I haven’t played a lot of souls, but elden ring death (both of non-boss enemies and protagonist) is super toothless. What made it more relevant in previous games?

Omg yes. It was not just a corridor. It was a send up of every game corridor game that I had played to that point. Taking a design limitation and making it a compelling plot twist was exactly what made bioshock awesome. One of my top 5 gaming moments of all time.

For me grind is when the gameplay loop is motivated by reward not exploration and plays out the same every time.

Good gameplay can come from a feeling of freshness because there are lots of possibilities, because rng or because player options (say, slay the spire), or from lots of genuinely novel content (say, elden ring).

It doesn’t feel like a balancing act at all. I just want more of the latter and less of the former, but maybe some people really do play for repetition?

It had a single player campaign too! Deck builder pvp gets too sweaty for me, but I really like deck builder RPGs.

Couldn’t find a good primary source to dig into it. But from Ipsos:

“I believe the preference for physical discs amongst next gen gamers reflects the potential value they derive from the pre-owned market,” commented Ipsos director Ian Bramley to MCV, “which is holding up the preference for physical - this is unlike the music and film markets.”

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/64-percent-prefer-physical-media-to-digital-distribution

I’m sure there’s a lot of generational and market segment differences. I never really understood “collecting” games. But I guess people do that in digital too with their huge steam sale backlogs!

I’m sure not many people care about physical vs digital per se. It’s the arbitrary locks by servers, digital storefront, DRM etc. So that when you pay your money you have no idea what you are getting and what your rights are. Physical game media was a simpler time from that perspective (play in perpetuity, don’t redistribute, cool cool that seems like a fair trade) and resulted in better pricing and experience for consumers.

I’d accept “move on” if the argument was just “muh pretty box” (god knows there are plenty of ways to buy pretty boxes of vidya IP) but consumer rights are surely worth fighting for, or we get needlessly bled for ever more dollars.

Only has a fraction of the strategy and deck building of the actual TCG. Just seems like the usual mobile garbage to me (stamina mechanics, a million currency types, pay to win), shame.

I mean some fraction of that market is for sure addicted, which possibly stretches the definition of “like”.

I expect the great leap forward in LLMs and AI art to dramatically change this at some point. They can already write pretty interesting plot with OK prompting, surely only a matter of time before someone is able to wrap that in a game.

We all just read an article about it, so this is obviously the most impactful and public place these people could have possibly gone to protest…

Shut up and dribble amiright

And wasn’t that mention itself a joke about the obsession among the player base with the romances I the game?

The irony of complaining about lack of fast travel on patient gamers is great.

RDR2 is pretty much my all time fave because of story/character but I never liked hunting and never felt the need to do any of the myriad achievements. I really enjoyed the slow pace of the game, so often the main story feels so urgent it is totally immersion breaking to do anything other than immediately pursue your next quest objective. By contrast RDR2 there were breaks in the story that felt natural to chill in camp or explore randomly or side quest or whatever.

Favourite game of all time. Gorgeous looking and jaw dropping plot. Only complaint is I find the gunfights a bit samey.