Minus the cover shooting, the closest you're going to get is Evil West. I highly recommend this game. I ended up being so wrong about GG Gore.
Your video game hot take(s) thread
- Thread starter Dany_the_penguin
- Start date
Not sure how much of a hot take this actually is, but the [main] bosses' expositing and pontificating throughout the fights in Elden Ring feels really out of place. They're mostly nonsensical, and somewhat, I dunno, "cheapen" the experience of boss fights that are epic enough that they don't need a bunch of "thy" and "thee" and generally convoluted poetic language strewn throughout to give them weight. I like it better when the boss and I have a tacit understanding that we each simply want the other dead.
Also (and I think I've complained about this before,) it really grates a nerve that there are NPCs strewn throughout Souls worlds that would suggest there is or recently has been any sort of normalcy in those worlds. I think the games might benefit from at least a few "safe" towns or villages of non-hostile NPCs to sell the idea of the wider, crumbling world actually being the grave exception and not the general rule of the state of things. Example, "The Great Kenneth Haight." Who was he screaming to for help to re-take his fort in the middle of nowhere? Except me, does he see ANY normal, non-hostile people wandering around? And when I did re-capture his fort, he was actually saddened to find it disrepair. Has he not seen literally EVERY building in the lands between? I'd say he got off pretty easy. And where are all the normal people who inhabited his fort ostensibly not so long ago? Hell, where is ANY normal person who lit all the candles everywhere, stacked up the crates and barrels in every other room, prepared the food left [I guess] to rot on the tables, etc. Just saying, lore-wise, FROM is pretty damn good, but with world-building, they leave a lot to the eye-rolling imagination.
Also (and I think I've complained about this before,) it really grates a nerve that there are NPCs strewn throughout Souls worlds that would suggest there is or recently has been any sort of normalcy in those worlds. I think the games might benefit from at least a few "safe" towns or villages of non-hostile NPCs to sell the idea of the wider, crumbling world actually being the grave exception and not the general rule of the state of things. Example, "The Great Kenneth Haight." Who was he screaming to for help to re-take his fort in the middle of nowhere? Except me, does he see ANY normal, non-hostile people wandering around? And when I did re-capture his fort, he was actually saddened to find it disrepair. Has he not seen literally EVERY building in the lands between? I'd say he got off pretty easy. And where are all the normal people who inhabited his fort ostensibly not so long ago? Hell, where is ANY normal person who lit all the candles everywhere, stacked up the crates and barrels in every other room, prepared the food left [I guess] to rot on the tables, etc. Just saying, lore-wise, FROM is pretty damn good, but with world-building, they leave a lot to the eye-rolling imagination.
My hot take for today is that metroidvanias and rogueli*es are as much time-wasting grind designed to cheaply keep players spending extra hundreds of hours in a game as the loot grinding mechanics are in MMOs and the big open world with icon on maps and copy paste content. It's all just repetitive stuff, just slightly different flavors.
I know roundtable hold is your "safe zone" but honestly I'd kinda like if they went back to DS2 for once and had a little town like Majula that wasn't completely gone to shit.
Exactly. I'd like a few non-hub places that give the land some "life" outside of everything except a dozen NPCs scattered around ruined places. Someone other than me has to be keeping all these random merchants gainfully employed. Not saying Souls games should conform to tired, rote RPG formats, just a little something extra to balance the decay, persistent threat, and give the player a sense that they're actually fighting for something other than a dumpster fire.
Another example, the Castle Mourne quest. You're told the servants revolted and took over the castle, yet it's just another ruined castle filled with non-human mobs. Where are all the people those servants were tending to that they felt the need to revolt? As far as I can tell, it's just one guy, his daughter and we'll assume the handful of guards you find fighting the mobs, but that doesn't suggest there was any life or normalcy recently.
Castle Mourne I think the people you're looking for are the corpses strung up all over the castle after furcon 2022 went horribly wrong. I know what you're saying but it does feel like that's the intent there.
Like I remember asking why do you see wrecked ships all over the seas but no evidence of ports or shipyards needed to build and service said ships and was told conservation of detail was at play. To be fair, the Lands Between feel grossly underpopulated for what's basically a continent. Even Lyndell, as fucking gorgeous as it is, really isn't nearly as big as it looks from above(though it is an amazing feat of perspective that something the size of a town looks like a metropolis)
Last edited:
“Normal”. In a FROM game? *cackles wickedly*
Meanwhile, In FROM offices:
Salaryman: Miyazaki-san, I've been informed someone on an American video game website is unhappy with the lack of safe towns in our games.
Hidetaka Miyazaki: I see. Double the number of poison swamps in Armored Core immediately.
Salaryman: But we don't have any poison swamps in Armored Core.
*Hidetaka Miyazaki Death Glare*
Hidetaka Miyazaki: Just so you know I am very disappointed in you right now and I expect you know what to do.
*Hands salaryman a sword and a basket*
Last edited:
Hahaha!!! But seriously, it's not about wanting "safe towns," just places with an ambiance and atmosphere of life to give the decaying Souls worlds some context. I mean, even if it were just dilapidated shantytowns with non-hostile residents cowering in the huts trying to survive. As it stands, I'm trying to become Elden Lord for what? A dozen disaffected NPCs sprinkled around who speak in riddles, giggle after every sentence, and generally don't seem to be appreciably affected by the horrors surrounding them? Good luck getting that sorry lot to help me rebuild civilization...
I'm going to tell myself it's a The Matrix: Revolutions situation. I'll beat the Elden Beast, become the Elden Lord, and everything will reset back to pre-shattering normal. Yeah, that's the ticket. Makes about as much sense as anything else Miyazaki has dreamt up.
Considering most of the endings tell you pretty much nothing, why not?
The only ones we kind of know anything about are the frenzied flame where everything "Returns to fire" and maybe the blessing of despair where apparently everyone is born with the curse of the omen or something going forward. Ranni's ending is pretty despite not knowing what the hell is going on.
I've heard it argued each ending leads to a different FROM game, making ER a prequel to all of them, but that sounds like fanwank.
Oh, fanwank for sure. It's a fun to imagine FROM might be developing multiple and disparate Elden Ring sequels, but to call that "ambitious" is an understatement considering ER is already bigger than all of FROM's titles and there's nearly ten years between then first the third installments of Dark Souls.
*Miyazaki grins menacingly* “The Frenzied Flame ending would be a good choice for you.”
But seriously, if you’re looking for ambiance and lively towns full of personable peds, give RDR2 a try. Over 700 of them with 150,000 or so lines of dialog. Pretty sure no one has heard everything yet after 4+ years.
RDR2 has hands down one of my favorite Player bases ever. It helps that it feels like people are actually doing their own thing and aren't just standing in the same spot forever waiting for you to come talk to them but also they react when you come back dirty, or don't pay into the camp fund, or don't come back at all(someone will literally come looking for you if you don't visit camp for like a month or something).
It also makes it feel much more noticeable when the camp becomes run down and depressing in the final act of the game and Dutch starts noticeably losing his shit.
Last edited:
I might give RDR2 a try. I haven't avoided it or anything; I really enjoyed the first game, I just haven't had the kind of time such a game demands. At least with its razor-thin narrative and ability to stop playing at any point anytime, ER is a game I can approach at my limited pace; RDR2 just seems like the kind of game I'd need to invest significant stints of time into to really enjoy.
But yeah, "feels like people are actually doing their own thing and aren't just standing in the same spot forever waiting for you to come talk to them" is exactly what I think Souls' worlds need. As it stands, we fight to right the ostensible wrongs in completely dead worlds.
I recall when ER was first revealed that they entertained the idea of having more typical RPG-like places populated with more NPCs, but it would’ve been too much extra work to flesh out on top of the open world elements. So they basically stuck to what they’re known for, which is creepy/cryptic obtuse quest lines. But at least this time some of them have more verbal cues and even map markers, like the assassination requests.
You do need to invest a large amount of time to see RDR2 though arguably you can still do so in small sessions of like 30 minutes or so. I think the longest mission in RDR2 is maybe 30 minutes long and most of them are probably closer to 10 or 15. Though wandering around and exploring you can do at any point past the first chapter(which is an enforced tutorial where you're stuck up in the mountains in winter). Granted, playing at this pace will probably take months but I honestly think RDR2 was built with a longer, relaxed pace in mind.
It was really cool for me see the final year of the Van Der Linde gang that was only mentioned in RDR playing out in front of you in RDR2 and seeing Dutch when he wasn't a complete nutcase living in a cave in the middle of nowhere. He's quite charming and good at hiding that he's basically an asshole because he knows lots of pretty words to use in his fancy speeches to convince everyone HE HAS A PLAN!(you just can't look at it because goes to a different school in Canada).
Also, just gonna drop a clip from one of my favorite missions in RDR2. It's early in the game and there's no plot spoilers, but it's also the closet thing to a "comedy" mission in the entire game, I think.
LENNNY!
Last edited:
Shame, I think a lot less could have been done in other areas to allow for the "typical RPG-like places" to make the world more meaningful. Crafting is a rabbit hole I feel could have been avoided, and while interesting, I think the Ashes of War convolute what I felt was better done in previous games where you found a weapon you liked and focused on it. ER is a great game, but to call it overwhelming in terms of its available options is an understatement; it's like having my head shoved into the troughs at an all-you-can-eat buffet when I only had a mild appetite.
I'll probably bite the bullet and give it a try, most likely when I hit the next brick wall in ER (which will likely be soon since I hear tell the next main areas I'm facing aren't very... accommodating.)
My most anticipated game of 2023 is Haunted Chocolatier.
Catching up on the youtubes and the games media and seeing all the 2023 anticipations and predictions and such, I'm not seeing any mention or hype for this one, and what am I missing here. Everyone freaking loves Stardew Valley. The love for that game even got me sucked in and I don't normally play cozy games or mgmt type games, I find that boring, but I got so into SV.
Ok am I really more hyped for this than the big ticket games? I mean... actually, maybe, at least a little? I think I just kind of feel I know how all the big AAA games will go. I know that I'll like not love Jedi 2 and Spiderman 2- they will be good quality sequels to games I liked, but will offer nothing new or interesting. I don't care about open world Zelda or the various horror sci-fi games that are being hyped and I'm sure they'll be fine and deliver what fans expect. Starfield and Redfall will be meh.
But Chocolatier may offer some surprises. Ok yeah it'll likely play the same as Stardew, it's not like we're coming to these for deep mechanics and RPG systems or whatever. But characters, dialogue, situations, sprite designs, goofy humor, and a chance to create your own little world- there is potential to create something truly wonderful here.
Catching up on the youtubes and the games media and seeing all the 2023 anticipations and predictions and such, I'm not seeing any mention or hype for this one, and what am I missing here. Everyone freaking loves Stardew Valley. The love for that game even got me sucked in and I don't normally play cozy games or mgmt type games, I find that boring, but I got so into SV.
Ok am I really more hyped for this than the big ticket games? I mean... actually, maybe, at least a little? I think I just kind of feel I know how all the big AAA games will go. I know that I'll like not love Jedi 2 and Spiderman 2- they will be good quality sequels to games I liked, but will offer nothing new or interesting. I don't care about open world Zelda or the various horror sci-fi games that are being hyped and I'm sure they'll be fine and deliver what fans expect. Starfield and Redfall will be meh.
But Chocolatier may offer some surprises. Ok yeah it'll likely play the same as Stardew, it's not like we're coming to these for deep mechanics and RPG systems or whatever. But characters, dialogue, situations, sprite designs, goofy humor, and a chance to create your own little world- there is potential to create something truly wonderful here.
I'd forgotten about that. Is it confirmed it's coming out this year? Because that'll also have my attention, much like silksong will.
God forbid those drop at the same time.
I don't think it's been absolutely positively confirmed but IIRC it is slated for this year.
Since I quit on ever trying to beat Hollow Knight, Silksong is not something I'll be interested in, saving me a lot of time and a LOT of frustration. I hope it comes out, it's good and people who like HK like it, though. At this point though it would be shocking if it actually lived up to the hype.