I love FromSoftware and have for a while now. But the point of this thread is not to say that. The point is appreciation. I would like to have a thread devoted to better appreciating and sharing appreciation of what FromSoftware are and what it is they do. Their newfound mass popularity in the wake of the release of Elden Ring I believe has the internet due for this. I've been covering this subject in pieces in various places all over, and now would like to focus down and concentrate on one place. To get things rolling I'll share some writing here that I first posted on TunisBayClub about Elden Ring. I was about ten hours into the game when I wrote this, thirty in now, and my thoughts haven't changed.
Please feel free to post anything From or Elden Ring related or adjacent in this thread. This post is just to get things moving and give you all an idea of how I see the From Question.
This site's lack of interest in video games is a touch worrying. All sharp and cultured men should be fascinated with the bleeding edge of multimedia. Stupid people will never get it, but I think that with some lateral thinking we could correct the language we use around the subject and catch the attention of those with the capacity to see.
The average gamer is a rube who can't conceptualise a will behind anything in front of them and can only think in inherited terms. Maddeningly logocentric people. To most people "Video games" are totemic creations which are what they are and could only possibly be what they are. Really how rubes think of art in general, they can't understand or see expression or intention behind what's right in front of them. But they also don't even see what's right in front of them. They see the totemic whole before themselves, and then smash it down into familiar forms they've been told about by consumer guides and edutainment pop-media made by transsexuals.
The people see what they know, not what they see. And what they know is wrong and bad.
I started playing Elden Ring recently, and unlike most of the people playing it I'm familiar with what its creators have been doing since they first started making games. I'm going to write about both what the game does well as multimedia, and how everyone misreads it. I hope this doesn't get confusing.
Despite its enormous sales and the amount of hours its taken from so many people, I think the nature of Elden Ring as a work of media/art is entirely lost on virtually everyone observing it. They see what they know, not what they see. They see Elden Ring, and they interpret it as "video game". Having read around online it's very plain that the average person enjoying this game interprets it as World of Warcraft. A video game in the true sense. A series of contrived challenges to be completed for their own sake, with an equally meaningless layer of genre-babble covering the whole thing so that the wiki-writers and video essayists can tell you what things are. "Gameplay" with "lore". To a normal person Elden Ring (and all the preceding games beginning with Dark Souls) are about "fighting bosses". While the more cerebral gamer will tell you that it's about building a wiki worth of "lore" and "worldbuilding" through pieces which are scattered around in 3D space, with gaps where you have to figure out what happened. Of course they're both disgustingly wrong.
The consistent element across all FROM games is a fascination with phenomenal experience. New possible angles and experiences of fictional worlds. The point is not the content of the fictional worlds themselves, but the experience of encountering this world from the perspective of a lonely and lost explorer. This is possible in a game. More particularly, this is possible using existing video game conventions. Something Japanese games have excelled at for a long time is taking the mechanical conventions and contrivances of "games" and turning them towards expressive ends. It's a video game thing to be thrown into some weird hostile foreign environment where everything is trying to kill you and you are uniquely positioned to prevail over the forces aligned against you because you can come back and try again every time you die. FROM have you do that too. But in their later games it goes from total contrivance to a considered whole experience.
The experience FROM want you to have in every game is that of a weak and unwanted interloper in a strange world you can only appreciate from your ant-like point of view. That experience is there now, but it's lost on most of the people playing the game, who just see Ghosts 'n' Goblins with a way bigger budget. Crossed with World of Warcraft.
The point of the lore in FROM games is above all else to feel large. Incomprehensibly large from the perspective of the player, who is walking through the ruins finding smouldering embers of what once was and picking up shreds of incomplete recorded information piece by piece. This is interesting. The appeal and ideas are similar to old weird literary fiction, one of their games is rather explicitly a homage to Lovecraft, but they're able to go further with new tools. Garbage meme games made by Jews lie to stupid people and tell you a game about a father who loses his daughter is giving you that experience. Shit-eaters try to convince themselves this is half true, but it simply doesn't work. A game cannot perfectly convince you you are someone else, not any more than a movie can. FROM understand which sensations they can deliver, and which they can't. Weird fiction is a perfect tradition to pick up, because if there's something a game can do great. especially ones about navigating and surviving in elaborately constructed three dimensional spaces, as is popular in games now, it's make you feel lost and confused.
Demon's Souls to Elden Ring FROM have been using conventions of video games (contrived challenges in virtual space) and weird fiction (fantastical stories which are more about the strange sensations they suggest than the particulars of their events or worlds) to create a new class of experience which isn't really best appreciated as "video games" at all. It's a kind of interactive multimedia.
This is how you can view FROM games, but very few people do. What happens is, as I alluded to above, the parts are seen as arbitrarily connected modules, each of which serves as its own self sufficient point, appreciated as old media. The 3D space and its obstacles become "video game". Ghosts 'n' Goblins with a huge budget. Collect all the coins and get to the end as fast as you can. While the "story" becomes "lore". Regressing to something below old weird fiction where now the content and particulars are the point and people devote themselves to collecting fictional facts divorced from their multimedia framing. Becoming something like historians of made up events. There are people who have gotten rich doing this on youtube. One anyway.
Elden Ring is a fantastic piece of multimedia weird fiction. In these pieces of work a 100 year old tradition is not only alive but running on a bleeding edge of presentation and popularity. Elden Ring is not "Open World Dark Souls". Elden Ring is multimedia Clarke Ashton Smith.
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/K2G0sG6/image.png]
Nothing to add to Anthony's post at the moment, but here's a cool interview with Kota Hoshino where he relays his extensive soundtrack work and shares that the music he originally made for Shadow Tower was later used in Evergrace.
https://www.rocketbaby.net/interviews_ho...ac2_1.html
02-07-2023, 04:22 PM
(This post was last modified: 02-07-2023, 04:28 PM by Oldblood.)
(02-05-2023, 09:55 PM)anthony Wrote: The experience FROM want you to have in every game is that of a weak and unwanted interloper in a strange world you can only appreciate from your ant-like point of view. That experience is there now, but it's lost on most of the people playing the game, who just see Ghosts 'n' Goblins with a way bigger budget. Crossed with World of Warcraft.
The point of the lore in FROM games is above all else to feel large. Incomprehensibly large from the perspective of the player, who is walking through the ruins finding smouldering embers of what once was and picking up shreds of incomplete recorded information piece by piece.
They do this well with the architecture, and they LOVE cathedrals. Unlike ourselves, they clearly have a reverence for European culture. My favourite moments in these games is when they set up cinematic landscapes for your character to emerge to, followed by the area title. It's an interesting blend of photography and city planning and they are set up with the utmost care. These moments of awe often occur after trudging your way through a dark dungeon and serve as a well earned reward. Everyone remembers seeing Irithyll for the first time, knowing this, FROM make use of the open world format and fill Elden Ring with player-operated cinematics.
I've just seen the Virtual Photography thread, perhaps this would be better there?
[Image: https://godricsnow.com/content/images/20...235114.jpg]
Also Yuka Kitamura might be the most talented woman ever.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIT9aUHbcaI&t=6384s
(02-07-2023, 12:11 PM)Guest Wrote: Nothing to add to Anthony's post at the moment, but here's a cool interview with Kota Hoshino where he relays his extensive soundtrack work and shares that the music he originally made for Shadow Tower was later used in Evergrace.
https://www.rocketbaby.net/interviews_ho...ac2_1.html
Thanks. That's awesome. I think it's very neat that Hoshino can't read music and just kind of felt like he could make work that would fit what From do. And of course he was completely right. I want to post about Evergrace soon because I think it's such an amazing achievement of aesthetic harmony. Everything I read about it gives me a very strong impression it was ultimately produced along the lines of feeling and intuition, as Hoshino alludes to here.
(02-07-2023, 04:22 PM)Oldblood Wrote: They do this well with the architecture, and they LOVE cathedrals. Unlike ourselves, they clearly have a reverence for European culture. My favourite moments in these games is when they set up cinematic landscapes for your character to emerge to, followed by the area title. It's an interesting blend of photography and city planning and they are set up with the utmost care. These moments of awe often occur after trudging your way through a dark dungeon and serve as a well earned reward. Everyone remembers seeing Irithyll for the first time, knowing this, FROM make use of the open world format and fill Elden Ring with player-operated cinematics.
I've just seen the Virtual Photography thread, perhaps this would be better there?
[Image: https://godricsnow.com/content/images/20...235114.jpg]
Could post this in virtual photography too if you like. What I'm really interested in here is the word "architecture". You're right. What From and everyone making video games do is different to illustration. It's a kind of virtual architecture in which the phenomenal experience of a building has to be considered during its creation. Or at least should be. A good friend of mine has talked about his admiration for DOOM as an architectural experience. I think I get where he was going with that.
From are of course very good at making things which look cool, but more than that there's attention to how moving around, in sight of, and within these things will feel as you're going. As you say there's a lot of attention paid to these emerging into sight moments, for one example.
As I went into a bit in the virtual photography thread there's great use of this in Elden Ring. This sense of your surroundings subtly growing more alive as you approach the erdtree, which you can see from a distance at virtually every point in the game, and gradually goes from a suggestion on the horizon to something very real and eventually right in front of you as you progress through the game.
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One could say that since this isn't all strictly buildings it's not architecture and is instead something like world design or some stupid term like that. But I would say that since there is no essential already present terrain in video games, you create virtual space from nothing, it's all architecture. Even the creation of natural scenes. And From are very good at both. I think this is actually related to a problem that tends to come up in discussions of another favourite game of mine, Breath of the Wild. People ask for Dungeons, by which they mean carefully crafted challenging space. Because people are stupid they don't understand that outdoor scenes are just as constructed as indoor ones in a virtual space. I think that a lot of people have a kind of problem really thinking of virtual natural space as a created thing. Serious problem with "Open World Games" discussion as well. Might take this to that thread.
Exception to this "all virtual space is created architecture" would of course be something like Minecraft or Second Life where there are actually pre-existing foundations before you start building, and it's possible to practice architecture starting from more than zero, but that's another subject.
you've spilled a lot of proverbial ink over elden ring all to the effect of "it makes a fantastic interactive screenshot" so i have to ask, is there anything else you like about it? elden ring is blatantly not designed to be a walking simulator, quite the opposite it is billed as the latest installment of "hard games for hardcore gamers" with the scenery being a mere backdrop to the action. from software has for a long time now had this undeserved reputation of being a studio that makes difficult games against which to measure your skill and nothing else but they have done nothing to counter it and only gone further in that direction. there is a complete disconnect between how you play the game and how all of the mechanics overtly push you towards playing it. i am willing to believe that everybody playing the game like world of warcraft is doing it completely wrong but everything suggests that is the intended approach and i don't think the game is praiseworthy just because the first third has beautiful environments.
(02-05-2023, 09:55 PM)anthony Wrote: Western games have THEMES
As in they make a mechanical toy, then decide it should be about something, so they paint a THEME on top.
The Max Payne games have always been embarassingly stupid, the third being the worst because it's trying the hardest. Even if its presentation is the best.
Max spends the whole game monologuing about his supposed moral decline, corruption, and failure, while his entire journey start to finish is fuelled by an honest desire to work which transitions into genuine conventional moral outrage.
A game about an extremely boring good guy insisting that he's dark, grey, and corrupted as he does nothing but good guy things to an embarrassingly straight standard.
Rarely, if ever, is a THEME in a western game actually an organic part of the thing. It's just something insisted upon clearly and artificially so that the people writing reviews know which words to repeat when praising "the story".
what happened to this sentiment? can you tell me how the gameplay of elden ring harmonizes with the world design to create a cohesive whole rather than jamming two incompatible concepts together?
(02-09-2023, 12:52 AM)parsifal Wrote: you've spilled a lot of proverbial ink over elden ring all to the effect of "it makes a fantastic interactive screenshot" so i have to ask, is there anything else you like about it? elden ring is blatantly not designed to be a walking simulator, quite the opposite it is billed as the latest installment of "hard games for hardcore gamers" with the scenery being a mere backdrop to the action. from software has for a long time now had this undeserved reputation of being a studio that makes difficult games against which to measure your skill and nothing else but they have done nothing to counter it and only gone further in that direction. there is a complete disconnect between how you play the game and how all of the mechanics overtly push you towards playing it. i am willing to believe that everybody playing the game like world of warcraft is doing it completely wrong but everything suggests that is the intended approach and i don't think the game is praiseworthy just because the first third has beautiful environments.
I think that there is great value in being an "interactive screenshot", if by that you mean something like a nice looking virtual space made to be looked at from various angles inside. And I do think Elden Ring does that nicely at times. But that's not my point. I really do think the experience of moving through this space is what makes it great. It's the experience of scale and weirdness that I'm into. Of which the nice 2D images I'm capturing are a part. Scale and weirdness comes from moving through space, and the weirdness and hostility of those spaces. I think that whether or not something is a "walking simulator" is rather meaningless. I am enjoying the experience of moving through this world. Does that mean I'm playing it as a walking simulator? Whatever you decide I won't argue. I will say that it was obviously designed to be more than a backdrop for "gameplay".
They don't tell people not to take their games seriously as challenges, but I would question your "nothing to counter it" suggestion. They basically run a skill curve game to game and build Elden Ring as a succession in challenge from their older games, but, at the same time, they're ramping up the power-ceiling of your options as a player/explorer/whatever. I would argue that the ease with which you can summon help and wield extraordinary power in this game is a kind of suggestion for those who care that they are willing to lend you a hand and want you to get through this thing. Look at the steam achievement stats. The playerbase is kicking this games ass. Also as they assume metaknowledge in player skill improving over years, I think it's also fair to assume they expect most people to look at wikis. Basically making the game easier again. The challenge is largely in finding stuff that makes you powerful, and you can neutralise that in five minutes of internet use if you want.
I don't really know what you think I'm doing in the game when you suggest a disconnect between how I play and how the game is built. I'm looking around, grabbing what I find, killing things in my way, and trying to figure out what I might do next.
Oh yes and I've been playing more, much further into the game now. What I came back to the thread to post about is my most recent experience. The plot is far further along, suggestions are mounting that my actions are of extreme importance, have dire consequences, and are irreversible. My brother talks about the games number of "endings" and whatever, I don't know any of that. I genuinely have no idea what's going on and the game has given me a strong and genuine sense of confusion and bewilderment in the face of extreme and weird circumstances. It's an awesome feeling. I am the weird fiction protagonist. I don't know what's going on, but it's bigger than me and will very likely go badly. I am not playing a screenshot game. I am playing a weird fiction game. And I'm having a fantastic time. I'll reply to the rest of your post in a bit, or tomorrow. Don't let me forget.
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/KhSBpzJ/20230209161853-1.jpg]
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It's all very strange and fantastic to me and I'm having a great time.
I have trouble getting into the Souls games. From peaked in the 2000s for me. Have you ever played Lost Kingdoms, Anthony? Another one with great music by Hoshino. He can't read scores, of course, but he's a skilled guitarist. He plays in FreQuency, a band composed of From's sound team, sort of like Zuntata, Taito's old "house band", but not really the same thing.
Some music from Spriggan Lunar Verse, where he is credited as a "sound producer": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vs1gCwqwP2Y.
I recognize the influence of imaginative fiction that I love on things like Dark Souls and Elden Ring, but it just doesn't work for me. It's too high fidelity. The early 3D of Shadow Tower, and intermediate 3D of Evergrace and Forever Kingdom, the latter which I was playing the other day, lends itself more to the uncanniness of Weird Fiction. I think the brain knows what it's looking at when it sees pixel art (or cel animation in the PS1 port of Policenauts, or whatever), it thinks: "this is a cave painting". There's evolutionary precedent. And when it sees photorealistic 3D, when it sees the latest God of War, that's just like a dream. But when it looks at Seaman, there is dissonance on a fundamental level. From's classic games do things with this kind of 3D that is unparalleled. Most games from the time "resolve" into something else, work to make the visuals familiar to the consumer.
(02-09-2023, 12:52 AM)parsifal Wrote: (02-05-2023, 09:55 PM)anthony Wrote: Western games have THEMES
As in they make a mechanical toy, then decide it should be about something, so they paint a THEME on top.
The Max Payne games have always been embarassingly stupid, the third being the worst because it's trying the hardest. Even if its presentation is the best.
Max spends the whole game monologuing about his supposed moral decline, corruption, and failure, while his entire journey start to finish is fuelled by an honest desire to work which transitions into genuine conventional moral outrage.
A game about an extremely boring good guy insisting that he's dark, grey, and corrupted as he does nothing but good guy things to an embarrassingly straight standard.
Rarely, if ever, is a THEME in a western game actually an organic part of the thing. It's just something insisted upon clearly and artificially so that the people writing reviews know which words to repeat when praising "the story".
what happened to this sentiment? can you tell me how the gameplay of elden ring harmonizes with the world design to create a cohesive whole rather than jamming two incompatible concepts together?
This part seems simple to me. "Gameplay" is not just the stuff wiki guides are written about. Walking is gameplay. Looking at scenery is gameplay. Thinking about weird stuff characters say to work out what's happening is gameplay. Etc. I'm preparing to write something about "gameplay" and more specifically what it means to be playing a game within virtual space. I'm writing a few of these definition pieces lately and mostly keeping them between myself and a few friends. Might bring the "gameplay" one here since it's probably most useful for directing practical discussion.
And I saw your shoutbox post about considering that I'm not done with the game. I understand my impression of the game still has room to develop. I'll post in this thread when I've reached the credits of the game.
(02-09-2023, 12:30 PM)Guest Wrote: I have trouble getting into the Souls games. From peaked in the 2000s for me. Have you ever played Lost Kingdoms, Anthony? Another one with great music by Hoshino. He can't read scores, of course, but he's a skilled guitarist. He plays in FreQuency, a band composed of From's sound team, sort of like Zuntata, Taito's old "house band", but not really the same thing.
Some music from Spriggan Lunar Verse, where he is credited as a "sound producer": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vs1gCwqwP2Y.
I recognize the influence of imaginative fiction that I love on things like Dark Souls and Elden Ring, but it just doesn't work for me. It's too high fidelity. The early 3D of Shadow Tower, and intermediate 3D of Evergrace and Forever Kingdom, the latter which I was playing the other day, lends itself more to the uncanniness of Weird Fiction. I think the brain knows what it's looking at when it sees pixel art (or cel animation in the PS1 port of Policenauts, or whatever), it thinks: "this is a cave painting". There's evolutionary precedent. And when it sees photorealistic 3D, when it sees the latest God of War, that's just like a dream. But when it looks at Seaman, there is dissonance on a fundamental level. From's classic games do things with this kind of 3D that is unparalleled. Most games from the time "resolve" into something else, work to make the visuals familiar to the consumer.
Lost Kingdoms is one I have lined up. I want to play as many of their games as I can. The one I'm really interested in is Armoured Core 4. Recommended to me by a Japanese friend, but unfortunately console-locked and expensive. From his description it sounds very interestingly From in narrative despite the completely different and far more grounded setting to the souls games. Its conflicts resolve in a very cool and Japanese way, which mirrors the Souls games but with a meaning which is far plainer to see in this context. Why I want to play it and talk about it. What these games are about seems to be spelled out quite plain there.
Sorry that's off-track. Yes, this era of "JRPG" type games of theirs is very interesting to me. They looked nice, still in that odd inherently abstract early 3d era of visuals. And less fixed in their ideas on how to best do things, so lots of weird interesting experimental stuff that barely works. I greatly enjoyed the barely-functional three character combo-fighting in Forever Kingdom. Intermediate 3D is a nice term for where these early PS2 jrpgs were at. I might start using it.
I get where you're coming from with From's advanced 3D in their newer games, but something I've praised a lot before is that they're probably the only people I've seen use the quirks of this era to stylistic effect. Most particularly, Bloodborne deliberately plays around with bad, uncanny hair and fabric rendering to create hard to discern surfaces, broken unreadable shapes, that kind of thing. Trying to look closely at the details of any random beast-turning character in Bloodborne feels like looking at one of those stroke-simulation images. It's an absolutely inspired effect.
As for Elden Ring... a bit of that. But I do agree that for the most part the effect of newer standards of 3d graphics is just functional. Less interesting to look at. I would prefer if the game looked like Forever Kingdom. I have some screenshots somewhere. Let me get some for reference.
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I've tried to find similar scenes here to demonstrate the different impressions created by the styles.
What this brings to my mind is Breath of the Wild. It basically renders a lot of things in a borderline intermediate fashion. And in my opinion loses virtually nothing for it. And if anything gains. I like the effect of relatively flat, massive open spaces. It feels big in a way that overly dense and lush modern design trends miss. Frankly I think most open world games feel borderline claustrophobic. I believe this is due to normalfreak horror vacui. Everyone says they want open worlds, but everything they do and look for and praise suggests the opposite. They want mass, bulk, content, not openness and freedom. Actual spiritual openness I believe genuinely scares and unsettles most people.
Density of non-repetitive detail, visual busyness, and shadow effects, etc, these things are all for spiritual Indians. It's the aesthetic trend of Half Life 2 Cinematic Mod becoming mass taste. Elden Ring still looks nice because these things are used with some taste, but they're frankly unnecessary. I would probably like the game more if it had Breath of the Wild's level of surface-detail.
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