chevauchee Wrote:When I say Sekiro is better, I'm not putting them in the same family in the way that I'd say "Demon's Souls is better than Dark Souls II". I'm saying that its more limited scope, a game designed around a singular type of combat with a smaller world, fewer bosses and enemy types, and so on, allowed for a higher level of refinement and tighter cohesion in that realm we don't have a word for, where the gameplay itself communicates the aesthetic "point" of the game.
Fine
Quote:I think Bloodborne is a very, very good depiction of 19th century horror ideas that are sort of fundamentally entwined with Western philosophy. But I think Dark Souls proper sneaks in a lot of Asian metaphysics under its medieval skin. The Japanese cannot help but see Western monotheism through a gnostic framework, and I mean this literally and not in a meme/voegelin sense. It comes up in a lot of anime too. "Fire creates disparity and ensouls a monolithic semi-existence into the world we experience" has hints of animism; then a group of powerful souls among many impose an "artificial" world-order on the new existence that is doomed to decay or decline in a cyclical fashion. Whereas the "dark soul" which in a twist is the soul of humanity is a sort of representation of Nature, of mutagenic change and the "law of the jungle". (Those who lose their share of "Humanity", quite literally a piece of the human oversoul that is shared between men and can be taken by force, become undifferentiated and mindless zombies while the taker grows in power). I personally find this sort of asian-flavored Western fantasy interesting, it's a more interesting take on Order/Chaos than "god is le metatron", which the default interpretation by the Japanese, but its interpretation doesn't exactly "ring true for me". Elden Ring is actually more authentically Western in metaphysic than the Souls series, and this may be down to Martin knowing his mythology despite his contempt for it.
You didn't answer the question, which is if any western game has done anything comparable in ambition and scope and depth.
Quote:I don't even mind that the horse is used to cut through empty space; it's more that it removes the sense of struggle with the environment and hence the reward for mastering it, where most outdoor areas I can just gallop through on the horse, not even stopping while I pick up the items I need, on my way from one dungeon to another. There are a bunch of encounters unique to an open-world environment that From put in, like villages full of the frenzied flame infected, or the troll caravans, or open-air ruins, and even wide spaces with enemies or environmental hazards that could prove to be a unique challenge on foot but are completely trivialized by the horse. Though I might just be too good at these games and the average player's experience is actually to take it slower in open-world exploration
What you describe as the problems of Elden Ring introduced by the horse are actually how most people play the older 'Souls' games. I have spent some time on 'Souls' youtube. These people aren't human. You can actually just run through most of the Souls games. I don't of course, because I want to see what's around, learn how to fight everything, get the value for my guy out of killing everything, etc.
You say "sense of struggle with the environment and hence the reward for mastering it", but I don't really think this was ever a thing with from. The most the environment ever resists you is demanding funny awkward jumping in the older games. The environment doesn't resist. The poison blowdart guys populating it do. Actual environmental resistance is something more recent games have done quite well, but it's still rare. In Breath of the Wild the environment resists you. In a somewhat friendly way, but still, it does. Same for Death Stranding.
As I think I've written elsewhere, the terrain in Elden Ring is all functionally a flat plane. Incline effects pace and can exhaust you in Breath of the Wild. Minor unevenness of the ground can throw you off balance and trip you in Death Stranding. Elden Ring is only different to the earlier Souls games in space between things. What "unique challenge" would there have been without the horse? You just would have been walking across a functionally perfectly flat nothing for longer.
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.
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?
Does gameplay make any "sense" to you or carry any experience if it is ugly or even simply lacking beauty though? It's not possible to make one feel like a stranger in an antique land and a small and powerless foe of the powers that be without a beautiful and immersive world. Gameplay against powerful and challenging bosses doesn't seem to make any "sense" if the world doesn't present that narrative as a backdrop and that aesthetic as the canvas on which you paint your gameplay. Fighting enemies many times larger than yourself doesn't mean anything if that isn't established. Furi is somewhat troony and most people only like it because of its OST quality, but it sets up this narrative well enough that after fighting bosses which seem to be your "peers" the final boss who is out of your league so to say closes the narrative neatly.
In Elden Ring (or Sekiro) you're continually pitted against gods and the divine order (or several divine orders), and having a massive and beautiful worlds which are immersive because they are interactive screenshots lends credence to this idea through and through. I take the form of a weak outsider (or a cripple past his prime) and the gameplay actually forces me to feel that experience. But not just because of the gameplay, and being beaten down and forced to thrive or die (with no ability to just survive). In large part because the world makes me small, both relatively and in totality.
And o! beware my watch.
anthony Wrote:You didn't answer the question, which is if any western game has done anything comparable in ambition and scope and depth.
You say "sense of struggle with the environment and hence the reward for mastering it", but I don't really think this was ever a thing with from. The most the environment ever resists you is demanding funny awkward jumping in the older games. The environment doesn't resist. The poison blowdart guys populating it do. Actual environmental resistance is something more recent games have done quite well, but it's still rare. In Breath of the Wild the environment resists you. In a somewhat friendly way, but still, it does. Same for Death Stranding.
As I think I've written elsewhere, the terrain in Elden Ring is all functionally a flat plane. Incline effects pace and can exhaust you in Breath of the Wild. Minor unevenness of the ground can throw you off balance and trip you in Death Stranding. Elden Ring is only different to the earlier Souls games in space between things. What "unique challenge" would there have been without the horse? You just would have been walking across a functionally perfectly flat nothing for longer.
You said "Have From also made the best depictions of these allegedly western fixations in the history of video games?", which I interpreted as being about truth-value or quality of interpretation (as opposed to the obviously excellent expression of them) so I gave my thoughts on From's interpretation. As far as scope, ambition, depth go, I'm actually going to say no, I can't think of a Western game that ties these underlying philosophical currents into something as aesthetically coherent and nuanced. The background lore of TES as re-written for Morrowind (and then retconned again later) I think comes the closest but has far less expression in the game world as experienced by the player.
When I say "environment" I am including the enemies, used in the same sense as "PvE" . The terrain or level design of a Souls game is only oppressive to the player in combination with its enemies of course, as opposed to a platformer, but "can run past everything" isn't a fair metric; just about every game can be "speedrun" in this manner. A lot of the challenge of a Souls game comes from careful level design; the blowdart guys in Blighttown are a problem because it's dark, they're across treacherous footing, and they shoot you from angles that are hard to block with a shield while traversing. You're not just overcoming some blowdart guys, their challenge is inextricable from the level's challenge. It's the same with the thieves that attack you in the tight alleys of lower Undead Burg, the Darkwraiths and ghosts in New Londo... Dark Souls actually did this integration of enemy and level design the best now that I think about it, excepting the "unfinished" levels. The environments got more lenient on the player as the enemies grew more individually powerful and threatening.
Running past everything isn't how most people play these games. I invade a LOT in these games. I have a titanic sample size for how the "average" person plays, and most people explore the full level and try to kill most of the enemies on the way to the boss. Then, once the shortest path to the boss has been unlocked, they will make the "boss run" if they die to the boss. I feel like Elden Ring incentivizes the average player to play like a speedrunner, to the general detriment of "Souls pacing", at least in the overworld. It's inevitable in an open world game, and all of your points are valid, it's just a personal gripe of mine that I feel negatively impacts atmosphere. But on the other hand there's an entire Souls game worth of environment that can't be traversed by the horse; I was just expecting some kind of FromSoft interpretation of an open world that maintained the "feel" of Souls.
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