is it ok if I don’t care if the guy is ever findable
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Of course it is.
I think you should know that your posts come across really adversarial and condescending sometimes.
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I like that fromsoft’s way of handling this with the volcano manor assassinations is just the gentle nudging on your shoulder of, okay here is a letter that adds an unobtrusive map marker, go ahead and do it if you want but if not that’s ok too
Ehn I also come across as adversarial and condescending sometimes probably.
I’m honestly of two minds regarding finding vs not finding the guy. One is that mystery is good, and a huge problem with a ton of games these days is they’ve been built to feel like a mixture of work and problem gambling, totally lacking in any sense at all of joy or purpose and adding nothing to anyone’s life, with nothing to discover or find or any sense that you’re really participating at all.
On the other hand, playing a pretty intentional pastiche of epic fantasy where you just don’t see half the story, are confused by almost everything that happens and it just feels like it doesn’t add up to anything because you just didn’t see shit is like… ok well why is it in the game then? One thing I think about prior Fromsoft games is that A. missing really major elements was less common because the games were smaller and more linear and B. the weird laughing guy who disappears suddenly and you just find all his items on the ground has this strong spooky air of gothic fantasy that just feels like it serves a purpose in the Souls games.
In Elden Ring where it’s trying to send up (maybe not in a ha-ha funny way but certainly in a thematic way) all these elements of epic fantasy works less well if half of it is just kind of missing. It’s like doing the skateboard trick when my back was turned. I bet it sure was cool! But for me it basically didn’t exist so the game just feels weirdly themeless and empty in a way I have honestly not come to expect from Fromsoft
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absolutely imo, and if the game were openly fucking with you I think that would be great, but when the alternative is a bunch of soupy names that sound like they should be relevant but aren’t, and it doesn’t seem to be positioning this as an ironized, forgotten legend in even the way as the last 3 dark souls games… it does seem uneven
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I’ll take the note, but also I wasn’t really being sarcastic. I didn’t feel like I should have to argue back from the position that miyazaki &co can do no wrong. I don’t really care what was intentional or not! I’d say that’s even crucial to my enjoyment. “they’re fucking with me” isn’t nearly as funny as “are they fucking with me?”
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I would submit two astels vs two mohgs as good/bad examples of this
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list idea: list of things in elden ring that don’t have any kind of twin
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I definitely feel like that a great part of my enjoyment of ER, especially compared to DS3/Bloodborne/Sekiro, none of which really clicked for me at all, is the positively palpable aura of Eurojank, Piranha Bytes-style. It’s even got the commonality of having non-US, non-English developers further obscuring might what could have been a design choice or something that shipped because nobody on the team could adequately communicate about/organize people to fix in time.
I think my favorite sequence of this was encountering a bunch of ghost NPCs, which included an NPC who also had a physical form like within visual distance of their ghost self. And then the ghost self disappeared shortly thereafter for no reason that I could figure out. Absolutely impossible to tell how much of that was intentional or for what reason.
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Actually, I’m wrong, I just remembered that at least some of it was intentional because the ghost NPC tells you to go next door and talk to their physical form.
ETA: Or the conversation I saw yesterday in a Discord server trying to figure out exactly what ‘undead’ means within the context of a FromSoft game, which…part of the reason why I think there’s such a weird cult-like thing about the Souls games is that people latched onto all the “rich world-building” of item descriptions and suchlike and part and parcel of making two-hour YouTube videos about this is the assumption that FS has to be geniuses! Rather than maybe, they make really weird, inconsistent cosmologies that wind up leaving a lot of room for people to read into.
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There was a point where I had two Roderikas in the Roundtable, right around the corner from each other, and if it was a bug it sure did suit the other shit that was going on in the game at that moment.
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hey i’ve enjoyed your posts and my replies are meant as an attempt at dialogue not like, saying you are wrong or need to change yr approach to the text. i don’t think anyone here thinks from or miyazaki walk on water, but a lot of us might like being confused or lost in virtual spaces more than the average
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It’s also that a unique experience is often valued regardless of whether how much of that uniqueness is intended or even if what makes it unique is poorly done or ill-thought out.
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Yeah that was honestly probably a bad turn of phrase on my part: what I mean is I see a lot being read as intention that might be honestly chalked up to time or budget or ability.
People in general online seem to feel like From’s approach is less chaotic than it certainly comes across in interviews. They have a je ne sais quois for sure that people love and obviously you don’t bungle your way through all of that, but they’ve also routinely expressed having wished things had been done differently or even just that they’d been actually finished.
I also feel like when I say I don’t like how much stuff is missable people take that to mean that I feel like I’ve been cheated by not getting to absorb some Content or something. Like Miyazaki took one slice away from my fifty cakes and I’m gamer mad about it. Honestly I’m less worried about being lost or just not seeing 100% of the game than I am about the game’s themes just going missing.
One of my fav thing about FromSoft games is the oblique and constantly repeating rhythms of theme. Bloodborne weaves blood and birth and the cosmos into a half-formed (but very visible and intentional and powerful) picture. Sekiro tackles the way war and conquest dehumanize people, and the continuing sorrow they leave in their wake. Elden Ring, well… it kind of starts to have some themes if you play it with a wiki so you see everything. Otherwise it’s fantasy name soup and a little guy running around. And I’m not sure that was on purpose. It feels… mistake-ish. I certainly don’t think it works or is good. I don’t need a quest log; I’d just ideally like the elements of the game to come together in some sort of organized and purposeful way
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If there’s one way that Fromsoft walks on water it’s probably time management. They always manage to release games at the exact sweet spot where it’s neither been rushed nor delayed. What really matters to the core experience has been polished, and there’s also a ton of jank that arguably adds crunch to the experience.
I agree with BoB that Miyazaki (unlike SB) seems never to be actively happy with the jank, because every sequel polishes away some of the notable jank from the last game. But that’s the key, they always push their ambitions to the next one and never aspire for one particular game to be the single Era-Defining Gaming Masterpiece (while ironically getting closer to that than most devs who do).
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I definitely also trace some of my frustration about structure to the game’s themes being so missable. I mentioned way up in the thread or in the previous thread that I don’t think I would have started any character stories (using this term instead of quests lmao) in the game correctly without a guide, mostly because I completed many of their progression steps before finding the character they’re associated with.
Many of the themes about rot, corruption, eerie doubles, fluid identities, losing yourself in a mission or in another person or in service to another person, etc would have simply been missing from my game experience if I hadn’t used guides. I’m glad I got to experience that stuff because it adds a lot, IMO! I just had to use a guide to do that. I think I would have enjoyed myself more if I hadn’t had to stick a toe into the fextralife morass, where all the secrets I don’t want to learn–zones I haven’t seen yet, secret identities revealed, etc–are presented in the same place as the secrets I do want to learn.
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I’m torn here because this is a good point but ridiculous shit like this is also something I love about this game. seems like a genuine attempt at a AAA icebergvania.
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but that’s what siofra and ainsel felt like in the first half of the game, much less sloppily!
I’m pretty harsh on the second half in this respect because I really do have a pretty short attention span for this stuff and move on relatively quickly if I’m not engaged
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Every teleporter in the game feels like a placeholder for some kind of cooler transport mechanism like DkS1’s crowmobile
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except the tower of return, it rules
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