal with simple desires, not the advanced Ancients who were fed up with their lives. This was weird and I am glad DLC added alternative endings for them.
@SSpeed2000 The overseer tricks you into trying to help moon, it shows you other slugcats to make you follow it. It then directs you to neuron flies. It doesn't actually care about you at all, or you ascending, it's solely motivated by getting Moon neuron flies and keeping you alive to that end.
@@SSpeed2000 The restlessness the ancients felt is communicated pretty well to the player through the gameplay, and the experience of going from a lonely, tortured animal to someone who's let go of the expectation of meeting their family and accepts the world as unfair and full of pain reflects the game's Buddhist themes really well imo and is a really genius example of using gameplay to tell a story. There's a really good article by lesliebyvivrebrooks that goes into how pretty much all of the original game is designed to reinforce the Buddhist themes present in the narrative. I can understand how it can seem a bit jarring, though.
this truely is a rain world
Loved the analysis. Couldn’t agree more. I did not even pick up on the tonal shift in 5P’s communication so this was quite eye-opening.
Also, I’ve 100%ed the game and its’ DLC and I still consider Hunter to be my favorite slug… so **fist bump**
this really changed my persepective wow
Now I understand why after 2000 hours I still only play hunter 😂😂😂😂
8:40 because she is just that angry
The DLC is like Avatar 2, it tells you everything at the beginning and the sense of surprise disappears. The correct way to do it was leaving more to the player interpretation, to leave the comminity make assumptions or theories about what is happening or why. One thing that rainworld did gorgeously was the ancients. The game only give you hints about them, but does not throws to your face everything about them. The game allowed the community to imagine how do they look, why did they use that architecture, what did they eat, what language did they speak, how did they build their iterators, like, how?
I would loved to have seen moon more different than five pebbles in the spearmaster campaign, showing it's deprecated and old technology, with redundant systems or even robots. That moon facility had the tools to repair machines and that the main difference between pebbles and moon would be the use of bio-engineering and robots, respectively.
The thing I liked less about rainworld was the dialog between iterators in spearmaster. I would prefered that those weren't in the game. And I hate that the developers leaved a lot of stuff in their discord than on the game, making the casual player unable to know that stuff, even making misinterpretations about the lore, for example, that the challenge 70 was not canon.
I liked more about the assumptions that I make on my own about why moon died, how did pebbles kill her, why did he made that such a horrible thing; and not that he was being an annoying emo teenager. Or how pebbles got the rot, something like doctor House applying an alternative way to reconstruct the tissue in his leg knowing the possible consequences and ended up with cancer tumors. I would liked that five pebbles were more like doctor House in behavior, that even fits with the organic supercomputer thing.
I don’t know if I can actually apply that changes to the game with a mod or something. It would be pretty cool if I can.
(Sorry for the broken english, I tried my best)
Have you seen the mod for additional hunter endings? Lolight2 did a review recently of the endings and i feel the characterization of NSH is exactly what your looking for. would be interested in your thoughts.
that mod literally turns hunter into another downpour style campaign with a lot of flashbacks into yet another iterator... its the kind of thing this video is complaining about. Art is impressive tho, they are fairly close to Del northern's draws
@@jevmenyt3422 I take your point about the structure of the campaign. my question was about the characterization of the iterator. NSH seemed closer to a supper computer than downpours characterizations. However where the most mystery was the fandom was bound to explore so its unsurprising what we got. (Downpour originally being mods)
This is a nice perspective to get as someone who bought rain world like three or four years before downpour came out, never played it, and then got super into rain world after watching a bunch of let's plays on UA-cam
as a long time rain world player, downpour and its affect on the community have only got worse for me as time has gone on. i was so eager to enjoy it, but it was completely kneecapped by akus greed and impatience, and ive lost all faith that theyll bring anything positive to the community
Same tbh, whenever I play the game I think about this but not just when I play the game but even when I look at the community and modding scene and how they have changed since 1.5. It really feels like Downpour made it a different game, but it shouldn't, Downpour is a separate story.
Halfway through the video and yeah, I mostly agree with your points, as much as I love Downpour. I really don’t like most of the broadcasts, however, there is some neat info in some of them that characterizes SRS and NSH, which I do like (even if it’s written poorly). Maybe they could have like had the broadcast thingy they do in game but when you try to see it it turns into a pearl that you need to bring to Moon? And like, only 5 or so are necessary, not the whole bunch we got. Of course, they would still differ heavily from base game, as we barely got any personality for any other iterators other than Moon and Pebbles, and even then it’s not nearly as in your face as it is in downpour, but I do like seeing the more “human” side of them. Also yes I hate how wall breaky they are which is why I think that would work better. And maybe Rivulet still does the rarefraction cell thing, but is could characterized as more of a nomadic slugcat who likes to go on little journeys instead of just the slugcat that “fixed the bond between two god like entities” or whatever Moon’s dialogue is written as (kind of like how Gourmand and Artificer are characterized?). Oh and maybe they’re slower on land actually but to compensate they’re faster underwater and there are even more floods in than there are in downpour. And the gravity cell can’t actually be used, it’s just like a giant pearl you have to carry (not actually a pearl but like it’s useless to you while moving through the land). And maybe to up the difficulty the floods DO become less frequent after you take the cell and it’s harder for you to navigate because you’re slower on land.
Edit 1: Ahhh I saw you dislike the human aspects of them, which I do like, even if I think a lot of the dialogue isn’t great
Edit 2: Oh yes, I think the cutscenes should have been art, and I think your Spearmaster Dream idea is better than my broadcast pearl idea. Maybe we could see Suns slowly getting more closer to Spearmaster, and maybe one dream where Spearmaster peers over and sees Suns talking to NSH (because I do like the fact that they are made friends in Downpour) and maybe we see Suns looking somber when inserting the message into Spearmaster’s chest to know yes they do feel *very* guilty but less in your face. And I love the art at the end of Rivulet, if they had more of that in Riv that would’ve been amazing. And cut the Moon broadcast at the end it totally ruins the art cutscene that comes after
It's not that I outright dislike the human aspect, it's just that I preferred the feeling of them being more alien/strange. It's different, which isn't necessarily bad, but I find it less interesting,
@@sorbetcafeFair enough. I feel like there could’ve been away to make them mechanical and “human” at the same time (like how you mentioned Pebbles shows respect for Hunter and a small bit of care for Moon by helping them “aid in their rescue mission” so he definitely does care in base game it’s just not nearly as obvious as they make it in Downpour)
When Pebbles met Monk he gave him the mark to comment on his non importance and on how to off himself (aka, f off from his structure)
When Pebbles met Gourmand he gave him the mark to comment on his 'roundness' and on how to f off from his structure (literally)
Seems pretty close to me. Although the video as a whole is on point
Downpour is a fantastic game. Rain World is a fantastic *story.*
I still liked and even LOVED the story Downpour told. But the way I see it, Downpour is about the Iterators. Which were, if anything, more of a backdrop to the basegame of Rain World. I still firmly believe Rain World and RW:DP being two seperate canons is what is best. I recognise that it feels less like an artful story that feels like windchills after rain, and more like a series of mythological tales you'd read in school or something
Ur so fucking real for this btw
Regarding the different campaigns...
Gourmand is basically a joke. However, I really loved the exhaustion mechanic. It really felt like something that belonged for a slugcat! (I hope to someday make my own modded slugcat that combines Gourmand's exhaustion mechanics with Hunter's ability and illness.) But the idea that Gourmand is just a story is kinda broken by his actions having a direct effect on the campaigns of Monk and Survivor... It's a sloppy mistake. But I like Gourmand as an easier alternative to Hunter. It does that well.
Artificer... I hate Artificer... her abilities are stupid, and killing stuff every second gets tiring and it's so luck-based that you die constantly no matter how skilled or cautious you are.
Spearmaster - I totally agree with your analysis. The only thing I disliked was the broadcasts. That was so stupid. Everything else was great.
Rivulet was just too stupidly fast. And I thought Pebbles asking for his power supply to be disconnected was perfectly fitting for him! It feels so in-character. However, the idea that this power supply can be used to almost entirely revive Moon was silly.
Saint was amazing. His tongue is unfairly overpowered (they should've made it not launch you upwards when retracting it), but his world was very well polished. And seeing 5P like that... amazing. And I think Saint's ridiculous "god mode" powers worked pretty well considering he seems to be an echo merely dreaming that he was able to help everything in the world with totally fake powers.
I really hope the new watcher dlc will have more focus on the new regions instead of overpowered abilities
I paused and went frame by frame to read the iterator discord channels that shit was hilarious to read. I need more private dms between NSH and SRS. Good video
You are the only person I have ever seen to complain about stability in Downpour. I play on a disgusting potato laptop, i3 with fucking integrated graphics. I have finished the entire game, every campaign, every pearl, every broadcast, every bullshit challenge, I have 200+ hours. I am being %100 honest when I say this: I haven't experienced A SINGLE crash or major lag issue throughout it all. Is this really an important widespread problem like you make it out to be?
I also experience crashes, and quite regularly. Compared to the 1.5 era, when the game never really crashed for me, the stability of 1.9 has not been great. But I never experienced lagging. I also see many experiencing crashing, and they also crash regularly. I find it a surprise to see someone who never had the game crash on 1.9.
rubicon was one of my least favorite regions, and one of the biggest reasons was the fact that guardians and miros vultures on the same screen would cause my game to drop from 60 to like 20 fps. i have an i7 and 3070, so a lot of things were clearly not very well optimized, beyond the more common crashes from my experience.
@@soloraceschannelvery interesting. It's been around a year since I last played the game, so maybe a bad patch came out that messed things up some time? Never had the game before Downpour so I can't say anything about stability for earlier versions.
i'd like to say that i don't think it's a hellish world and you just naturally don't want to be there- if you did you wouldnt play the game at all. there are cases where that's not true though. i know that in the game its not because you want to escape but because you have given up on finding your family and are now lost and searching for a purpose
8:59 "spearmaster is the weakest and simplest of the downpour slugcats"
saint:
saint is much more powerful that spearmaster. Combat ability isn't the same thing as being strong.
back when i just started playing rainworld which is earlier this year i know nothing about every slugcat even the downpour slugcats
i dont even think they are op but rather a slight adjustment for their difficulty which brings variation to the game
bro really said wain wowld
i have no reason to tell you this neither can i blame you for this, but one of your mods ruined my life. don't think anyone will even read this nor care and not caring is probably the best thing to do(it's so stupid that i am even saying this because in reality i am just being incredibly petty and can't move on). overall pretty great video and it strongly reminds me of the difference between dst and original. don't starve together isn't quite the "uncompromising" experience it describes itself as. most characters don't have really major downsides but they have absolutely massive upsides. the closest thing to the uncompromising experience is Wormwood or Wilson. because they don't offer something ridiculous like double damage at the cost of eating slightly more and stronger sanity drain when you kill everything twice as fast. all downsides are basically overriden by the damage multiplier. and this applies basically to every character because all of them feel like Wilson but stronger(something that looks like an incredibly common thing in Rain World too). or newer bosses which mostly look like... someone's fursonas rather than a don't starve creature. especially some parts like Charlie after ancient fuelweaver which looks like she was ripped out of a different game. you can even see the direct difference in just short animations. the first one having this gritty aesthetic and the last ones which idk, just look more like a normal cartoon or smth. i think it's probably a common thing for the original artistic vision to just get lost overtime. haven't both of these games basically existed for years already? Rain World itself is like 7 years old and downpour is only 1 year old. it always sucks but i think it's just something that happens. though i still think the random insane power creep isn't something that naturally happens. i rarely play dst due to how the game is balanced making it boring and multiplayer actually being barely functional. and sorry for randomly guilt tripping you for no good reason. also the point about feeling powerful is so like uhh, idk but characters like Wormwood can feel incredibly powerful while still offering the uncompromising experience. they could in my opinion retain that feeling while still making characters feel strong. in fact i had a lot of moments where i felt strong as Survivor just because i killed 2 white lizards at once. you aren't straight up overpowered but the feeling of outsmarting, outmaneuvering, and overpowering a creature supposed to kill you feels incredibly satisfying even if it's probably entry level stuff. you can thrive and it's very much possible in both games but it always feels different to kill a boss as Wormwood rather than Wolfgang. and for extra clarification ignore me mentioning the admin thing. i do many stupid things
what?
I started playing about a day before Downpour came out, and I guess I never really took the time to consider most of the stuff you bring up in this video... and now that I have, honestly I agree with you. It really does feel much more linear for everyone but Saint, and loses a lot of the charm of exploring that alien world and having your own free choices.
Also holy hell yeah that new Hunter description is a crime, and so's the lack of lineage. I have complained about the dreams(or lack thereof) from my first playthrough of a Downpour scug though, so at least I'm not totally ignorant I guess lol
Maybe there was too much dialogue so they stopped bothering with the wording being the same style as before.
Also with downpour crashes they've literally only happened to me if 1. I die or 2. After hibernating but it saves progress most of the time.
I get crashed going through karma gates sometimes and in intensive regions like sub
Oh and I was watching a friend play at one point and she was getting crashes every hour or two mid-cycle as survivor, made it really hard for her to play
@@sorbetcafe yeah might vary, I always thought it's because i have some mods on and I'm mostly thinking it's the vestiges mod but I don't remember karma gates getting bugged out on anything except trying to go to submerged superstructure while playing an enemy randomizer mod.
Like i haven't played the downpour slugcats in a while so it could be worse now, I did get a crash every hour or two while playing the erratic pulse mod slugcat so maybe it's the same for others but it still was mainly on death.
My cousin and I get crashes here and there, but it always saves before doing so. The glitches are definitely apparent and vary way too much
As much as I loved downpour and it's story I have to agree with a lot of the points you made here. Pebbles' and Moon's downfall to me, is a story about god-like super computers getting humbled by the passage of time and their environment. They are not exceptions to the cruelty of the world, and through it they learn to look for comfort towards each other in their disheveled state and even acknowledging the lower life forms they've disregarded as a nuisance. But the way they executed it in the game though is ehm. The dialogue. Good lord the dialogue. It could've had more impact if they were more cold and calculating like you said. There's just too many tell not show which, in a game like Rain World of all things, where environmental story telling is one of its selling point, is not good. And they HAD good show not tell moments [SPOILERS] like the bridge from chimney canopy to the wall being absent in Saint's campaign, or the fact that the Chieftain scavenger having the mark of communication and a citizen ID drone. I really don't mind the scugs being like lap cats for them and having these cool abilities, I just wish they weren't treated like these special creatures favored by the iterators.
None of DP scugs ever felt too OP for me (probably because I suck at the game) but the gameplay of go to moon->go to pebbles-> they tell you what to do-> go to new region to do the thing is just verry repetitive and takes out the whole being lost in a dangerous world aspect of the base game. I was also disappointed that Rivulet's short cycles was just gone towards the end of the campaign. The challenge was just not there anymore. But man does the repetition work so well when you get to Saint's campaign and it gets subverted. Which I won't spoil but damn was it the best part of downpour for me.
Despite all it's flaws and how it didn't really capture the magic of the base game, I can't help but to love downpour because it was a source of joy for me in a stressful time. It clearly comes from a place of passion from the modders and I was able to enjoy it for what it is. This makes me want to see a mod that makes downpour more in line with the original. I tend to avoid discussions about criticism on it because it just becomes a whole argument on who's right and comes from a lack of maturity from both sides of the argument. Which is just the nature of the internet I guess.
Co op in the game is also really really unstable there are some regions you actually cant enter because it crashes as soon as you enter the karma gate pipe entrance and well a loooooottttt of other glitches im genuinely surpised they havent patched the bugs yet and are instead working on another dlc???
I agree that the dialogue in Downpour was.... messed up. I think spearmaster's campaign would have been better without the broadcasts, they add literally nothing. Everything about SRS they were trying to convey, about him caring about spearmaster, was conveyed in the menu picture once you finished spearmaster's campaign. I think they tried to humanize the iterators a little too much instead of leaving them a little more ambiguous. I like how Ruffles saved FP, but Moon's dialogue was too... childish.
I also think that Artificer and Gourmand should have been left out of Downpour, especially Artificer, I will die on that hill. Saints campaign felt complete, but Ruffle's and especially Spearmaster campaign was lacking the emotion that the visuals and scant dialogue in the base game provided. The time that went into Artificer and Gourmand should have gone into the other three campaigns, and it really wouldn't have changed that much!
I do want to remind people though that the iterators are still biological, and do have emotions. While i think that they ended up too childish in Spearmaster's campaign, I don't think that FP acted correctly in Ruffle's campaign. He is broken. He destroyed himself and others around him, and he is guilty now. He has no reason to maintain a god-like persona.
Loved this video.
Anyway the vedio is so good made! I enjoying rain world with or without DLC, and hunter for me is most enjoyable slugcat too :3
Downpour campaigns,expept for gourmand and saint are designed around you speedrunning the game to get to the new regions which are 4 times more difficult
saint is weird,getting out of sky islands is very hard,cc is hard after it you just run through the entire game,even silent construct is pretty ez
agreed
this made me think a lot, i really liked how dp focused on iterators more, they were and are my favorite part of the universe, and i enjoyed how we got more of a perspective on their every day affairs. on the other hand i do see now how dp changed them. i dont think they should have been completely so alien and computer like like you seem to suggest, but i definietly think downpour made them too much like fanfiction. the line "no *human* talks like this" really resonated with me on this point. theres probably a middleground somewhere that makes them relatable and more human, yet still makes it clear that these are beings like no other.
on the topic of gameplay i tend to disagree more. i cant imagine any version of downpour that added 5 unique and distinct slugcats without inherently making them overpowered. especially since the game would also start getting easier and easier for players after they've already beaten the game. i think at a certain point players are just so good at the game that by nature the ecosystem starts being irrelevant. I think moving on from that element of rainworld for the tradeoff of more fun campaigns was a good move.
everything else im more or less in agreance with. id especially add that i hate how downpour ditched the evolution of creatures through time. in the og game , you could see entire species like centipedes and red lizards go extinct from hunter to monk, but now they just start reaperaing for no clear reason. thats just dumb and removes a really cool part of the base game.
overall though, i think and hope that a lot of this can and will be allieviated with the watcher. with what seems like an entirely new world with entirely new creatures(something even the devs have said dp was lacking in) it could bring back that same sense of uneasiness and confusion. playing rw for the first time gives you this very unique feeling, where it seems like the very nature of the universe you live in is now unlike what you could ever grasp. im hoping the watcher can replicate that feeling, but i guess time will tell.
tldr good video made me think :)
According to the devlogs one of the devs has a whole presentation on the progression and migration of the different creatures, so no, they didn't ditch that, there is a logic that we just don't know of
this is just hate, I get that you are nostalgic of the first campain, but you don't keep in mind that the timeline changes, iterators are semi organic living beings, they grow as living beings and change, they suffer from the wait and try to help each others deal with it, and gameplay wise, most of the downpour slugcat are NOT op at all, abviously if you just describe their abilities, they seem OP, artificer is OP, but her campain is filled with scavengers ready to kill you at any time, gourmand has great damage, but at the cost of exhaustion, his crafting mechanic makes sense, I mean, you don't expect him to build bombs but you expect hunter to walk a very long path from NSH to FP??? it's like 30 regions apart. Slugcats are intelligent and gourmand is just trying to find food for his colony, so obviously he's not dumb, rivulet is weird, it's one of the few slugcat that are truly lost, abviously by now you know that you need to go talk to pebbles, but you don't know who sent you, and you're just trying to understand the new and dangerous world state, spearmaster is an absolute masterclass, it's probably the most intelligent slugcat, and it is specifically said that SRS chose not to give it the mark of communication, it is a messenger, and clearly knows it, at this point in the timeline you live right before moon's collapse, so obviously you interact a lot with iterators.
and OMG I respect that you have your own opinion on saint, but how can you forget to mention literally 80% of its campain? obviously it has a tongue to escape predators, it's a vegetarian pacifist, and it can't throw spears, the whole world state is stunning, the dialogues are phenomenal, and the way five pebbles just seems like his own shadow is beautiful.
you can't just say that saint randomly gains the ability to one shot everything, it's just untrue, you have to meet every echo in the world, forcing you to visit every new region, and finally, out of curiosity, you go in depth, and realise nothing's here, so you fall, and have to walk your way up the rubicon, throughout all of the regions you have already visited, and eventually, you realise it was all a cycle, and it didn't matter.
please, next time you criticise a game, know what you're talking about and don't say shit out of context.
I agree with you for the most part. I however do agree that Gourmand and Saint go too far. I would have much preferred if Gourmand's crafting was more grounded and Saint wasn't the Buddha.
@@soniaserval454 Yeah gourmand should not be able to create mass rarefaction singularity bombs that's for sure 💀but honestly saint being wise and shit isn't that bad, especially with the ending, I was thinking the same thing before doing the campain, but the idea behind saint reaching ascension and having to ascend every living creatures forever is great, HOWEVER, why did they have to make the sleep screen so buddhist???? ;(
@@NilTraveler Saint is a real, actual God. That's my problem with it.
@@soniaserval454 lore wise, yes, but in game? not at all, even with the ascension powers, you still get obliterated by some miros vulture.
and eventhough saint is a god, I think it still feels right to play because saint is both, completly out of the food chain, and in a way, is the most "inside the food chain" imaginable.
I feel like its powers are godlike, but its mission seems to have been given to it by gods, and it seems like a victim of its own wiseness
I get that you’re upset, but criticism is not hate. If anything, the most valid criticisms usually come from those that do like something and can see the flaws in it despite that.
Artificer’s parry and weapons makes every predator a joke. You can parry out outrun miros birds. Vultures and KVs, combined with unlimited exploding spears, are very easy. I killed every DLL in underhand and FP without dying. Scavengers are only difficult if you don’t know how to fight them, and maybe that’s the issue here, I understand how to fully utilize the downpour slugcat abilities to be overpowered.
No, I don’t expect gourmand to create life at will and craft singularity bombs, fire eggs, neuron flies, and similar items.
>you can't just say that saint randomly gains the ability to one shot everything
That would be why I didn’t say that, you added the word randomly in there.
the moment at 16:28 was not interrupted by the word "messenger" when it would've been so fucking funny if it had been. 0/10 video
If it was Mac-compatible, I would play it, but I'm unable too.
I really like downpour
dude a lot of good points
5:20 wtf centipedes can do that??
The Monk: Am I a joke to you ?
Huh
@@hollowknightenjoyer He didn't even mention Monk before 33 min of video, basically the end.
@@stevenex5547 bro he's just easy mode this video ain't bout him
@@hollowknightenjoyer bro can't you take a joke ? And still, he's part of the lore. Based on your logic should we exclude hunter cuz "he's just hardmode" ?
@@stevenex5547 if it's a joke where's the funny haha part
did yuw just used de UwU wanguage ?
you lost me on the iterator dialogue section. absolutely lost me. the iterators always used tildas!! your favorite campaign is hunter so you know that NSH especially doesnt speak very formally. plus everything sounds stupid when you say it stupidly, i very much hope you arent fooling anyone with this because you definitely arent fooling me.
yeah no im not getting through the whole of this video lmao you're exaggerating every change as if its the end of the world because its not how *you* would have done it and i dont want to watch through that
Saint only gets the accension abilities once he reaches karma ten
Gourmand is a legend but tires out when it throws a spear
Artificer has a giant bounty on his head and can die when exploding to much
Yes these guys are overpowered but they arent gods you still have survive
They announced another batch of community mods to be a second dlc
I totally agree, the dialogues in downpour are horrid. When I finished rivulet and hear moon call herself a "Big Sis" of Five Pebbles I was so thrown off, the immersion was immediately thrown out of the window. That's not how an iterator, a giant, extremely inteligent machine is supposed to talk. That's something a human would say. They got way too emotional in the DLC. I guess it could be explained by their extreme age, maybe being conscious for such a long time transformed them into something closer to their creators, the ancients. But I don't know, seems like a stretch.
i have my criticisms of downpour as well but just so you know, "big sis moon" is a nickname that she canonically used for herself in iterator chat messages in the vanilla game. they didn't make it up just for downpour. it can be seen in some of her pearl readings
My issue isn’t as much with her nickname being Big Sis Moon as it is the line just being kind of cringy and spoiling an emotional moment, imo.
@@ed3014 hm, alright then. My point still stands though, this isn't the only too-human line.
Iterators don’t have to be inhuman. They have always had emotions and are partially organic. Given how they speak and look I’d say the iterators were more human-like than the ancients who built them, and that makes it easier to relate to them.
I personally don’t interpret the iterators as extremely intelligent, because they don’t act like it. Rather it makes sense to me that the puppets are kinda regular in intelligence but have access to a vast wealth of processing power for resolving simulations and mathematics. And as the other guy said, big sis moon is not new.
what i do to enjoy downpour and make it make sense in the base games world is just ignore almost all DP dialog, it actually keeps the world meshed together pretty well if you do that (fuck you rivulet)