henke on 21/2/2024 at 07:16
I like the idea of this kinda high-concept B-game. Feels very 80's. Tho I kinda get the feeling that once you get past the novel concept there won't be a whole lot to it? The Steam page describes it as a "epic action/strategy sandbox" which does indeed sound like it expects you to make your own fun. Also it's developed by the folks who made Road Redemption! That was fun. Yeah... this might be ok! Very very ok.
Jason Moyer on 21/2/2024 at 17:26
Warren Spector's magnum opus is finally getting a remaster and PC release:
[video=youtube;bIr2LK_65s0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIr2LK_65s0[/video]
Sulphur on 22/2/2024 at 06:18
I'm curious how well those controls are going to translate to a normal gamepad. Never got to play the game back when it was released, but sure am curious still.
Meanwhile, I'm not a Souls fan by a long shot (just someone who appreciates them well enough when they don't piss me off, which is 5% of any given playthrough), but this Elden Ring expansion trailer looks, as they say, lit AF.
[video=youtube_share;qLZenOn7WUo]https://youtu.be/qLZenOn7WUo[/video]
Because a lot of its shit is ON FIRE, you see. Huehuehue.
*cough* Anyway, some really striking images there. Someone getting his head sucked off, dessicated old feller pulling a giant sword out through his skull, and a poison-belching lion guardian whose entire design and movement seems to be patterned off shishi-mai Lion dancers. I have no idea what the everloving fuck they're saying in the trailer, and I also don't care, but that is some exquisite visual direction.
Shame about the games being inspired by dentistry, though.
Aja on 22/2/2024 at 16:11
Souls games are interesting in the sense that I tend to enjoy them more on subsequent playthroughs after having learned the nuances of combat and watching lore videos. I get that obscure storytelling is their style, but it's a bit annoying that all these games have really interesting stories with tons of detail and worldbuilding and you basically will never understand any of it unless you're willing to make a giant mind map to piece together all the bits of text from item descriptions and off-hand comments from NPCs that you couldn't possibly understand at the time (or watch one of the many excellent summaries on YouTube). I spent 100 hours in Elden Ring and I still don't know what an Elden Ring is (I know it's not a piece of jewelry).
Sulphur on 22/2/2024 at 16:38
Part of the reason they're like that is, at least for Dark Souls 1, they designed the game first and then the story around it. For ER, they had GRRM flesh out some themes Miyazaki had in mind to create a foundational backstory for the world and characters, which they took and drew out into Elden Ring's design, so it was a bit more of a 50-50 approach there.
And yeah, Miyazaki prefers that style of making the players figure it out. He's also on record saying he designs games that hurt you because he likes being hurt, to paraphrase the bit from (
http://soulslore.wikidot.com/das1-game-no-shokutaku) a podcast transcript. Now the overall vibe of that interview was pretty informal, but I get the sense that he's not completely joking when he says it.
Aja on 22/2/2024 at 18:37
He's a masochist, and I'm fine with it. Story criticisms aside, I'm just grateful that FromSoft games exist at all. It feels like a glitch in the Matrix, that something I love so much is actually popular enough to support the high budgets they get now. How on earth did Sekiro sell 10 million copies?
demagogue on 22/2/2024 at 19:19
It always reminds me of that trend in marketing you see sometimes, where, e.g., a salsa or Red Hots advertises itself as inhumanly hot, or some extreme version of whatever the product is. Then you have a whole cult crowd buying the thing to feel like they're part of the elite few. Then they tighten their sphincters and jump into the thing headlong to suffer the worst it has to give, is that all you've got?!
That's always the image I have from a Soul's game -- a gamer tightening his or her sphincter, jumping full on into the pain, and wincing every other turn with a stupid smile. XD
Sulphur on 23/2/2024 at 02:40
I think Demon's Souls came in at the time when people were getting tired of having their hands held, and there were few things on the market that offered something like it that trusted the player to push through it. You do have to have like some amount of masochism yourself to be able to keep going, but the games have ways of taking the edge off if you look hard enough (which is sort of my problem, I'm not invested enough most of the time to plod through the muck to find these out). 'Hard but fair' was the phrase being thrown around when everyone was saying, damn it Sony, publish this game in more countries than Japan. Dark Souls was pretty much the same philosophy taken a notch up, with a wider, seamless world.
And Aja, I don't know, but Sekiro is my all-time favourite From Software game, because it is an action game par excellence. I'm glad it sold as much as it did, and I'm glad From made Armored Core 6, and I hope we get many more like them in their wake.
nicked on 23/2/2024 at 09:06
I think a lot of the hype around From Software's games' difficulty misses a crucial point that they're not actually particularly punishing. They are able to get away with being difficult because there's little to no penalty for failure. You can just try again, the worst you'll lose is your accumulated souls/runes/whatever currency, which can be infinitely re-attained. This coupled with encounter design which is learnable and fair is the perfect recipe for repetition that is actually engaging.
Aja on 23/2/2024 at 17:02
I don't think it was masochism that initially attracted me to Demon's Souls. Rather it was the notion of an action game that you had to play slowly and deliberately, one that rewarded careful, thoughtful action. It also had, for its time, some of the most tactile combat ever, from the way swords glanced off shields to the way your movement was affected depending on what armour you were wearing. I recall it being very frustrating at times but also addicting in the sense that even when I was ready to throw my controller at the screen, a half hour later I wanted to come back and try again.
But as we can see from the imitators, which perhaps get one or two elements right, FromSoft games are about so much more than difficulty. Artistically they're unmatched (Elden Ring in particular is almost absurdly beautiful), and atmospherically I find them extremely compelling (the crestfallen warrior from Demon's Souls, for example, gives a particular air of mystery and melancholy that felt novel at the time). The more I learn about the Souls games' design process, the more obvious it is that the devs are drawing from a myriad of influences, both historical and pop cultural, that inform all aspects of the games' design, and that lends them a richness that, in my opinion, is the real reason they're so revered.
