Its also that the core narrative hasn’t really moved forward till very recently. Its gone wide building up all these side things but never really answering or resolving anything.  Its been going from adding one new piece to the board and resolving nothing to adding the next piece.  And all of those pieces idling in…

You’ve gone out of your way to find negative examples, of which there are handful - and you’re ignoring things like the entire reddit.

Like, yeah sure, I understand if you mean just the obnoxious ‘git gud bros’ who don’t even mean it as a joke.

I kind of like it because it encourages community driven testing and discoveries which results in an actual community forming around the game.

But you missing the tutorial because you were afraid to jump in a hole is not one of its flaws.

It absolutely isn’t. It’s an intended part of the games design that it doesn’t hold your hand and players are allowed to find things on their own. Like it or not, this type of design has an audience that enjoys

The game has flaws, this isn’t really one of them.

Ah I see. ‘Elden Ring is perfect and has no flaws’ is your entire personality. Gotcha.  Well that certainly explains a lot.

It’s not fucking hidden in any way.

...this was a small little internal story, by the military for the military...

The idea of a cryptographically verifiable ledger of any and all changes that is immutable is VERY interesting.

Lol, tell that to Dredd, you stupid moron.

the technical concept of them, really is interesting

What if these were all normal parts of doing business and not a sudden race to gobble up every development studio on the planet?

There are scenes and such yeah, and they’re perfectly reasonable (story quality aside). But the difference is largely in how you interact with the story.

That’s not quite it...

The problem I run into calling it an RPG is in its structure. It starts off as an amazing RPG. And then, once you’re free to leave Watson, it stops doing any of the things that made it feel like an RPG.

In the sense that there are other games that get called RPG’s that give the same level of RPGness...sure its an RPG.

Yeah, and combined with some less than great choices elsewhere its not great. An attempt was made. They just faceplant on the landing.

Don’t get me wrong. I agree with everything you say about Claire. Her character is great. That she’s just a female character till you find that out, is perfect.