Cody

Posted Thursday, March 23, 2023

1y

ISFP

Libra

Lol

The other day I made a comment on a video about how I didn't think that Elden Ring was a revolutionary game or that it was even particularly exceptional by any means - it's certainly a good game, but I wouldn't say that it's so incredibly good that it stsnds head and shoulders above everything else. It's not like how Divinity Original Sin 2 was for CRPGs. It was more your standard, Action/Adventure title with RPG elements and an open world. Anyway, a guy responded to let me know that my take was just awful (dreadful, man!) And went on about how it had done what no other game has, while informing me about what should be an obvious flaw in my thinking by explaining that Original Sin 2 did nothing particularly different (it does indeed do what you could expect.) I don't think he expected my response. I responded by saying that in Original Sin 2, I could teleport a man (who was on fire) into an Oil Field and cackle hilariously as the screen lit up with explosions and then drop a massive painting on him, ACME style, for even more comedic effect, and that I couldn't ever do something like that in Dragon Age unfortunately, lol. I went on to say that Elden Ring has several appealing things about it - the Art Design, the Monster Design, and the story being atmospheric and curious, if not a tragic drama for the ages in the style of shakespear. Unfortunately, the Gameplay still has it's DNA engrained in Demon's Souls, and is still as halfway between janky and floaty even 15 years or however many. This was perplexing to me given that most people really do not like for their games to feel wobbly and sometimes stiff but were willing to ignore it in this particular case. I went on to say that while the Lands Between is fun to explore, really you aren't doing much of anything different than what you would be in a game like The Witcher or even Skyrim, with the exception of the boss-fight centered gameplay that Fromsoft I would guess wildly took inspiration from Monster Hunter for. It's not exactly revolutionary or a new standard, it's just a formula that has worked for it and for other games that came before it. I think people have a hard time defining 'revolutionary' in terms of visual examples, because in most cases you can't really distinguish them and people are more often relating the the exoerience they've had emotionally woth the game in particular, and that often can be enough for people to put something on a pedestal, even if it's not true practically speaking.