Since we're theorizing, I wonder if it's also related to changes in gamer demographics? A lot of us old millenials with kids are playing games now and it just isn't possible to commit the kind of time and energy these games require. Parents demand quest logs!
“Everything that can be consumed is owed to us, and it’s owed to us because all we are is that which we consume.” Beautifully put; good god I love your writing.
I don’t know anything about video games but were epilepsy warnings really only developed so recently? The danger of strobe lights have certainly been known for much longer. The Simpsons joked about Battling Seizure Robots in Japan back in, like, 1998.
yeah and even just in the context of video games, there are PS3 games e.g. The Evil Within with epilepsy warnings so the convention is a bit older than just the past few years.
I thought it started due to an episode of the Pokémon cartoon in the late 90s allegedly causing epileptic seizures. That was my memory as a kid at the time. So FWIW it’s probably been on parent’s radars for a while now. Or at least the worry wort ones.
My memory is that when renting video games from Blockbuster in the 90s, their cases all had an epilepsy warning on them, so I thought it was a common problem with video games
I've never been very good at video games, but there are a lot of video games that appealed to people like me. Many games are basically roller coasters that show you a good time without demanding too much of you.
More recently I've been trying to force myself into games that demand that you "git gud" (namely, Megaman X) and while it's definitely frustrating to die over and over, I quickly realized that "shooting all the guys" isn't the game. The game is learning the tricky patterns the developers laid out for you, and being able to perform them reliably. Every game over that sends you back to the start of the level is an opportunity to practice again. Every time I play it a little bit better. I try a jump differently because the other jump wasn't working, I try to make a shot that seems like an opportunity if I'm fast. I can see it paying off and it's cool. Beating the last boss is satisfying not just because he was hard, but because I remember the previous five times I tried and saw that I was getting closer every time.
I’m shit at video games and have only ever managed to make it a small way into Bloodborne, but I keep inching along because, yeah, the learning curve is so goddamn satisfying. I’d never experienced anything like it before - figuring out how to get past the first horde of guys took me probably 50 tries, but the feeling of breaking past the last zombie asshole into the piece of terrain beyond felt like I’d *accomplished* something. …And then when I immediately died at the hands of the first new zombie asshole waiting for me, I wasn’t disappointed but excited to blow through the first 50 again and get beyond 51. It’s great game design - it plants these little discoveries at just the right intervals to push you on to the next thing.
I do have to say that when I clicked on Schrier's initial thread over the weekend, it seemed like for every person that posted "this is ableist against neurotypical people" there was then someone else that responded to that with "I have ADHD/autism/etc. and I have always taken notes when playing games in order to help with my memory/attention/stimulation issues."
People with ADHD often hyperfocus on things like video games. In that state you're motivated to take notes, make plans, and "work" on the game like a fascinating project.
As a person with ADHD, I would like to say that FromSoft games are actually pretty easy if you're willing to spend hours and hours repetitively finding and running through a super-optimized XP grinding route. Ask me about the Loran Chalice Dungeon!
Yeah, whenever someone online goes "as a person with depression/bipolarity, I resent [something banal that I believe someone did," I'm often strongly tempted to respond with "as a person with depression/bipolarity, *I* resent *you* making us all look like massive fuckwits."
"I resent you appointing yourself the spokesperson of a community of millions if not billions as part of a cynical ploy to make your spiteful grievances appear to carry more weight than they in fact do."
I've been gaming for decades, and the map/note-taking used to be standard for RPGs, perhaps related to TT RPG practice. Eretrian Odyssey is a more recent example. Of course, the gaming community being what it is, any sort of change meets with high degrees of angst and anger, and it's been that way for YEARS. Kind of like a proto-Twitter, except even more juvenile and profane. Don't want to make a list/map? Don't play the game. Or you could also try it out and see if it works for you. I promise that either way the world will keep turning.
It puts me in mind of the ending for the "Mass Effect" trilogy of games, which was pretty downbeat. There were a ton of complaints from ordinary gamers that there was no option for a Hollywood style happy ending where the hero rides off into the sunset with his paramour. It's a line of reasoning that privileges the consumer over the original artist, which is surely a recipe for artistic stagnation and conformity.
I think the majority of the complaints about the Mass Effect ending were primarily that you only had three real endings to choose from when the developers promoted this idea that your choices from the previous games could lead to vastly different outcomes. It was like a choose your own adventure with only three endings instead of dozens.
Personally I really liked the synthesis ending but I'm a big dweeb for AI and robotics so that's my own crappy taste in action.
On the one hand I'm sympathetic to the false advertising line. But on the other hand if you are going to employ writers there has to some accommodation for artistic integrity.
The majority of complaints about the Mass Effect ending also missed the point, which is that the the plot went off the rails after the first game and never really recovered.
I thought the writing in Mass Effect was pretty awful, with the exception of a couple of expansions packs. But if you are going to employ writers to create story lines and narration for games it's understandable why they would want to adhere to the established structure of genres like novels or films, and that includes trying to write endings that convey some artistic message. I don't think the writers wanted an upbeat finale for the trilogy and that's there was no possible ending that provided one.
For a significant proportion of people who play video games, part of the satisfaction of playing a game lies in successfully overcoming a challenge. If a game subjectively feels "too easy", then one doesn't derive any satisfaction from overcoming the "challenges" contained therein, as the challenges are too trivial to offer any satisfaction. Super hard games simply push this idea to its logical conclusion: maximum challenge = maximum satisfaction upon completion. Certainly an acquired taste, but it's only a quantitative difference from the subjective experience of the average player, not a qualitative one.
Like I said, an acquired taste, and different people have different thresholds for frustration. It even varies from game to game: I found the gameplay of XCOM Enemy Unknown absorbing enough that I spent hundreds of hours trying to beat it on Classic Ironman; while conversely, although I did enjoy the gameplay and aesthetics of Cuphead, I eventually gave up on it as I found it TOO frustrating to be worth the effort. (Although I do intend to give Cuphead another try at some point in the future.)
It's interesting to analogize this with books. I quit games when they stop being fun, but I don't do the same for novels. Given the quality of modern games maybe they deserve that same commitment?
I think that's an interesting topic too. I do the same thing. If I'm reading a book that I'm not really into I basically slow the pace of my reading to a crawl rather than put it aside and try something different. It's a bad approach.
But the weird thing is I don't do that with TV. I can think of lots of shows that I loved for years that took a nosedive. I always just shrugged and stopped watching. Why am I a completionist with books but not TV?
Soulsborne games are also not really that hard. People talk about them that way because they are almost unique in AAA gaming these days in the way that they demand focus, patience, and attention, 3 things that the last 20 years of modern gaming have stripped gamers of.
I haven't played a non-Nintendo console in over a decade. Breath of the Wild is about my limit for difficulty, and apparently everyone other than me 100%ed it blindfolded without touching the controller
I can definitely see an issue with too easy games. I bought some kirby game (can't remember which one) and I felt like I was watching my own let's play.
on non-Nintendo consoles the problem Eric describes is worse bc on, say, a PlayStation, you're dealing with so many big franchises that have dialed down difficulty over the years bc they're so primarily determined to be cinematic, and you break the flow of a pseudo-movie if you make the gameplay too difficult or even just too engaging at all.
Yeah, that's another thing about Soulsborne games, I don't care about the story so I don't care if I don't finish it. They're more like campfire retellings of old epics than narratives, anyway.
i do think there are a lot of bad secondary effects of Dark Souls being the modern gamer's only reference point for video game difficulty. you see this all the time on Reddit. someone will show up raging against a game they're convinced is broken bc they're having massive trouble and they just know the problem isn't them bc they "love Dark Souls." a sad state of affairs.
Soulsborne games ARE hard, they're just not hard in the way that people think they are, which is why superfans like me keep pushing them. :) The games are, above all, fair, and I think that's what people worry about.
You need to train yourself to be OK with ambiguity in the story - even the story doesn't hold your hand, you need to figure out what to do next yourself - and to be patient even when you keep dying to the same enemy repeatedly. You CAN beat them, there aren't "tricks" or anything like that. It's just patience with a slower paced game.
Accessibility discussions and complaints online are fascinating to me, because inevitably people will have different disabilities or need varying accommodations even if they have the same disability. While I generally think people should try to increase accessibility when possible (having caption or subtitle options for videos, alt text for images, etc.), it’s not a perfect science. I remember a discussion where someone was praising something being available in audio form instead of text as reading was hard due to a TBI. Except someone else was deaf, and there were no captions or subtitles so they couldn’t participate at all.
Seems like a symptom of a larger issue that we don't understand the role of different value systems.
Right now, it seems like the only valid value is morality, so every argument is framed as a moral one. No one understands the values of aesthetics, so we don't argue along those lines, and even if you tried to, no one would care or track what you said.
To say you like or dislike a piece of art is only to comment on the morality of it; likewise if you like or dislike art, you can only frame that in moral judgments.
There seems to be a sentiment out there as well where if you portray or show something evil or immoral on screen then somehow you’re endorsing those actions. Which always seemed to be a pretty wild take to me, how can you tell a story without conflict?
I've seen this come up many times with literature specifically. People will choose specific lines from a book spoken by the villain and use them to say the author is a bad person. That's the point of a villain! They're supposed to be an unpleasant, crappy, or outright evil person that the heroes must struggle against.
Most of the critiques of Elden Ring (and From Software in general) have been aesthetic critiques, at least so far as I've seen. There is a hardcore group of people who really, really, really like their games. There is also a sizable group that finds their games to be an example of the worst elements of game design (artificial difficulty). These two groups despise each other.
There is a elitist streak in the hardcore group that responds to any criticism of the game design of From Software games with "git gud". Responding to that with a reason why one cannot "git gud" and so would like the game to provide an amenity that literally every RPG of any note has provided for 20 years does not strike me as an unreasonable argument, in that context. If there is a valid aesthetic reason for From Software not to provide a quest log (and I'm very, very doubtful there is), then they and their fans can defend it on that grounds.
From my perspective, a lack of a quest log is akin to requiring someone to do 20 jumping jacks every fifteen minutes to keep a movie going. It's pointless to begin with; that it excludes paraplegics is just further reason it's a bad choice.
I mean, they did reluctantly introduce the sliders into 'Pathologic 2' after pressure from their publishers. Maybe they really are equal opportunity offenders... everyone is going to feel miserable and hard done by playing their games!!
(or a bit skeezy.... I love 'The Void', but whenever I see it in my Steam library it looks like some dodgy visual novel or somesuch. ho hum!)
I think the difference has a lot to do with our expectations of how game logic works - it’s all supposed to have rules and “feel” “fair”. If X has been the jump button for the past 60 hours, it would feel like artificial difficulty to have X suddenly be the attack button - unless there were some justification in the story for the switch in mechanic, like, oh, this is meant to communicate that the gravity in the spaceship changed, or whatever.
When I think of “artificial difficulty,” I think of a character you meet fairly early on in Bloodborne. She’s the first character you encounter who’s not an enemy. My first instinct, seeing her in the shadows, shaped like every other enemy, was to sneak-attack her the way I did everyone else. She killed me instantly. …And then, after I respawned, every time I entered her part of the map, she killed me again. And again. And again. And again. She’s impossible to beat at the player’s level; the only way to stop this is to start the game *completely over from scratch* and just remember not to attack her next time.
So, in the logic of video games, I think “programming in a fail-state that requires a full restart to punish a player who reacted to a new game element in the exact way the previous 15 hours had taught them to react” would count as artificial difficulty. There’s a sense of, there was literally no story justification for this and the game logic hasn’t pointed toward this being possible before, so it serves only to remind me the video game is hard, not to enhance my experience of playing it.
(And of course I wince even typing this out, because to a certain subset of fan the fact it took me 15 hours to get to this character is proof I was probably too much of a baby to play the game anyway, and what I’m calling “artificial difficulty” is just me being mad the game wrote in Real Consequences, or something. So I guess it’s all very subjective!)
Yeah, I do agree with both you and the above commenter that “artificial” is a bad word for it. Like, that particular bit of punishment drove me nuts, but there are a lot of the hard-for-hard’s-sake elements of the game I really like - just, for some reason that one crossed some mental/emotional line and took me from “Wow, these mechanics are good but really unforgiving” to “Hey, that wasn’t FAIR.” But both are equally artificial.
but this right here gets at my problem with the term. i've not played Bloodborne but what you're describing is just bad design. "high level boss beats under-leveled player under softlock conditions" isn't illogical or "artificial," it's just unfair! and i think "artificial difficulty" encourages people to lump (1) a literal softlock and (2) "this boss is hard and now i'm in a bad mood" into "everything on a mechanical level that's ever made me mad in a video game." but (1) and (2) aren't necessarily similar issues! so why do we force them to share a diagnosis?
Think of it like a story: by its very nature, it's fake and so there cannot be an actual "what [character] would really do". But you'd still get annoyed if a character acted out-of-character.
Artifical (or fake, that's a good term) difficulty is stuff where it feels like you're fighting the game on a meta level. You're fighting the choices the coders made, not the world that they have made inside the game. Some of it is a sliding scale: most people would agree that a hitbox 1 pixel wide is fake difficulty, but where a game switches from fake to acceptable difficulty isn't set. Some of it is pretty black and white: early video games often had levels that were impossible to complete unless you knew a trick that the game didn't teach you, which was done specifically to sell guides on how to beat the game.
Elements of these can, at times, be an artistic choice (Hellblade and Spec Ops come to mind), but more often it's lazy design.
"out of character" is a much better term suggesting a very different problem that "artificial difficulty" often does.
I spent a couple days on Reddit arguing with people about the Okumura boss fight in Persona 5 Royal. to my mind that was a very strong example of "out of character." it's a boss fight that springs several overlapping complications on the player out of nowhere with little to no consistency with any other battle in the game* before or after and with the calling card mechanic locking you out of the resources you need to get any viable offense off the ground. i wouldn't describe any of that as "artificial" but i'd certainly describe it as out of character.
*not inconsistent with Shin Megami Tensei in general, as Royal Okumura does in a lot of ways feel like a classic SMT boss fight, but certainly inconsistent with the rest of Persona 5 Royal, specifically
forgot i wrote a very long and roundabout substack post a couple years ago about "fighting the choices the coders made, not the world that they have made inside the game"
How would you describe things like Mario Kart's "catch-up" cheating or ridiculously tricky hitboxes? It's easy to make things difficult in a game, but making them feel fair is a legitimately difficult task.
There's an aspect of taste to it: many people like Souls games. But my experience of Dark Souls was "It's not that I can't do this, but it's kind of ridiculous that a game is asking me to do it." It felt difficult not because it was, but because the developers had made a host of choices that made things take longer than they ought to have.
absolutely agree that there's bad balance, worthy of criticism, in a lot of video games. but "artificial difficulty" has just always struck me as a term that's too general, too hand-wavy, and too unintuitive (video games are inherently "artificial") to get at the truth of what's so inartful or unfair about certain implementations. "artificial difficulty" just ends up being the language of rage-quitting.
It strikes me as a very odd conceptualization as well. As if putting a bonfire directly outside a boss fight represents “actual” difficulty and putting it far away to create more of a sense of punishment for failure is false difficulty. Just a weird framing to me.
I'm curious what you think some of those choices are. Certainly the function of items in Dark Souls is somewhat frustratingly opaque but aside from that I can't really think of anything.
Some might have been because I played on the PC port, which is apparently notoriously bad: narrow and inconsistent hitboxes, a camera that swung around unhelpfully, and a weird inconsistency between visual indicator and actual hit (it took me a long time to time dodges correctly, because when it seemed like you ought to dodge based on the animation wasn't correct).
Long gaps between save points (requiring you to run a lot of content over again if you fail) combined with enemies that are hidden and often cannot be seen before they jump out. A lack of a save point before boss fights combined with boss fights where you have to already know how they work before you can beat them--I wouldn't mind "trial and error" boss fights or having to repeatedly run to a boss fight, but the combination of both is infuriating.
The wonky hitboxes are legit annoying, not really sure why that is except that a lot of games have hitbox issues. Dodge timing is just something you have to learn. As for the bonfires, well, that's a design decision. Dark Souls really wants you to learn the maps really, really well and that's one way they enforce that. Once you have a map down you're probably no longer than 30-45 seconds away from the boss.
Appreciate you pointing out the elitist streak among the fandom. I don’t hang out in online gaming communities so I got to enjoy beating my head uselessly against Bloodborne in peace. I have a friend, though, who loves games but has a physical disability that prevents them playing any FromSoft game, even with a specially modified controller that makes most other games doable. The best they can do to enjoy the games is watch livestreams or let’s plays, which can grate because even the streamers will act like anyone watching instead of playing must be doing it simply because of their inability to git gud, and anyone not interested in the head-beating for any reason must be mocked. When my friend wishes aloud that FromSoft were willing to consider maybe rolling out game updates with lowered difficulty settings that their accommodation could handle, I totally think it’s a reasonable request, even while for my part I kind of like the boldness of making a game half-unplayable to rubes like me in a world that seeks the most massive audience possible.
But yeah, whatever anyone’s feelings on the games themselves, genuine assholes on the game-enjoying side of things do their part to help push the conversation to the least interesting version of itself.
Here's a frame of a pro-no quest log argument on aesthetic grounds: automated quest logs (and map markers, clearly stated objectives, etc.) can encourage mindless disengagement from the game's world and story -- people rush through dialogues without listening, they look for bright blinking icons rather than relying on described information, and they either miss entirely or can't enjoy rich details that are mechanistically unnecessary to getting the simple dopamine hit of a completed task. forcing players to rely on the raw experience of the game's world and one-time interactions that can't be replicated demands a radical change in how someone thinks about and approaches something that has otherwise, for many people, become rote and sometimes joyless.
if done well, a truly open, unmediated game-world has the potential to heighten the genuine feelings of discovery, exploration, and immersion that great RPGs can evoke. it could create a sense of mystery around the limits of the game (not everything is discovered and documented) and also deepen your connection to your particular role-play (when did my character write that down? i have no memory of a person with this description, why does my character know who they are?). i don't know if this game does any of that, but these seem like legitimate aesthetic possibilities.
i like games with game logs. but i also want people to try new things that change how people experience and conceptualize video games, and i love that From does that, even if it's sometimes unsuccessful.
What he said. I'm not arguing that NO games should have quest logs, but it's much, much better that the Soulsborne games don't. It makes it far more immersive, and gives the player much more agency.
I am very on-board with this comment. Disclosure - I'm 40 hours into Elden Ring and consider it a masterpiece, I'm about 1,000 hours into From Software games and consider them my favourite dev. I don't particularly like the git gud mentality taken to a denigrating extreme, but I also don't want From to compromise what makes their games so good - which is the sense of mystery and discovery that Brian talks about above.
But the worst part of modern morality—its not codified. Instead morality is whatever someone says is morality. i.e. I'm moral, because I'm a pacifist, I don't kill spiders ... I call an exterminator instead.
It’s classic “rock/rap music is evil” logic. And the inclusion or omission of a quest log isn’t necessarily a good aesthetic argument to begin with, as the merits of its functionality could be argued on a mechanical level of execution and necessity as much as it can be a personal preference of taste (which in itself is self-selective).
I can’t believe people feel the need to argue over the lack of a quest log in a video game, when they don’t even know how to differentiate aesthetics from anything else 😂
Yeah, spot on. The problem is we've given everyone a hammer (the outraged outburst), and so everything looks like a nail. And this particular hammer rewards you with delicious morsels of dopamine from your peers every time you use it, as they cheer on your outrage and join in themselves.
There's a lot of truly hilarious choices made in the production of Elden Ring. The whole POINT is it's not fun, but is instead a mechanism to experience pleasure in punishment and difficulty. I either love it or hate it, I can't decide yet. The learning curve is hard and it's not fun.
Very relatedly, I was recently asked at the start of an endeavor if I required an accommodation for learning. I had to spend several days assessing if the accommodations that needed to be made were by me or were for me. In the end I had to build my own rigorous structure to do the work, but it was useful to try the experience on and to realize that I needed to decline accommodations by others and build methods for myself. But it's also not fun.
I would submit that if you think the "whole POINT" of Elden Ring is that it's not fun, then the game isn't for you. It very much is fun to some people, me included.
I decline your submission about whether it is for me or not, thank you. :) I will also refer you to the infamous Hidetaka Miyazaki interview on masochism of course.
The idea that it's ableist for a video game not to be designed to accommodate every single player (regardless of their level of hand-eye coordination, reaction time, colour-blindness and so on and so forth) logically implies that the artistic media of music and painting are intrinsically ableist, as they cannot be experienced or enjoyed by the deaf or blind, respectively.
I'm a 41 year old man whose hand eye coordination is likely better than average due to playing videogames for, oh, the last 35 years or so, and I still think Elden Ring is hard. I've actually never "finished" a FromSoft game. And I don't care! They are soooooo good. A unique experience that you can't get anywhere else.
I think the difference is it's relatively trivial for a game to allow at least some accessibility by including captions, including color-blind mode, and by having configurable difficulty (which often includes adjustment to how large the timing windows are). These are all features regularly available in games because things like colorblind mode are trivial to implement. Not so with a painting.
Plus there IS an extent to which "easy" modes rob a little of the joy of completing the game on the high difficulty. It's one of the reasons the Soulsborne games garner such a rabid fanbase: if you've seen the Nightmare Frontier, well, you're seeing something not everyone who plays gets to see.
Plus, if you're me, the temptation to turn on "easy" mode as soon as I start getting a little frustrated can be irresistible.
The fact that it's present in nearly video game does not imply that it's trivial to implement. Virtually every video game (indie, AAA, doesn't matter) features music - that doesn't mean that composing and recording music for video games is easy. Likewise bespoke 3D models or 2D sprites, dynamic audio mixing, stable high framerates etc.
Just because something is such a firmly entrenched convention in video games that players have come to expect it and will be surprised/annoyed if it's excluded, does not remotely imply that such a thing is trivial to implement.
"Again, there are many, many repetitions of this sentiment out there, that the lack of a quest log and associated handholding are not merely annoying or bad design choices, but a form of bigotry, that they fail to accommodate the disabled and thus are morally wrong rather than merely artistically wrong."
It's good you mentioned that, since, by itself, I wouldn't have known that "Speaking as someone with memory issues and ADHD - fuck doing this." was a complaint about injustice rather than someone's statement that the game was simply not for them, so they wouldn't spend their time on it.
I don't use language like, "Fuck cats. Cats make me sneeze," to express cats aren't for me and I shouldn't make time for them because I'm allergic (if I weren't, I'd quite like them). I think it's needlessly crude, though I'd guess people often intend the crudeness to be funny. I wouldn't have supposed such language was a complaint about injustice rather than a statement about one's own limitations and preferences for dealing with them.
I wouldn't assume someone who hated a game best played with an independent journal didn't already do journaling to manage symptoms. Someone already journaling just to get by in life could quite reasonably feel too journaled up already to add recreation involving *another* journal.
To be fair, it could go either way. Or many ways — including "I know I should be doing more journaling to get myself in order, but if I do, I can't justify doing it for a game." While someone else might find a game that needs an independent journal is what finally teaches him the journaling skills for real life. We are such messy creatures, AD(H)D or not!
I downloaded Elden Ring last night and stayed up until 2 AM messing around with it. I've barely scratched the surface, but so far my review would be: it's not Bloodborne, but it looks like From Software nailed it again. I think it's going to be a ton of fun.
I'm in the "no quest log, please" camp. From games are all about atmosphere, diegetic storytelling, danger at all times, and no hand-holding - you really might not win. They walk the fine line between "challenging" and "frustrating" better than anyone. Before I played Dark Souls all my favorite games were RPGs from the 80s and 90s. But now Bloodborne, Dark Souls and Demon's Souls are definitely all in the top five.
My only complaint, so far, is that Elden Ring may have moved TOO MUCH towards the Assassin's Creed style you're talking about. There's a crafting mechanism (which I haven't used yet but am dreading a little - scarcity has always been a big part of what makes From games successful, and this might wreck that) and there's stealth, which you almost have to use. It's not that the stealth isn't fun, it's just that it isn't any more fun than it is in, say, Skyrim, and (in the early parts of the game at least) is really easy. Some of the danger of other From games is sanded off, and some of the familiar action/adventure tropes are present.
Then again, I've played almost nothing of it so far. I'm looking forward to tucking the kids in bed tonight and getting back at it.
I'm genuinely glad to hear that. Most of last night I spend stealth-ing around some guard camp, backstabbing everyone. It was fun enough, but it's something I've done in plenty of other games.
I've got almost 20 hours in, I played it pretty much as much as I could over the weekend, and I can't wait to get back to it after work today. It's the best game I've played since the original Dark Souls but that's an understatement because Elden Ring is honestly astonishing.
I didn't even know it was coming out until like two days ago. It's fun going from "unaware a thing exists" to "desperately salivating in your desire to have that thing" to "having that thing" in a few hours. Doesn't happen much.
I was going to hold off because I bought Horizon: Forbidden West last week and yikes, what bad timing for that game to come out a week before Elden Ring. It went from being the hot topic of conversation to disappearing overnight.
I tuned in a couple of times for the writing and socialism content. I don't pay attention to the screen, so it's like listening to a disjointed podcast with gunshots in the background. This is not a complaint -- I just mean it doesn't matter to me if you're succeeding at the game.
There's something gleefully ironic about all of this, as the adjective that woke anti-GG journalists and game enthusiasts most frequently use to describe pro-GG "hardcore" gamers is "entitled", as in "gamers are bunch of entitled manbabies".
Not that I'm saying the criticism is entirely without merit, but what could be MORE entitled than demanding that a difficult or unintuitive video game be redesigned from the ground up to accommodate YOUR preferences, which you've arbitrarily designated as more legitimate than a "hardcore gamer"'s preferences?
Since we're theorizing, I wonder if it's also related to changes in gamer demographics? A lot of us old millenials with kids are playing games now and it just isn't possible to commit the kind of time and energy these games require. Parents demand quest logs!
“Everything that can be consumed is owed to us, and it’s owed to us because all we are is that which we consume.” Beautifully put; good god I love your writing.
I don’t know anything about video games but were epilepsy warnings really only developed so recently? The danger of strobe lights have certainly been known for much longer. The Simpsons joked about Battling Seizure Robots in Japan back in, like, 1998.
I think the Simpsons reference was to a specific incident with a Japanese TV show that (supposedly) caused seizures in some viewers.
yeah it's referring to the infamous Pokemon episode that sent a lot of Japanese kids to the hospital in its original airing
yeah and even just in the context of video games, there are PS3 games e.g. The Evil Within with epilepsy warnings so the convention is a bit older than just the past few years.
I thought it started due to an episode of the Pokémon cartoon in the late 90s allegedly causing epileptic seizures. That was my memory as a kid at the time. So FWIW it’s probably been on parent’s radars for a while now. Or at least the worry wort ones.
My memory is that when renting video games from Blockbuster in the 90s, their cases all had an epilepsy warning on them, so I thought it was a common problem with video games
Certainly in film …. Tony Conrad’s “The Flicker” opened with a long title card warning in 1966.
Yeah Freddie is wrong about that. Video games had epilepsy warnings at least going back to the late 90s. It was like the original trigger warning
Right, I never will be able to play the viola well enough to be in an orchestra due to my poor sight reading and I'm ok with that.
I've never been very good at video games, but there are a lot of video games that appealed to people like me. Many games are basically roller coasters that show you a good time without demanding too much of you.
More recently I've been trying to force myself into games that demand that you "git gud" (namely, Megaman X) and while it's definitely frustrating to die over and over, I quickly realized that "shooting all the guys" isn't the game. The game is learning the tricky patterns the developers laid out for you, and being able to perform them reliably. Every game over that sends you back to the start of the level is an opportunity to practice again. Every time I play it a little bit better. I try a jump differently because the other jump wasn't working, I try to make a shot that seems like an opportunity if I'm fast. I can see it paying off and it's cool. Beating the last boss is satisfying not just because he was hard, but because I remember the previous five times I tried and saw that I was getting closer every time.
I’m shit at video games and have only ever managed to make it a small way into Bloodborne, but I keep inching along because, yeah, the learning curve is so goddamn satisfying. I’d never experienced anything like it before - figuring out how to get past the first horde of guys took me probably 50 tries, but the feeling of breaking past the last zombie asshole into the piece of terrain beyond felt like I’d *accomplished* something. …And then when I immediately died at the hands of the first new zombie asshole waiting for me, I wasn’t disappointed but excited to blow through the first 50 again and get beyond 51. It’s great game design - it plants these little discoveries at just the right intervals to push you on to the next thing.
I do have to say that when I clicked on Schrier's initial thread over the weekend, it seemed like for every person that posted "this is ableist against neurotypical people" there was then someone else that responded to that with "I have ADHD/autism/etc. and I have always taken notes when playing games in order to help with my memory/attention/stimulation issues."
You mean to tell me that people online are speaking on behalf of populations they do not belong to? I am shocked!
People with ADHD often hyperfocus on things like video games. In that state you're motivated to take notes, make plans, and "work" on the game like a fascinating project.
As a person with ADHD, I would like to say that FromSoft games are actually pretty easy if you're willing to spend hours and hours repetitively finding and running through a super-optimized XP grinding route. Ask me about the Loran Chalice Dungeon!
Yeah, whenever someone online goes "as a person with depression/bipolarity, I resent [something banal that I believe someone did," I'm often strongly tempted to respond with "as a person with depression/bipolarity, *I* resent *you* making us all look like massive fuckwits."
"I resent you appointing yourself the spokesperson of a community of millions if not billions as part of a cynical ploy to make your spiteful grievances appear to carry more weight than they in fact do."
I've been gaming for decades, and the map/note-taking used to be standard for RPGs, perhaps related to TT RPG practice. Eretrian Odyssey is a more recent example. Of course, the gaming community being what it is, any sort of change meets with high degrees of angst and anger, and it's been that way for YEARS. Kind of like a proto-Twitter, except even more juvenile and profane. Don't want to make a list/map? Don't play the game. Or you could also try it out and see if it works for you. I promise that either way the world will keep turning.
I had fun making graph paper maps Back In The Day...although this may also have been because I was 8.
It puts me in mind of the ending for the "Mass Effect" trilogy of games, which was pretty downbeat. There were a ton of complaints from ordinary gamers that there was no option for a Hollywood style happy ending where the hero rides off into the sunset with his paramour. It's a line of reasoning that privileges the consumer over the original artist, which is surely a recipe for artistic stagnation and conformity.
I think the majority of the complaints about the Mass Effect ending were primarily that you only had three real endings to choose from when the developers promoted this idea that your choices from the previous games could lead to vastly different outcomes. It was like a choose your own adventure with only three endings instead of dozens.
Personally I really liked the synthesis ending but I'm a big dweeb for AI and robotics so that's my own crappy taste in action.
On the one hand I'm sympathetic to the false advertising line. But on the other hand if you are going to employ writers there has to some accommodation for artistic integrity.
The majority of complaints about the Mass Effect ending also missed the point, which is that the the plot went off the rails after the first game and never really recovered.
I thought the writing in Mass Effect was pretty awful, with the exception of a couple of expansions packs. But if you are going to employ writers to create story lines and narration for games it's understandable why they would want to adhere to the established structure of genres like novels or films, and that includes trying to write endings that convey some artistic message. I don't think the writers wanted an upbeat finale for the trilogy and that's there was no possible ending that provided one.
I never really understood the appeal of super hard games. I'd pass on this but it's not because of some disability
For a significant proportion of people who play video games, part of the satisfaction of playing a game lies in successfully overcoming a challenge. If a game subjectively feels "too easy", then one doesn't derive any satisfaction from overcoming the "challenges" contained therein, as the challenges are too trivial to offer any satisfaction. Super hard games simply push this idea to its logical conclusion: maximum challenge = maximum satisfaction upon completion. Certainly an acquired taste, but it's only a quantitative difference from the subjective experience of the average player, not a qualitative one.
I understand that, but I never find the satisfaction worth the annoyance.
Like I said, an acquired taste, and different people have different thresholds for frustration. It even varies from game to game: I found the gameplay of XCOM Enemy Unknown absorbing enough that I spent hundreds of hours trying to beat it on Classic Ironman; while conversely, although I did enjoy the gameplay and aesthetics of Cuphead, I eventually gave up on it as I found it TOO frustrating to be worth the effort. (Although I do intend to give Cuphead another try at some point in the future.)
It's interesting to analogize this with books. I quit games when they stop being fun, but I don't do the same for novels. Given the quality of modern games maybe they deserve that same commitment?
Funny enough, Moshfegh's McGlue is one of the few I just gave up on.
I think that's an interesting topic too. I do the same thing. If I'm reading a book that I'm not really into I basically slow the pace of my reading to a crawl rather than put it aside and try something different. It's a bad approach.
But the weird thing is I don't do that with TV. I can think of lots of shows that I loved for years that took a nosedive. I always just shrugged and stopped watching. Why am I a completionist with books but not TV?
Yeah, novel abandonment comes with a distinct feeling of guilt/failure for me. I think novels benefit from some kind of undeserved legacy privilege.
Soulsborne games are also not really that hard. People talk about them that way because they are almost unique in AAA gaming these days in the way that they demand focus, patience, and attention, 3 things that the last 20 years of modern gaming have stripped gamers of.
I haven't played a non-Nintendo console in over a decade. Breath of the Wild is about my limit for difficulty, and apparently everyone other than me 100%ed it blindfolded without touching the controller
I can definitely see an issue with too easy games. I bought some kirby game (can't remember which one) and I felt like I was watching my own let's play.
on non-Nintendo consoles the problem Eric describes is worse bc on, say, a PlayStation, you're dealing with so many big franchises that have dialed down difficulty over the years bc they're so primarily determined to be cinematic, and you break the flow of a pseudo-movie if you make the gameplay too difficult or even just too engaging at all.
Yeah, that's another thing about Soulsborne games, I don't care about the story so I don't care if I don't finish it. They're more like campfire retellings of old epics than narratives, anyway.
i do think there are a lot of bad secondary effects of Dark Souls being the modern gamer's only reference point for video game difficulty. you see this all the time on Reddit. someone will show up raging against a game they're convinced is broken bc they're having massive trouble and they just know the problem isn't them bc they "love Dark Souls." a sad state of affairs.
Soulsborne games ARE hard, they're just not hard in the way that people think they are, which is why superfans like me keep pushing them. :) The games are, above all, fair, and I think that's what people worry about.
You need to train yourself to be OK with ambiguity in the story - even the story doesn't hold your hand, you need to figure out what to do next yourself - and to be patient even when you keep dying to the same enemy repeatedly. You CAN beat them, there aren't "tricks" or anything like that. It's just patience with a slower paced game.
Accessibility discussions and complaints online are fascinating to me, because inevitably people will have different disabilities or need varying accommodations even if they have the same disability. While I generally think people should try to increase accessibility when possible (having caption or subtitle options for videos, alt text for images, etc.), it’s not a perfect science. I remember a discussion where someone was praising something being available in audio form instead of text as reading was hard due to a TBI. Except someone else was deaf, and there were no captions or subtitles so they couldn’t participate at all.
Seems like a symptom of a larger issue that we don't understand the role of different value systems.
Right now, it seems like the only valid value is morality, so every argument is framed as a moral one. No one understands the values of aesthetics, so we don't argue along those lines, and even if you tried to, no one would care or track what you said.
To say you like or dislike a piece of art is only to comment on the morality of it; likewise if you like or dislike art, you can only frame that in moral judgments.
Boring.
There seems to be a sentiment out there as well where if you portray or show something evil or immoral on screen then somehow you’re endorsing those actions. Which always seemed to be a pretty wild take to me, how can you tell a story without conflict?
I've seen this come up many times with literature specifically. People will choose specific lines from a book spoken by the villain and use them to say the author is a bad person. That's the point of a villain! They're supposed to be an unpleasant, crappy, or outright evil person that the heroes must struggle against.
Most of the critiques of Elden Ring (and From Software in general) have been aesthetic critiques, at least so far as I've seen. There is a hardcore group of people who really, really, really like their games. There is also a sizable group that finds their games to be an example of the worst elements of game design (artificial difficulty). These two groups despise each other.
There is a elitist streak in the hardcore group that responds to any criticism of the game design of From Software games with "git gud". Responding to that with a reason why one cannot "git gud" and so would like the game to provide an amenity that literally every RPG of any note has provided for 20 years does not strike me as an unreasonable argument, in that context. If there is a valid aesthetic reason for From Software not to provide a quest log (and I'm very, very doubtful there is), then they and their fans can defend it on that grounds.
From my perspective, a lack of a quest log is akin to requiring someone to do 20 jumping jacks every fifteen minutes to keep a movie going. It's pointless to begin with; that it excludes paraplegics is just further reason it's a bad choice.
The Evil Within in a nutshell.
//Ice-Pick Lodge cackle artistically//
I mean, they did reluctantly introduce the sliders into 'Pathologic 2' after pressure from their publishers. Maybe they really are equal opportunity offenders... everyone is going to feel miserable and hard done by playing their games!!
(or a bit skeezy.... I love 'The Void', but whenever I see it in my Steam library it looks like some dodgy visual novel or somesuch. ho hum!)
I prefer the term "fake difficulty", as described in detail by TV Tropes: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FakeDifficulty
I think the difference has a lot to do with our expectations of how game logic works - it’s all supposed to have rules and “feel” “fair”. If X has been the jump button for the past 60 hours, it would feel like artificial difficulty to have X suddenly be the attack button - unless there were some justification in the story for the switch in mechanic, like, oh, this is meant to communicate that the gravity in the spaceship changed, or whatever.
When I think of “artificial difficulty,” I think of a character you meet fairly early on in Bloodborne. She’s the first character you encounter who’s not an enemy. My first instinct, seeing her in the shadows, shaped like every other enemy, was to sneak-attack her the way I did everyone else. She killed me instantly. …And then, after I respawned, every time I entered her part of the map, she killed me again. And again. And again. And again. She’s impossible to beat at the player’s level; the only way to stop this is to start the game *completely over from scratch* and just remember not to attack her next time.
So, in the logic of video games, I think “programming in a fail-state that requires a full restart to punish a player who reacted to a new game element in the exact way the previous 15 hours had taught them to react” would count as artificial difficulty. There’s a sense of, there was literally no story justification for this and the game logic hasn’t pointed toward this being possible before, so it serves only to remind me the video game is hard, not to enhance my experience of playing it.
(And of course I wince even typing this out, because to a certain subset of fan the fact it took me 15 hours to get to this character is proof I was probably too much of a baby to play the game anyway, and what I’m calling “artificial difficulty” is just me being mad the game wrote in Real Consequences, or something. So I guess it’s all very subjective!)
Yeah, I do agree with both you and the above commenter that “artificial” is a bad word for it. Like, that particular bit of punishment drove me nuts, but there are a lot of the hard-for-hard’s-sake elements of the game I really like - just, for some reason that one crossed some mental/emotional line and took me from “Wow, these mechanics are good but really unforgiving” to “Hey, that wasn’t FAIR.” But both are equally artificial.
but this right here gets at my problem with the term. i've not played Bloodborne but what you're describing is just bad design. "high level boss beats under-leveled player under softlock conditions" isn't illogical or "artificial," it's just unfair! and i think "artificial difficulty" encourages people to lump (1) a literal softlock and (2) "this boss is hard and now i'm in a bad mood" into "everything on a mechanical level that's ever made me mad in a video game." but (1) and (2) aren't necessarily similar issues! so why do we force them to share a diagnosis?
Think of it like a story: by its very nature, it's fake and so there cannot be an actual "what [character] would really do". But you'd still get annoyed if a character acted out-of-character.
Artifical (or fake, that's a good term) difficulty is stuff where it feels like you're fighting the game on a meta level. You're fighting the choices the coders made, not the world that they have made inside the game. Some of it is a sliding scale: most people would agree that a hitbox 1 pixel wide is fake difficulty, but where a game switches from fake to acceptable difficulty isn't set. Some of it is pretty black and white: early video games often had levels that were impossible to complete unless you knew a trick that the game didn't teach you, which was done specifically to sell guides on how to beat the game.
Elements of these can, at times, be an artistic choice (Hellblade and Spec Ops come to mind), but more often it's lazy design.
"out of character" is a much better term suggesting a very different problem that "artificial difficulty" often does.
I spent a couple days on Reddit arguing with people about the Okumura boss fight in Persona 5 Royal. to my mind that was a very strong example of "out of character." it's a boss fight that springs several overlapping complications on the player out of nowhere with little to no consistency with any other battle in the game* before or after and with the calling card mechanic locking you out of the resources you need to get any viable offense off the ground. i wouldn't describe any of that as "artificial" but i'd certainly describe it as out of character.
*not inconsistent with Shin Megami Tensei in general, as Royal Okumura does in a lot of ways feel like a classic SMT boss fight, but certainly inconsistent with the rest of Persona 5 Royal, specifically
forgot i wrote a very long and roundabout substack post a couple years ago about "fighting the choices the coders made, not the world that they have made inside the game"
https://mirutanku.substack.com/p/mikami
"artificial difficulty" the most maddening phrase in all of video game culture
Right, it's a bit of artifice: all difficulty is artificial
As I read this I was thinking that the entire video game is "artificial difficulty" since it's, you know, a game...that's made up...
How would you describe things like Mario Kart's "catch-up" cheating or ridiculously tricky hitboxes? It's easy to make things difficult in a game, but making them feel fair is a legitimately difficult task.
There's an aspect of taste to it: many people like Souls games. But my experience of Dark Souls was "It's not that I can't do this, but it's kind of ridiculous that a game is asking me to do it." It felt difficult not because it was, but because the developers had made a host of choices that made things take longer than they ought to have.
absolutely agree that there's bad balance, worthy of criticism, in a lot of video games. but "artificial difficulty" has just always struck me as a term that's too general, too hand-wavy, and too unintuitive (video games are inherently "artificial") to get at the truth of what's so inartful or unfair about certain implementations. "artificial difficulty" just ends up being the language of rage-quitting.
It strikes me as a very odd conceptualization as well. As if putting a bonfire directly outside a boss fight represents “actual” difficulty and putting it far away to create more of a sense of punishment for failure is false difficulty. Just a weird framing to me.
I'm curious what you think some of those choices are. Certainly the function of items in Dark Souls is somewhat frustratingly opaque but aside from that I can't really think of anything.
Some might have been because I played on the PC port, which is apparently notoriously bad: narrow and inconsistent hitboxes, a camera that swung around unhelpfully, and a weird inconsistency between visual indicator and actual hit (it took me a long time to time dodges correctly, because when it seemed like you ought to dodge based on the animation wasn't correct).
Long gaps between save points (requiring you to run a lot of content over again if you fail) combined with enemies that are hidden and often cannot be seen before they jump out. A lack of a save point before boss fights combined with boss fights where you have to already know how they work before you can beat them--I wouldn't mind "trial and error" boss fights or having to repeatedly run to a boss fight, but the combination of both is infuriating.
The wonky hitboxes are legit annoying, not really sure why that is except that a lot of games have hitbox issues. Dodge timing is just something you have to learn. As for the bonfires, well, that's a design decision. Dark Souls really wants you to learn the maps really, really well and that's one way they enforce that. Once you have a map down you're probably no longer than 30-45 seconds away from the boss.
Elden Ring doesn't need a quest log. It doesn't have quests!
Appreciate you pointing out the elitist streak among the fandom. I don’t hang out in online gaming communities so I got to enjoy beating my head uselessly against Bloodborne in peace. I have a friend, though, who loves games but has a physical disability that prevents them playing any FromSoft game, even with a specially modified controller that makes most other games doable. The best they can do to enjoy the games is watch livestreams or let’s plays, which can grate because even the streamers will act like anyone watching instead of playing must be doing it simply because of their inability to git gud, and anyone not interested in the head-beating for any reason must be mocked. When my friend wishes aloud that FromSoft were willing to consider maybe rolling out game updates with lowered difficulty settings that their accommodation could handle, I totally think it’s a reasonable request, even while for my part I kind of like the boldness of making a game half-unplayable to rubes like me in a world that seeks the most massive audience possible.
But yeah, whatever anyone’s feelings on the games themselves, genuine assholes on the game-enjoying side of things do their part to help push the conversation to the least interesting version of itself.
Here's a frame of a pro-no quest log argument on aesthetic grounds: automated quest logs (and map markers, clearly stated objectives, etc.) can encourage mindless disengagement from the game's world and story -- people rush through dialogues without listening, they look for bright blinking icons rather than relying on described information, and they either miss entirely or can't enjoy rich details that are mechanistically unnecessary to getting the simple dopamine hit of a completed task. forcing players to rely on the raw experience of the game's world and one-time interactions that can't be replicated demands a radical change in how someone thinks about and approaches something that has otherwise, for many people, become rote and sometimes joyless.
if done well, a truly open, unmediated game-world has the potential to heighten the genuine feelings of discovery, exploration, and immersion that great RPGs can evoke. it could create a sense of mystery around the limits of the game (not everything is discovered and documented) and also deepen your connection to your particular role-play (when did my character write that down? i have no memory of a person with this description, why does my character know who they are?). i don't know if this game does any of that, but these seem like legitimate aesthetic possibilities.
i like games with game logs. but i also want people to try new things that change how people experience and conceptualize video games, and i love that From does that, even if it's sometimes unsuccessful.
What he said. I'm not arguing that NO games should have quest logs, but it's much, much better that the Soulsborne games don't. It makes it far more immersive, and gives the player much more agency.
I am very on-board with this comment. Disclosure - I'm 40 hours into Elden Ring and consider it a masterpiece, I'm about 1,000 hours into From Software games and consider them my favourite dev. I don't particularly like the git gud mentality taken to a denigrating extreme, but I also don't want From to compromise what makes their games so good - which is the sense of mystery and discovery that Brian talks about above.
But the worst part of modern morality—its not codified. Instead morality is whatever someone says is morality. i.e. I'm moral, because I'm a pacifist, I don't kill spiders ... I call an exterminator instead.
It’s classic “rock/rap music is evil” logic. And the inclusion or omission of a quest log isn’t necessarily a good aesthetic argument to begin with, as the merits of its functionality could be argued on a mechanical level of execution and necessity as much as it can be a personal preference of taste (which in itself is self-selective).
I can’t believe people feel the need to argue over the lack of a quest log in a video game, when they don’t even know how to differentiate aesthetics from anything else 😂
It's a kind of secular religion, perhaps
Yeah, spot on. The problem is we've given everyone a hammer (the outraged outburst), and so everything looks like a nail. And this particular hammer rewards you with delicious morsels of dopamine from your peers every time you use it, as they cheer on your outrage and join in themselves.
There's a lot of truly hilarious choices made in the production of Elden Ring. The whole POINT is it's not fun, but is instead a mechanism to experience pleasure in punishment and difficulty. I either love it or hate it, I can't decide yet. The learning curve is hard and it's not fun.
Very relatedly, I was recently asked at the start of an endeavor if I required an accommodation for learning. I had to spend several days assessing if the accommodations that needed to be made were by me or were for me. In the end I had to build my own rigorous structure to do the work, but it was useful to try the experience on and to realize that I needed to decline accommodations by others and build methods for myself. But it's also not fun.
I would submit that if you think the "whole POINT" of Elden Ring is that it's not fun, then the game isn't for you. It very much is fun to some people, me included.
Not sure people only play games for fun anymore, man. It's like with books or movies, sometimes it's about other stuff.
I decline your submission about whether it is for me or not, thank you. :) I will also refer you to the infamous Hidetaka Miyazaki interview on masochism of course.
And also this ENTIRE interview? https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/hidetaka-miyazaki-sees-death-as-a-feature-not-a-bug
Fair enough. I don't think Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is "fun" but it's one of my favorite movies.
I was going to say, "Melancholia isn't exactly fun," but actually now that I think about it Melancholia is pretty fun
The idea that it's ableist for a video game not to be designed to accommodate every single player (regardless of their level of hand-eye coordination, reaction time, colour-blindness and so on and so forth) logically implies that the artistic media of music and painting are intrinsically ableist, as they cannot be experienced or enjoyed by the deaf or blind, respectively.
I'm a 41 year old man whose hand eye coordination is likely better than average due to playing videogames for, oh, the last 35 years or so, and I still think Elden Ring is hard. I've actually never "finished" a FromSoft game. And I don't care! They are soooooo good. A unique experience that you can't get anywhere else.
I think the difference is it's relatively trivial for a game to allow at least some accessibility by including captions, including color-blind mode, and by having configurable difficulty (which often includes adjustment to how large the timing windows are). These are all features regularly available in games because things like colorblind mode are trivial to implement. Not so with a painting.
Configurable difficulty is by no means a "trivial" feature for a developer to include in a game.
And yet it's present in nearly every video game. Indie, AAA, doesn't matter.
Implemented but usually not well. What should difficulty mean? That your opponents just get double the hit points or that they play smarter?
Plus there IS an extent to which "easy" modes rob a little of the joy of completing the game on the high difficulty. It's one of the reasons the Soulsborne games garner such a rabid fanbase: if you've seen the Nightmare Frontier, well, you're seeing something not everyone who plays gets to see.
Plus, if you're me, the temptation to turn on "easy" mode as soon as I start getting a little frustrated can be irresistible.
The fact that it's present in nearly video game does not imply that it's trivial to implement. Virtually every video game (indie, AAA, doesn't matter) features music - that doesn't mean that composing and recording music for video games is easy. Likewise bespoke 3D models or 2D sprites, dynamic audio mixing, stable high framerates etc.
Just because something is such a firmly entrenched convention in video games that players have come to expect it and will be surprised/annoyed if it's excluded, does not remotely imply that such a thing is trivial to implement.
"Again, there are many, many repetitions of this sentiment out there, that the lack of a quest log and associated handholding are not merely annoying or bad design choices, but a form of bigotry, that they fail to accommodate the disabled and thus are morally wrong rather than merely artistically wrong."
It's good you mentioned that, since, by itself, I wouldn't have known that "Speaking as someone with memory issues and ADHD - fuck doing this." was a complaint about injustice rather than someone's statement that the game was simply not for them, so they wouldn't spend their time on it.
I don't use language like, "Fuck cats. Cats make me sneeze," to express cats aren't for me and I shouldn't make time for them because I'm allergic (if I weren't, I'd quite like them). I think it's needlessly crude, though I'd guess people often intend the crudeness to be funny. I wouldn't have supposed such language was a complaint about injustice rather than a statement about one's own limitations and preferences for dealing with them.
I'd guess you read that comment too and said, "wait you have memory issues and ADHD and you DON'T already have a running journal of some kind?"
But otherwise this just seems to be the invisible hand at work.
I wouldn't assume someone who hated a game best played with an independent journal didn't already do journaling to manage symptoms. Someone already journaling just to get by in life could quite reasonably feel too journaled up already to add recreation involving *another* journal.
Good point. I didn't even consider that. Thanks for the gentle reminder/language.
To be fair, it could go either way. Or many ways — including "I know I should be doing more journaling to get myself in order, but if I do, I can't justify doing it for a game." While someone else might find a game that needs an independent journal is what finally teaches him the journaling skills for real life. We are such messy creatures, AD(H)D or not!
I downloaded Elden Ring last night and stayed up until 2 AM messing around with it. I've barely scratched the surface, but so far my review would be: it's not Bloodborne, but it looks like From Software nailed it again. I think it's going to be a ton of fun.
I'm in the "no quest log, please" camp. From games are all about atmosphere, diegetic storytelling, danger at all times, and no hand-holding - you really might not win. They walk the fine line between "challenging" and "frustrating" better than anyone. Before I played Dark Souls all my favorite games were RPGs from the 80s and 90s. But now Bloodborne, Dark Souls and Demon's Souls are definitely all in the top five.
My only complaint, so far, is that Elden Ring may have moved TOO MUCH towards the Assassin's Creed style you're talking about. There's a crafting mechanism (which I haven't used yet but am dreading a little - scarcity has always been a big part of what makes From games successful, and this might wreck that) and there's stealth, which you almost have to use. It's not that the stealth isn't fun, it's just that it isn't any more fun than it is in, say, Skyrim, and (in the early parts of the game at least) is really easy. Some of the danger of other From games is sanded off, and some of the familiar action/adventure tropes are present.
Then again, I've played almost nothing of it so far. I'm looking forward to tucking the kids in bed tonight and getting back at it.
Don't worry about the stealth. It's truly a minor feature.
I'm genuinely glad to hear that. Most of last night I spend stealth-ing around some guard camp, backstabbing everyone. It was fun enough, but it's something I've done in plenty of other games.
You liking Elden Ring so far?
I've got almost 20 hours in, I played it pretty much as much as I could over the weekend, and I can't wait to get back to it after work today. It's the best game I've played since the original Dark Souls but that's an understatement because Elden Ring is honestly astonishing.
I didn't even know it was coming out until like two days ago. It's fun going from "unaware a thing exists" to "desperately salivating in your desire to have that thing" to "having that thing" in a few hours. Doesn't happen much.
I was going to hold off because I bought Horizon: Forbidden West last week and yikes, what bad timing for that game to come out a week before Elden Ring. It went from being the hot topic of conversation to disappearing overnight.
Twitch stream when???
oh god, I am so existentially bad at video games it would be a disaster, but perhaps a beautiful one
There's a lot of us who are bad at video games. We deserve representation too.
I tuned in a couple of times for the writing and socialism content. I don't pay attention to the screen, so it's like listening to a disjointed podcast with gunshots in the background. This is not a complaint -- I just mean it doesn't matter to me if you're succeeding at the game.
There's something gleefully ironic about all of this, as the adjective that woke anti-GG journalists and game enthusiasts most frequently use to describe pro-GG "hardcore" gamers is "entitled", as in "gamers are bunch of entitled manbabies".
Not that I'm saying the criticism is entirely without merit, but what could be MORE entitled than demanding that a difficult or unintuitive video game be redesigned from the ground up to accommodate YOUR preferences, which you've arbitrarily designated as more legitimate than a "hardcore gamer"'s preferences?