Sordid

@Sordid@sh.itjust.works

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Quake 1 holds up really well!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I recently replayed Q2 and I found it… decent. Alright but not amazing in basically all respects. Just like I remembered it. I hate the fact that enemies have collision until their dying animation is finished, that was a constant annoyance. Quake 1 got it right, so I haven’t got a clue why they screwed it up in the sequel.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there a game that you've been very patient for, which turned out to be dissappointing when you finally started playing it?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Oblivion, on paper, is an objectively better RPG that is truer to the Elder Scrolls formula than Skyrim

  Hard disagree on that one. It’s truer to the Morrowind formula, but Morrowind itself was a radical departure from the previous TES games’ design philosophy. And I despise Oblivion precisely because of that, because it slavishly apes Morrowind’s formula without really understanding what made it tick. Morrowind was a great triumph but also a turning point for Bethesda. Up until that point, they used to make varied games. Once they found success with Morrowind, they’ve stopped trying to innovate and improve and have just been remaking the same game over and over with a slightly different coat of paint each time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there a game that you've been very patient for, which turned out to be dissappointing when you finally started playing it?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Elden Ring is pretty much my favourite game of all time. I feel like it’s the “culmination of Dark Souls design”, and just happens to be exactly what I was personally looking for in DS games

  I’d probably feel the same way if I hadn’t played a few other similar games while waiting for ER. Nioh and especially Nioh 2 showed me how much more Dark Souls could do. Their combat system is much richer and deeper, and I find it baffling that From Soft hasn’t tried copying even a few of their ideas. I hadn’t realized anything was missing from the Souls formula until I played them, but now I can’t unsee it. Maybe my expectations are excessive. From Soft seems incapable of copying even its own good ideas. Dark Souls 2 made quite a few good (if relatively minor) changes to the formula, all of which were erased the moment Miyazaki took back control of the series.

  I also recently replayed Blade of Darkness, which I consider the forgotten true originator of the souls-like genre. Being more than twenty years old, it’s much simpler than its spiritual successors, but it showed me that Dark Souls also does a bunch of things it really doesn’t need to do, such as bullshit artificial difficulty. I used to think BoD was really hard back when I played it for the first time more than two decades ago, but after several thousand hours in Souls and Nioh, it feels easy. And you know what? That makes it great fun. Enemy attack patterns are quite basic and easily readable and predictable, there are no surprise ganks and no spoiler enemies (which is what I like to call annoying enemies specifically added in order to spoil what would otherwise be a fun combat encounter). Hell, there’s even friendly fire among enemies, so it’s much harder for them to gang up on you and you get none of that toxic and abusive encounter design based around ranged enemies shooting you through melee ones that From Soft seems so very fond of. Nioh showed me what the Souls series is missing, and BoD reminded me that sometimes less really is more.

  Seeing that ER is just more of the same has really sapped my motivation to play, and I haven’t gotten very far in it as a result. I’ll probably finish it someday, but I’m definitely not going into the NG+ cycle and PvP for hundreds of hours like I used to do with previous Souls games.

  as for Fromsoft just doing the same thing over and over - Armored Core VI coming out next week, and that’s quite different. :D

  Ah yes, the sixth game in a series. Such innovation. ;)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there a game that you've been very patient for, which turned out to be dissappointing when you finally started playing it?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Elden Ring

  It’s just Dark Souls 3.5. Which is not necessarily bad if you really liked DS3 and just want more of the same thing, but I considered DS3 by far the weakest in the series to begin with, and playing the Nioh series after it opened my eyes to just how much room for improvement there was in the DS series as a whole. From Soft has basically followed the same path as Bethesda - they used to make varied games until one of them randomly became wildly successful, and from that point onward they haven’t had the balls to deviate from the winning formula and have just been remaking that same game over and over with a slightly different coat of paint each time. Which makes sense from a business point of view, I guess, but after this many repetitions, it’s become clear to me From Soft is totally creatively bankrupt. Hell, it’s been more than a decade since Demon’s Souls, and they still can’t even figure out a better counter to the “roll behind them and stab them in the butt” strategy than making enemy tracking ever more effective and their movements ever more spasmodic and unreadable. The end result is that despite being expertly crafted, Elden Ring feels very by-the-numbers and utterly soulless (if you’ll pardon the pun).