Aja on 29/12/2022 at 05:59
Yeah, the ghosts are a holdover from Demon’s Souls (and every souls game since), where their point, as far as I can tell, is not to be performative but rather to give the player a sense that they aren’t alone. Demon’s Souls was bleak and oppressive and sometimes unfairly difficult, and it was cathartic to see other people struggling along with you. It took some of the edge off. Not to mention it was nearly impossible to figure out solo, with the whole game being designed around people helping each other out. Elden Ring’s shaved off enough of the rough edges to maybe not require the same amount of cross-player communication, but at this point it’s just tradition.
Malf on 29/12/2022 at 09:47
Like how they re-used the Basilisks (petrifying frogs) from Dark Souls.
henke on 29/12/2022 at 13:08
Player ghosts and messages and everything don't bother me, probably because they makes just as much sense as anything else going on story-wise. Which is to say, I don't understand any of it. Currently 120 hours into the game, loving it. I like writing those messages too, the one I'm most proud of was "be wary of up, dog". It didn't get many likes, probably because it wasn't a suggestion to put something up someone's butt, which is what you need to write about if you wanna get 9999 likes.
demagogue on 29/12/2022 at 16:07
Sh*t I'm sorry. After the first post I was gonna cross post it to the ER thread in its on forum too, but then it kind of got away from me. Also to clarify, I wasn't really saying I didn't like it. All the things I mentioned are fun gimmicks as often as not. I was just saying why it couldn't take the #1 spot for me. I think I was greatly overplaying my criticisms for rhetorical purposes too.
Renault on 29/12/2022 at 18:03
Yeah this seems like a lot of drama for something you can very easily disable in the menus.
demagogue on 29/12/2022 at 19:46
Quote Posted by Brethren
Yeah this seems like a lot of drama for something you can very easily disable in the menus.
It's not the features that were the problem. It's the fan service attitude of the world.
You can disable features, but you can't give a world a different attitude.
I mean like in Prey, you wake up in your apartment and there's this big reveal. Obviously the whole thing is constructed for the story, and they even embed the opening credits into the world during your first helo ride as more than a big wink. But still in the gameworld, your character really (
falsely) believes they're just a guy in their apartment, and it's played straight.
jRPGs or Souls games have this thing where it's like you're basically just playing a series of Super Smash Brothers boss fights that happen to be scattered out in an pretty open world, and it's not going to even try to pretend you're an actual warrior or bandit that was born in this world and found their way here. It's a little thing, I guess, but... I get into the former more than the latter. That's all. Or, I like it too, but like I like those card based RPGs. It's not like a proper adventure game for me but a nice fighting game.
Edit: I know I'm off the rails here, so I'll shut up about it. I like this game like I like Deathloop. That's probably a better example, since that's brought a lot of the world-winking tropes from jRPGs into our own backyard so to speak (Arkane), and it's still a super fun game. It just doesn't have "that old magic" I'd want for a GOTY for me.
nicked on 30/12/2022 at 13:04
I think I get what you're saying. Game design is a balance between immersion in the world and affordances to allow the player to engage with the mechanics. If you lean too far into helping the player, the world feels less immersive.
Sulphur on 30/12/2022 at 15:10
I... don't agree with that at all, actually. The Souls games don't treat you like a Takeshi's Castle contestant explicitly, because they do take pains to situate your character in the world. (In DS, you're the 'Chosen Undead', and there's lore and whatnot around it.) Implicitly, sure, they're not going to integrate you into the warp and weft of the story, because it already happened before you got there, most of the time.
If what you're saying is that the connective tissue is missing to lead you along to each battle, I guess that's a matter of perspective. It's passive integration of the protagonist vs. active integration via an ongoing narrative, and sure, whether you like one method over the other isn't right or wrong, just preference. I'm not seeing the connection that makes the world design fan service-y, unless you mean by dint of ER being yet another souls game, so I guess I am probably missing something.
catbarf on 30/12/2022 at 16:47
For me there are a lot of little things in the Soulslike games that keep me from feeling immersed, and I can see how Dema would characterize it as fanservice. There are the ghosts reminding me that this is a game that other people have gone through before. There's the core gameplay structure of needing to make it to the next save point in one 'run', otherwise the enemies all respawn exactly as they started, that feels more like a game show gauntlet than exploring a real world. There's the deliberate predictability and consistency of enemies, where learning their moves and tells through trial and error is core to the experience. And the gameplay leans hard into the concept of learning from dying, with certain bosses and traps that are virtually impossible to survive on a first blind playthrough, but that isn't incorporated into the narrative at all.
While I do really like the environmental storytelling itself, particularly how Dark Souls conveys that you're in the aftermath of the 'real' story, the gameplay is so disconnected from it that I find it hard to care while actually playing. I don't know if fanservice is the right term, but it definitely feels like there's a core gameplay loop that defines the game and then everything else is ignorable window dressing.
nicked on 31/12/2022 at 08:06
Yeah I'd agree with that - I feel like Dark Souls games would still be 90% as enjoyable in a greybox setting - the enjoyment comes from the gamified challenges not immersing yourself in a setting, despite the settings themselves being very good-looking.
