As I recall there was a documentary about that called “Everybody Hates Chris.” It’s a thing!

I feel like they should just make it so that every attack, spell, item, etc. has a hidden secondary value that represents how much damage it can do to a player character’s health bar. So like, you have your numeric damage against AI, which you can see and make a build around, but those same attacks—all the way down to…

I am unconvinced there’s any value in “spells are a clunky and outdated pain in the ass from 2009” as a way of ratcheting up the tension. FP costs, stamina costs, casting times, that stuff all helps maintain that heat of combat tension, but I think if the actual controls were more fluid and intuitive the gameplay…

I want to check this out once I’m done chewing on Elden Ring (so it’ll be a minute, and it’ll be on sale by then, which will only make it better), but Borderlands 3 was kinda hit-and-miss for me. In a post-Destiny world, it’s really hard for me to get into first-person shooters that don’t feel as good to play—they…

Hey in case you are sweating because you’re not sure what one of tomorrow’s three Elden Ring articles should be I’ve got another Thing that Elden Ring Players are Verbing about.

Not slows down, but yeah. Like, what if staves and seals let you hold R1 or R2 to turn the face buttons into a quick menu where you select your spell, then pressed the corresponding button to cast. OR, R2 gives you the menu to select, and R1 casts the selected spell. And maybe there’s a staff and seal-only ash of war…

I still say that Sony needs to hire them to turn that demake into a full game. I would 100% pay real dollars for a full game which just as creatively reimagined the rest of the environments as that did with Central Yharnam.

Yeah, I don’t buy that crap because the games have already improved (quality of life stuff, UI, adding tutorials and such). They landed on something over ten years ago and (at least in the souls game, which ER is in all mechanical ways) that now they refuse to deviate from—but it’s old and dated now.

I wish it had been! I wish you could have multiple characters running concurrently, a whole roster of vault hunters, and then they just added more planets and storylines as you went (and they *did away* with the larger overarching narrative).

Or, I wish it had been smaller and more focused, if they were gonna tell a…

Right? Like, consider what you’re *really* saying, which is: “I want you to change your behavior to my whim due to the power I wield, and this is the threat I am deploying to get you to do that.”

Most definitely! That’s very clear, and thank you for helping us both get here. I really appreciate your perspective.

Okay, thanks for the clarification. That makes more sense.

Y-yeah, I uh... already said that, in my first reply.

“If you already love everything else it does you’re probably less inclined to notice, but I don’t love everything else about it, so the exploration wears thin in places to me. If it were Bloodborne I’d probably me much more hard-pressed to find anything to complain…

For real? Is this really true—or at least a theory that’s plausibly true? Because that’s pretty great.

You’re definitely hitting a nail here—Ubi keeps making extremely open sandboxes but then nothing about the mechanics benefit or require that space. They hold your hand through directed experiences from the overall narrative down to the individual mechanics so that it might as well not have been a sandbox at all.

Some of the “liminal spaces” between legacy dungeons or more unique one-off locations is a bit more repetitive than you’d typically see in a soulslike, a bit more copy-paste. There are a bunch of very samey ruins with a single cellar that once you’ve seen a couple, you’ve seen them all. Plenty of stretches of land…

I think even Elden Ring is a little too big for its own good. There’s just a bit more of that typical open world “connective tissue” here than I think is necessary, which isn’t as interesting as it might otherwise have been if it were smaller.

With 12 million units sold I think a lot of people’s answer to that question will be, “No, they sounded not for me, but since this one is open world and everybody says it’s much easier for newcomers to get into, I showed up.”

And it’s possible those lower-level NPC’s were way outside the scope of Martin’s involvement. Like, he wrote the ancient lore, and all the ancient characters follow the trend. They all claim he had nothing to do with the “current” setting stuff, which tracks, because I doubt Martin was in there going, “There’s this…

I don’t actually know Martin’s writing so I’m sure *I’m* off base but it kinda feels like that list of proper names at the start comes from him. It’s just that everything is sent through the Fromsoft lens.