something i cherish about these games is how their worlds never feel built solely for my gratification (i mean they are because they’re video games but bear with me) and so much of the story being missable or optional really adds to that. nothing strains my ability to buy into the realness of a place like npcs that just stand around waiting for me and never seem to have agency. from soft npcs don’t have agency, really, but they create the impression of it with all of these people arbitrarily moving around, reacting to things i did that i didn’t even know they cared about, and generally not being designed for my convenience
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One of the truest and saddest things I heard about games was in the Abnormal Mapping review for Moon (a brilliant but stubbornly obtuse anti-game I was only able to finish by consulting a walkthrough about ten times) where Em is talking about how Moon is a game designed to be played and solved by a group of people in chunks over schoolyard lunch discussions over a period of months, and looked at that way it honestly isn’t that complex or oblique. Jackson replied (I’m paraphrasing heavily btw) that they would love to have the unstructured time and the social environment to play games like that but it’s more or less been destroyed by decades of habituation to a profit-seeking industry and the realities of contemporary adult life and I was like hooo boy.
So that’s kind of how I feel a lot about Elden Ring’s easily missable pseudo-storylines—I would love to be the kind of person in the kind of environment where I could really appreciate this stuff, because honestly I do think it’s better, but it feels like it belongs to a very different world than the one I live in.
Edit: honestly I think there has to be a happy medium where games are approachable but not actively trying to compel me to play for a thousand hours by elevating the commodity fetish to a production philosophy to produce uncannily smooth, uninterrupted surfaces of alienated play that compel me from point to point without me even being aware that they’re doing it
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yeah I mean, I think it’s fair to say that the async messaging systems are from’s attempt to integrate that exact experience into the game to allow for their approach, and I have so much respect for them sticking to that even with such a blockbuster AAA title with so much riding on it.
that said, I don’t know if there’s a single from soulslike game I’ve played without having to consult a fextralife wiki at least a few times, which shows it’s an imperfect solution… but imo still easily worth the tradeoff.
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I had no shame in mind. Latenna was actually my first ash to max. I was simply interested because I was much more capable of not using ashes on many more bosses during my NG+ run I just finished.
I pretty much also only melee. I used int as the main scale stat, but I was using the moonligh. So yeah that’s melee (no matter how I try I always fuck up castings, do use bows to bait enemies or clean an area that I know that I can OHK with headshots cause I’m lazy).
Still during NG+ I only used ashes during the a few bosses. The Crucible duo, the second Astel, Mogh Bloodlord fight, and Malenia.
However I was using various weapons because my level is pretty high now. But the lack of the old barricade shield is being really hard on me. Godfrey was NOT an easy fight… Him a brick wall, me a monkey with a stick.
But even Radagon and Elden Beast, specially the second, was doable with melee only and no ash.
Btw, I still have the same 50 vigor as in the first run. Actually using a lower defense armor cause SoulsFashion is a must.
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Me and 12 million people all f5ing fextralife for the same meteorite staff location
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I think a large part of the appeal (or not) of the questlines and the NPCs in Elden Ring is being able to let go of whether it’s an essential part of the experience. I think if it’s something that’s really going to bug you, you need to wiki the shit out of it ahead of time (and that’s fine) or just be able to accept that you’re going to miss stuff (and I worry that we’ve really pathologized this to the point where people not only can’t accept it; they feel like they’re being wronged if something is misseable).
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I generally subscribe to that belief, and I wish it were more widespread, but in Elden Ring’s case I think there are just a lot of cases where the narrative pacing gets severely fumbled if you don’t, for example, meet Milicent in Caelid (this is the big one that people keep talking about, I’m pretty sure), which also contrasts in weird ways with the extremely wiki-heavy culture around these games.
so, like, agreed that it’s pathologized, agreed that it’s a design crutch, still think it’s kind of an implementation issue here (but not even as a UX or a quest design problem, those are boring framings which I genuinely think are beneath good, mysterious gamedev, but it nevertheless exacerbates limp writing and hinders the sense of mystery). mystery-as-good is the correct framing, here, I think, and it’s still very possible to criticize Elden Ring on that basis.
like, the dualism of Radagon and Marika should’ve been more interesting when you maybe manage to follow the Goldmask questline without a wiki (does anyone?) except you’ve lost track of who these characters are throughout, oh, the middle 80% of the game; the reveal of Miquella in the battle with Mohg should’ve also been more interesting (nevermind that there’s a copy of that boss gating another extremely fascinating bit of storytelling that’s barely really explained as a projection or w/e) but when you take into account that the way to even access that area is like, a teleporter way off in the corner of the Consecrated Snowfield that feels like it’s borderline cut content… idk folks
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and to be clear I have almost 0 complaints from before you reach the plateau, love the implicit storytelling and the edges you can probe all around the first half
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I agree with that; it’s also not out-of-character for FromSoft titles though. Arguably some of the other games are worse, the DLC for Dark Souls comes to mind. I honestly have no idea whether it’s just not that important to them as a team or if they’re just bad at it.
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this was great though! you immediately see a beautiful garden that maps onto the existing world geography, you see Artorias is real fucked up, you save his dog, and you go all the way into hell and fight a demon. no notes
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I meant getting into the DLC. Aside from the sheer mechanical wackiness involved, what little narrative incentive you have to get you poking at that is incredibly vague/not there at all.
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oh, yeah. I had definitely wandered up to the base of that waterfall when I first played dark souls like a year previously, and I experienced the DLC purely in terms of “what do I need to do to play the new level,” but I have no idea how a new player would react to eg getting the item in the Duke’s Archives for the first time
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these games have always been really refreshing to me in an era where most stuff feels like asset theme parks
i approach them for the most part in the same way i would a kawazu or matsuno joint: play as much as i possibly can without wikis or faqs and then gorge on all that shit when i hit a brick wall or on a second playthrough
though i’m getting a bit old and short of time for the second playthrough thing
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I like coming at this game blind to the extent that after the patch that put NPC indicators on the map Goldmask is just an icon hovering over a bridge that I can’t interact with and have only just a fuzzy memory of being mentioned in passing by the faith spell vendor in my plathrough.
Kind of feeling like the import Demon’s Souls or maybe uh, the gamecube Animal Crossing or love-de-lic games where you just get by with little agency in a game world that functions just fine without you and is largely indifferent or even hostile to you.
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would anyone even call anything in these games “quests” if fextralife didn’t exist? I’ve found a lot of this aspect of the conversation here pretty alienating, honestly. I don’t think it’s just neat–or even a compromise–that it’s so easy to miss so much of this game, I think it’s straight up one of the best and most remarkable things about it.
and re: gamer pathology, none of these games have really ever ended in anything other than a pointed anticlimax. there’s no reason not to just stop whenever you feel like it. I don’t feel like the player is even told to feel otherwise. I can’t seem to figure myself into a position that agrees that this game specifically is genuinely too big or disjointed other than the labor issues, really.
though if it were up to me the next thing they made would probably be scoped back down to king’s field size, drilling down in granularity from there.
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I always find the responses in these conversations weird because I don’t really know any other way to critique games except wearing my design hat, so when people are like “listen, here’s how to approach these games so you will like them better” it’s like… yeah I can’t tell players to do things, so this is not viable information for me. I can only make the things and see what people think about them and I analyze games to get information on new tools to use to do that better.
Point number the second: I think it’s important to understand that From Software does not walk on water. Miyazaki has gone on record in interviews to say there’s a lot about the games he doesn’t like. Until gamer-Twitter had a howling infantile tantrum they were throwing around the idea of difficulty modes, because I don’t think they actually like the corner they have painted themselves into re: steep, inaccessible difficulty. They also definitely wanted to make NPCs easier to find in this game which is why they put them on the map in the first post-release patch.
Thirdly, I promise that when I complain that I don’t like how Fromsoft NPCs don’t show up where they said they were going to be and instead you meet someone else with a confusingly similar name three hours in who alludes to parts of the storyline that just didn’t happen because you didn’t find the original guy in a totally unrelated spot by hitting an illusory wall 32 times on a Sunday… that I am not trying to make these into Ubisoft checklist games, which I find depressing and tedious. Please just let me think this 100 hour game contains some stuff which is obtuse or not well-written, which it does
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completely agree, and i was bristling at the rampant use of “quest” too. especially when whichever AAA guy invoked “quest design” in that tweet. it’s like… maybe think about exactly what we’re talking about here
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Yeah, I started saying “storyline” because people kept getting mad at imagined guys whenever I called them quests. We can call them “froobidoos” if we want; I really just need a way to talk about all the stuff I didn’t see. I have zero stake in whatever weird switches this word is flipping in people’s brains
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i’m not getting mad at imagined guys, i just don’t feel like pretending that there’s no difference between what from software has been doing intentionally for seven games in a row and the straightforwardly digestible unmissable content-chunk structure that is Quest Design in the AAA sense
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Sure, yeah, I agree, but “quest” is just an English word and when a guy is like “take this golden needle to somebody you’ve never met who also isn’t in the place I’ll tell you where they are but actually somewhat nearby in an adjacent area” I think it’s fair to call that a quest. I promise I’m not trying to hold everything up to the standard of a guy saying “I’ve marked the spot where you can find the guy on your map” and then huge text that sits in an ever-present HUD saying “GO TO THE MAP MARKER TO FIND THE GUY” and then when you’re within three different proximity radii you get a series of unique VO barks from the protagonist like “this sounds like the place the old man was talking about where I can complete the quest by finding the guy.”
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