Video Game General

[anthony]

"Lies of P" What is this, a game about being offered a glass of lemonade by an 8 year old girl?
Haha just kidding of course, that would be a ridiculous premise for a video game. haha.

More seriously, Lies of P was an inevitability. You can take the "Gameplay" of a total and expressive work like Demons' Souls (through to Elden Ring), rip it out and start inserting it into different things as a modular piece of "content" for making various video games. Of course this has already happened a few times, just never this egregiously. The "mechanics" of Elden Ring divorced from the whole picture are just pointless. Stock assets. They were never compelling to me in isolation. But I know to the average person everything but that might as well not have existed. "Gameplay" and "lore" (has replaced "story"). That's a video game.

Miserable stuff. Bioshock crazy guys, retarded steampunk robots, korean-pretty protagonist (the best part since it's them being most honest and original about what they're into). To elaborate on that last point, the peak of Korean video games seems to have been various 2000s mmos where they were truly being themselves. Materialistic nerds with solid craft skills. Every Korean video game should just be about beautiful people going shopping. It's what they want, and so it would come out most interestingly. When are we getting a Suicide Boy game that plays like Shenmue only the karate is replaced with shopping and cutting yourself? THAT would be truly Korean and truly interesting.

[Video: https://youtu.be/TLPC0-zUZro]

[oyakodon_khan]

The idea of a non-Fromsoft souls game is a silly task.
I feel that the actual in-the-moment combat was never exactly the Souls series strongest point, that their games are "greater than the sum of their parts" and ever since Demon Souls, the combat was more of a means to an end. The way you interface with this world and such. Dragons Dogma, a game that I consider vastly inferior to Dark Souls, has much better combat.
Of course, Fromsoft is not exactly blameless for this, they've been upping the spectacle more and more with each game, with most bosses being epic "fights" rather than the puzzle-esque approach of the first games. it's not exactly a bad thing, but a bit of an awkward feedback loop between what the audience wants and what Fromsoft wants to produce.

[Guest]

The popularity of Souls is two-fold.

1.) The quality of the experience. Others have commented on this. It is a cohesive work with many strengths.

2.) The marketing. Which was "this is a hardcore game."

The marketing will lead the discussion of the game, and will inevitably lead to poor clones etc. from other developers. The sick parts of the audience (those defeated souls who depend more on appearance of a meal than the taste of nourishment of it) will follow. This is a minority, as clone-sales always demonstrate.

"Action aficionados" are people who have internalized marketing to the nth degree.

The audience, can be split along these lines. There is one audience, that is always the same audience, and always will be. If games stop delivering to this audience, they will leave for another new media. As happened with literature and film already. It is not particularly important. This audience will never die.

This being said, this immortal audience is not suddenly some great exception of man. No, they will generally communicate along the lines of a game's marketing as well. They will swap priorities, contradict themselves, etc. as they follow quality around. They cannot express what they know. This is the state of most of humanity, including some who are very impressive. I will not put this on the most impressive, because I do not know them, but it is fairly believable that they would be of this type too. After all, Great Men never write their own biographies. They leave vast cuts in History and Time.