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I hear what you’re saying, but to be fair, younger players don’t start out with those reflexes either. It’s probably harder for older players, but I’m not convinced it’s that much more of a challenge that it’s not worth trying
It’s not about the reflexes, though. It’s that they have opted to take actions that make the game unenjoyable for a significant number of gamers despite it having no positive benefit for ANY gamer.
And much of my Letsplay complaints weren’t about Elden Ring. I mod that. I don’t have the tools to mod Bloodborne, a game I otherwise would like more than Elden Ring because of its storyline.
It is a great apple to apple comparison.
This is the “nuh uh” answer. You never quantified anything. it’s sorta a “fuck you, I know you showed my argument was a fallacy, but I’m better than you so I’m doubling down”. I spend too much time in places where that shit gets laughed at. I’m going back to those places. Enjoy your shit game.
They made a piece of art. You chose to buy it knowing what it was. Git gud
No. I chose to buy Bloodborne because people convinced me that wasn’t the case. Git blocked.
You have so many options to make it easier.
Like the third-party Easy Mode mod.
You bought a game that you knew would be full of “difficult” bosses
I bought a game that I knew had a working Easy Mode mod. I would not have bought it if it hadn’t. Because the designers are assholes, but assholes who can write a decent story.
And now you sit and complain about there not being an official “difficulty slider”.
Yes, I do. And you sit and complain about another human being having an opinion despite the fact you could just NOT complain about other human beings having an opinion. Funny how people “sit and” do things.
Do you also go to a vegan restaurant and complain they’re not inclusive because you can’t order meat?
No, but that’s not an apple-to-apple comparison, making that a False Analogy fallacy. For two reasons. First, whether I agree with it or not, veganism is an ethical position and they’re refusing to serve any meat on the menu because they think it’s morally wrong to. Do you think Fromsoft thinks they’re “going to hell” if they put in a difficulty slider? Second, vegan restaurants are ABOUT veganism. There’s no reason to choose to eat at a vegan restaurant unless you or someone in your party is looking to have a meal without meat in it for some reason. There’s plenty of reasons to play Fromsoft games but at lower difficulty. Most people don’t like Bloodborne or Elden Ring “because it’s difficult/unforgiving”. They like it because of the story. Anyone who would opt out of playing those games because someone else could play them on easier has serious issues.
Soooo a game, which is not paid for nor developed by the community, and is rather purchased with the knowledge that it is a difficult game which will require ample skill to surpass its many challenges, should put in difficulty sliders despite them fundamentally going against the very nature of the game itself?
Fucking YES it should. I didn’t buy ER until I was 100% certain it had an easymode mod. So I got what I wanted out of it despite them shoving both their middles fingers at me and telling me I’m not worthy to buy their product because they’re intentionally hiding the good part (the story) behind gameplay I didn’t want. I’m still pissed that I wasted my money buying Bloodborne. You want me to get over that, cut me a check.
As I said to the other hater, what is with the ER-fanboys turning the chat into full-on-reddit level bitchfest defending it? Why don’t you just let me have my valid opinions? I know, heaven forbid there exists someone who has an opinion that doesn’t match yours.
If you don’t like spicy food. Don’t buy spicy food
I don’t know about you, but every spicy restaurant I know has a little “difficulty slider” where you get to ask them not to pour a gallon of ghost pepper into it. It’s about making the customer happy.
If you don’t want to “git gud”. You can use summoned spirits. NPCs, other players
Or I can fucking mod the piece of shit and complain about it on forums because it’s fucking stupid. But I want BURN Bloodborne because I can’t mod it.
There already is a difficulty slider. It’s one you set for yourself.
Yeah. I’m getting really good at archery. Think I’ll cut my eye out. Natural difficulty slider
Why is it every time I express a valid criticism about an otherwise story-heavy game with a stupid difficulty-related gimmic the cringe-posse comes out and tries to convince me the game is perfect and no human being would find my opinion valid. Like seriously what I tell my little nieces and nephews, if you don’t have anything nice to say, move along.
In other news, I DO respect the Viva La Dirt League reference.
I think it’d be a bit more difficult than you are assuming however since it is also a multiplayer game. I guess they could limit the difficulty options to offline players only.
For online play, you can just match people who are using the same difficulty, and perhaps disable PVP entirely for Easy difficulty. For everything but PVP, it’s not that big a deal. Seamless Co-Op Mod works with the Easy Mode mod. If modders can make a coherent experience, I’m sure From could. If they wanted to. Which they don’t.
Making it a game about ambiance and story makes it a different game, doesn’t it?
Not really. The experience with the Easy Mode mod in place is pretty much the same. I saw more “You Died” screens on easymode than the typical player sees on regular mode. The only difference is that I didn’t waste my money on Elden Ring by having to give up less than 10% into the game like I did on Bloodborne after 50 hours or so.
Some of us, especially older gamers, just don’t have the reflexes for that type of game. Unfortunately for us, Fromsoft writes GREAT stories and Let’sPlays are still kinda boring.
Honestly how is this gatekeeping?
“Gatekeeping: the activity of controlling, and usually limiting, general access to something.”
The lack of difficulty sliders make the game inaccessible to people who have no ability or desire for the unforgiving experience, nor any ability/desire to “Git Gud Scrubs”. It’s intentionally left out to exclude those people. That makes it “gatekeeping” by the definition for the word.
This is substantiated by the fact that a mode to make the game easier and a mode to make the game harder are in the top 10 downloaded mods for Elden Ring. If you leave out the loaders and modutils, those same mods are top-5. This is basically unheard of in most games.
You can argue that you approve of this gatekeeping, but it’s silly to die on the “it’s not really gatekeeping” hill.
For me, the primary appeal of a Bethesda RPG is that “take off in a direction, you’ll find a story” feel
I don’t entirely disagree.
The insanely frequent, lengthy cutscenes cut into the continuous flow
You mean the ship going into warp or landing loading screen? There aren’t really a ton of cutscenes. If I had to give a tedious downside, it would be the “power minigame” but at least it ends with a violent encounter with a strongish enemy 9 times out of 10
The choice to use procedural generation was odd and really took away from the more intentional feel of prior Bethesda games
See, THIS might be where my age plays me. My first Bethesda game was called “Arena”, and it was all procedural. My second Bethesda game was “Daggerfall” and it was ABSURDLY huge procedural. I’ve never seen some procedural elements as a downside to extend the plot (and in fact, Skyrim’s radiant quest system is procedure), as long as there was sufficient hand-made content.
Now here’s the thing. By all reports (both self-reports that can be questioned, but also people who dug into game files), Starfield has more handmade content than Skyrim. It’s just that the thousand planets above and beyond that were procedural. I LIKE that balance. A lot. It solves the “Morrowind problem” (Morrowind was slammed at first because the world was SO much smaller than Daggerfall’s) for me while still giving you 60-80 hours of handcrafted stories, characters, maps, etc. But I can see how other people who dive into into the procedural content might step back and say “boy this game is so reptitious”. Sometimes our gameplay loops define our enjoyment. I know I hated Persona 2 for years for the dumbest reason ever - I got addicted to the casino minigame and lost track of the story, then found the casino game too tedious and I had no desire to play the game anymore.
Yall are getting downvoted, but I think it’s great that you have a game you like.
100%. I get baffled that Starfield gets so much hate, but then some of my favorite games aren’t very popular (Book of Hours anyone? lol)
I can even see the perspective of this being a better Outer Worlds
Yeah. Outer world was in reality the polar opposite of Starfield. A game that was excessively theme-driven but had lackluster “everything else” to go with it. A little (less than Outer Worlds used) bit of tongue-in-cheek “Spacer’s Choice” could have worked like Vault Boy does in Fallout, and I wish Starfield had done something like that. But on story and gameplay alone, Starfield destroys Outer Worlds.
I think people like myself are just upset that we didn’t get scifi skyrim
This is the funny part. If I had to describe why I love Starfield to someone who had been living under a rock and hadn’t ever heard of it, I’d say “because it’s like Skyrim in space”. In so many ways, if I’m being honest.
The thing is, the biggest critique people have against Starfield isn’t all the crazy bugs (we remember those from Skyrim) or the really tropey shit, some skyrimmy feature it’s missing, or anything in between. It’s that they don’t find Starfield “fun” in this hard-to-place sort of way. Perhaps that’s you? If so, maybe you can see how someone would feel about Starfield if, for some reason, it clicked as fun from the start.
Now, I have some complaints about Starfield. But most of them have to do with things that Skyrim didn’t even try (the shipbuilder, which I hear has improved of late) or the lategame (which means I got my fun out of it).
Also, I’ve learned not to take downvotes too badly most of the time. Everyone has opinions, and just because I reserve downvote for the rare “this person is an absolute idiot” doesn’t mean other people do :)
If I had to guess, each graphics cycle is a little less dominant than the last. The iterations on graphics are becoming lesser and lesser. A game from 10 years ago is far improved from a game 20 years ago, but not that much worse than a game from last month.
There are moments of awe (imo, especially in VR when a game “nails it”), but we’re pretty desensitized to high-graphics video games of late.
Yeah, not the same thing. I’m not saying microtransactions can’t be stopped. I’m saying it won’t happen through US-based legislation.
And this iPhone monopoly suit is apples-and-oranges to a microtransaction litigation. They’re being charged with being in breach of an 1890s law that has held strong, but that has nothing to do with microtransactions. In fact, no relevant law exists except some flimsy gambling statutes that simply do not work. Most importantly, there is no legislative piece to it. Apple broke a big law and has been doing so with virtually no consequences for decades. Nobody’s passing new laws against Apple. They’re just finally facing the justice that they should’ve faced a long time gone.
There have been some incredible OSS games. Take away IP concerns and they have more access to assets. Take away needing to work to live, and people passionate about gamedev would have no obstacles in creating video games with their time.
Capitalism makes some core assumptions that, right or wrong, generally do not apply in the dev world - assumptions of laziness and selfishness. Smith tried to build a framework around “people will never be altruistic or work because of their pride”. It was intended both to standardize and limit those selfish behaviors (modern capitalists threw out the “limit” part). You can make your own conclusions about capitalism and most of the business world, but I don’t know a developer who would rather sit and watch The Price is Right than be on their computer coding something other people would love.
It’s the deal with the devil.
One could argue we have the world’s strongest economy because we are business-friendly to a fault. People actually question the fairness of unions, but even with unions our labor protections are more third-world than first-world. But in return, the median income is at least world-competitive, and the typical individual buying power is through the roof. All we had to do to get here is sign away our collective souls to these megacorporations and be ok with the sacrifice of a million lives a year devastated by it all.
This here. Through the years, if I ever pirated a game and liked it, it was instabought.
Execs that know they’re producing shit are the ones that really double-down on anti-piracy measures. When piracy is considered, it turns into a challenge of quality. When piracy isn’t considered, it’s just about return on marketing spend.
The real lost sales are the people who pirate a game, spend 15 minutes playing it, and delete it saying “thank GOD I wasn’t stupid enough to buy this”. Make a refund policy just hard enough on Steam and most of those just keep the game with regret.
Which is why Quest is beating PSVR in terms of overall experience. Of course, it’s still not doing as well as it seems to need to. ACNexus did reasonably well considering the audience size, but they’re still pulling out.
I’m sure the corp interest rates issue is part of it all, but nobody seems to be able to overcome the “why would I buy VR with no games?” and “why would I research games for VR if I don’t have VR?”
I mean, for me, I’ve powered through more solid VR games since jan-1 than I’ve played PC/PS/Xbox games in the last 3 or 4 years. But the games I’ve been playing are The Room and 7th Guest (OMG t7G remake is the GOAT). Popular among an older generation, but not great to build a critical-mass following.
There’s a marketing challenge and nobody has solved it. Even when I got my headset it was more of a “shit, I have nothing else to ask my wife for for Christmas… The HELL do I pick?”
I didn’t say that there are no good games. But genres have been drowned in these microtransaction games enough that it has become disruptive. I find myself sometimes playing games that are in many ways inferior to older games because they are trying to be low-budget disruptors in a market where the high budgets are largely “filled with urine” as it were.
Look at a few companies’ recent “people are just going to have to get used to subscriptions/microtransactions” attitudes. It’s going the same way television has gone. One cannot pretend in good faith overall quality in entertainment is not going down for reasons that the decisionmakers know to be hurting the products.
While I agree, I start to get tired of a significant percent of the game industry being reskins on older games. I always wait till they come out and let them convince me they put enough effort in to justify my time again.
Like Dyson Sphere Program. I avoided it and youtubed it up until I knew it managed to transcend being a Factorio Clone, and that the factorio feel dies around the 2 hour mark, leaving 78 hours of completely new content. But had it not done that…ehhhhh
Yeah, people seem all over the place about whether a copied mechanic is “ripping off” or just a genre.
These pokemon-likes have no more in common with Pokemon than Street Fighter with Virtua Fighter, Tekken, MK, KI, Fatal Fury, Guilty Gear, DBZ, or even Super Smash Bros… and about 2 dozen other games
Only if Apple doesn’t find a way to make their payment functionality worth using. They have options. They can keep the rate competitive, make the payment functionality easier and more efficient, add a new “revenue-producing app” tier that charges a lot more if you produce revenue from means outside of their app.
They’re definitely not powerless, but definitely will want to make adjustments to their process.
I don’t think we can know for sure, but the typical reason SCOTUS refuses to hear an appeal is that they do not feel the case represents a significant question of law. As SCOTUS generally sees it, they’re not about “swooping in to right injustice”. They’re about being the final arbiter of actual questions of law. If there are no actual questions of law worth addressing, there’s no reason to take the case whether the verdict was just or unjust. There is more than one defensible outcome to a lot of trials, and SCOTUS is often not trying to “find the one right outcome”.
I think the exception to that would be if appeals courts go rogue and rule in direct contradiction to established law. Well that, and if SCOTUS wants to go rogue and themselves rule in direct contradiction to established law (like Dobbs)
I got it for free on Epic a year or two ago. I love everything about Control - and I can’t stand the game.
Never quite figured out why. I think part of it was the controls feeling a little too “arcadey” for me? I just don’t know. Great story that I couldn’t stay into. Great level design which I kept losing track of. Fun puzzles that got on my nerves.
I played most of the game in Assist mode because I don’t like hard action. I quickly got sick of dying. But that didn’t affect my love/hate of the game. Perhaps if it had the “magic action balance” where your’e constantly challenged but never seem to die… but perhaps not, too.
I think in part it got sorta tedius.
Exactly. I cannot stand how interested I am in soulsborne storylines because I’m simply not willing to put myself through playing that shit any longer.
The only soulsborne I’ve beaten is an “easy mode” modded Elden Ring. Nothing worse than watching a game LP on youtube because I really want to play it but don’t enjoy it. (Bloodborne, lookin at you)
Considering the way they responded to ESPN football back when I was younger, I cheer on every time I hear bad things about EA Sports.
For those too young or who don’t recall… ESPN (or I should say, a company who licensed ESPN) came out with a budget football game 2000ish. They charged $20 for it, and it blew that year’s Madden game out of the water in terms of quality and reviews. It was situated to force the industry to pivot from AAA to lovingly-crafted AA titles by teams that clearly cared about the product being fun.
So EA gave the NFL a metric fuckton of money for exclusivity to murder the competition.
The end.
Games are about entertainment. They’re not a career. Nobody is paying me to play a Fromsoft game. More importantly, nobody is gatekeeping the entertainment, immersion, and story of music or coding behind me being able to “Git Gud”.
And let’s look at music and coding. Since I can speak a bit to both. For music, OF COURSE there are difficulty sliders. When I took recorder back in school, they had 2 different versions of many songs. When I first learned Christmas music on piano, I learned special “simplified” tracks for the songs. I never “Got Gud” at music, but I still got to the end of the book.
And coding. Coding is the opposite of a Fromsoft game. You’re surrounded by mountains of tools that try to make it easier. When I bring in a junior developer, I’m not giving them some unforgiving code challenge to power through. Maybe they’ll never be good enough to design a specialized cache or optimize queries. So I give them the things they CAN do, and hold their hand so they always succeed. Junior devs don’t ever fail, not because they “git gud” but because I set them up to succeed by this little difficulty slider called “how hard is this ticket to do and how much help do they need from me?”