(Archived 2022) The Insert Credit Neighborhood McDonalds

Gaagaagiins

Shit…… she’s absolutely right

goonbag

pasquinelli i had long assumed botw2 was going to launch alongside a ‘switch pro’ but i think that ship has sailed.. more likely now that a new console altogether is coming and botw2 will launch as a cross gen title like the original did on wii u and switch. source: my gut

edit: i reread your post and maybe that’s exactly what you’re saying, i just saw ‘new switch’ and thought you meant a hardware revision.

pasquinelli

goonbag yeah, that’s what i was saying.

goonbag

pasquinelli see this is why i delete ¾ posts i write before i actually post them! i try to only post stuff that isn’t redundant but i end up not reading other people’s posts properly anyway!

whatsarobot

a couple of years ago (!!!) i played this bizarro colourful horror PC game called Boreal Tales, i think because i heard Austin Walker talking about it on the Waypoint podcast. i absolutely love the intentionally weird-for-weird’s-sake vibes and ’90s PS1 a e s t h e t i c, but danged if i could get the game to work on my computer without crashing and bugging out constantly. apparently that was a common issue folks had with it, but i’m not convinced it wasn’t intentional on the developer’s part, given the overall feel of the game. at that time, i think it may have been in beta, or just a demo, or prologue, or something.

then, a lot happened, and i kind of forgot that game existed.

fast forward to literally last night, when i’m browsing the Switch e-shop (Japan store), and i stumble upon a game called Boreal Tenebrae, on sale for 85% off (so only 159 yen), and it’s apparently the same game, but … finished(?), and with a new title? i checked the Canada e-shop too, out of curiosity, but it’s not on sale there, even though (slash because?) the game was developed in Canada.

anyway, i bought it, haven’t had time to try it yet, but i’m interested in this weird little game’s trajectory, and its ability to twice capture my attention amidst the jumble of game-related noise surrounding us all at all times.

if anyone knows anything about this game, or what’s been going on with it behind the scenes, i’d love to hear about it. and if any of yall have Japan e-shop accounts, go ahead and spend 159 yen on this one, if you’re even a little bit curious. it’s worth at least the price of a cup of coffee, even if it’s just as buggy and crashy on Switch as it was on PC.

pasquinelli

goonbag i try to embrace a fire and forget attitude for just that reason.

treefroggy

I would have missed Tactics Ogre news if I didn’t begrudgingly click on a thread named Mcdonalds

Geoff

Janitor Bleeds came out.
I enjoyed watching a let’s play of it. It’s a really neat horror game.

MDS-02

In the spirit of being an old curmudgeon in the corner nobody really wants to listen to (and to maybe spare the general forum from a possibly unhelpful take): I have been thinkin hard about how Elden Ring pulled me in and then left me pretty dried out before the end of the game (spent about 85 hours), and I feel like the generally saccharine discourse about it is somewhat counterproductive (more broadly at least - maybe there is some good critique in the thread, too big for me to know, though).

I am hopeful that the lesson of “you don’t have to have quest markers or explicit signposting really at all for a broad audience to buy a game” will be learned by studios, and we will thus get games like Horizon but with 30% unmarked content. I think that will be great and fun.

But really, I have had too many instances of “I really intend to follow up on this story beat but am literally with no knowledge or means of tracking this NPC to their next slotted location” or “their next location is skipped because you have done something in a different sequence but you aren’t told this.” I feel like they used an attitude appropriate to a more contained souls space (with fewer sprawling areas to traverse), which left me feeling like I needed to re-check every place I had already been to find an NPC that moved to some unknown location (e.g. the eyes lady, and the wolf dude). However, even as I write this, I am already imagining someone responding and saying I ought to have x or y or approached the game in way z, but I have a pretty strong feeling that there just were some not great structural decisions.

Are people ready for that conversation without defensiveness? (edit: here I meant in the broader discourse, not to imply an encampment on these forums that I think will be unreasonable) I told my friend I would give it about five months before that rock starts to turn over more broadly. I’ve got other stuff to say and would love to hear other input on those thoughts, but also don’t need to waste anyone’s time.

Bless em for making such a beautiful bunch of stuff, for sure, and I think there is plenty of distraction and potential enjoyment to be had. But really, I don’t feel like ER was a new image of what games can be, it’s just that From actually put together that they could thread this needle in this space.

I’ll go back to my corner and eat my bagel. We can sit down and have a chat if you’re interested in the conversation.

yeso

MDS-02 This describes some of my experience too. Seems kind of strange to be critical of a game that’s fun and engrossing for 80 hrs, then diminishing from there, but I think it’s reasonable since it is a total, tied together game-thing. It’s not like an ongoing content churn like Destiny, right? Elden Ring = lots of cool stuff, not really successful in achieving its own aims/scope I think

2501

MDS-02 Welcome to the world of mildly disliking any isolated aspect of a Soulsborne game whatsoever. Any questionable design choice you may encounter is actually genius master design because it’s supposed to be annoying. It’s like trying to argue with Kojima diehards that maybe Phantom Pain having a bunch of xeroxed content and a lame non-storyline wasn’t part of a mind-blowing master plan, which is like trying to argue with a QAnon fan that maybe Donald Trump is an idiot. You can’t win.

thebryanjzx90

MDS-02 I think critique over the broken quest lines is absolutely present, but it hasn’t been a focus for a few reasons. You’re absolutely right that moving to an open world makes it much harder to tease out From’s quest progression on your own. But my guess is that many people who have already bought in based on the previous games already become accustomed to just looking up quest progression on a wiki anyway. I mean yes there are more points of interest to loop back to in order to meet an npc, and they are farther away, but Dark Souls was already incredibly hard to finish quest lines without looking it up. And those new to the series might be going at a much slower pace and such haven’t had as many chances to break quest lines.

Syzygy

2501
The “obvious jest” is a tone you have repeatedly taken on the point, responding to specific points by implying the other must mean something broad and vague. I encourage you to look back at comments like:

Maybe if I was an architecture nerd I would find the levels in and of themselves to be powerful expressions of humanity?? Maybe

And question who is speaking in good faith.

Obviously, it’s frustrating to feel crowded out of a conversation, but if you only want to state your piece without entertaining any rebuttal, just say so; this is basically what MDS-02 has done. Otherwise, it’s a discussion forum, and none of the response here to your criticisms has been as bull-headed as you keep saying. Part of good-faith is responding to the person(s) you’re talking with.

Maybe you should make a thread for railing against all the fanboys ‘out there’, since neither are you alone in that grievance among posters here.

2501

KennyL Also “Unannounced Dungeon Tactics Game” (Dungeon Encounters)

KennyL

2501 Oh yeah I missed that one.

MDS-02

Syzygy My apologies if my tone indicated any disinterest in engagement with discussion. My phrase about already imagining a response was mostly to express that I’ve been trying to engage with the material of the story with those recommendations in mind, but still ended up not being able to pull out what was there. Not that I explicitly don’t want to be offered an alternative. I did, however, also want to express that if anyone just thinks that’s a crappy opinion for me to hold, to feel free to pay me no heed, since I know people are having a good time and enjoying things despite the things I got rubbed wrong with.

If it’s cool to continue the conversation here, I’m glad to, but I really don’t have interest in ‘yucking anyone’s yum’ in doing so. (Originally was going to do a thread but didn’t really feel appropriate)

thebryanjzx90 I mean yes there are more points of interest to loop back to in order to meet an npc, and they are farther away, but Dark Souls was already incredibly hard to finish quest lines without looking it up.

I think for me this is kind of the central hit. I suppose part of the ‘plus alpha’ that separated Elden Ring from other souls games in my mind is that not knowing the depth of what was there provided big rushes of enjoyment. I might be mistaken but I feel like maybe the only time in a main souls game I had that kind of “oh wow I didn’t expect there to ALSO be this” was the painting world.

As such, I felt a bit signaled by ER itself that “the value and enjoyment you will get from this game will be self discovery.” That then put me in a state of “alright I should just roll with what’s there” which clashed against some world-tone language (“will you join me against the fingers?” Damn nah I don’t intend to do that, I just wanna find out where to get to the signposted great rune on the mtn that is on the few persistent dialogue trees. Oh turns out that was the only way to do that, unless I just look up the reward at the end of that questline, huh.). For me, mixing this with the large number of locations to check for any particular thing ultimately just resulted in my attempt to RP the role that I thought I was pointed to being stalled out (e.g. spending a big chunk of time looking for some other entrance to the volcano castle).

Since I generally felt so driven to play most of the game, it is honestly just surprising to me that this type of thing was as deflating as it was. It simply may be the case that my vision of this game being one that can be fully enjoyed within its own confines is the wrong model to have, and that looking stuff up is part of what the game is. Is that kind of how you think about it?

(I may look and sound like a crotchety old man but I’m really just confused and thought the way to use my computer was with a mouse not by puttin my grubby fingers on the screen.)

Syzygy

Aha, if I defend “any isolated aspect of a Soulsborne game whatsoever”, I am a blithering conspiracy theorist.

2501

Syzygy We’ve been over this before but what both MDS and I are referring to is a tendency common to FromSoft discourse for fans of the games to refuse to entertain any good faith criticism at all because any design choice that produces irritation, disengagement and/or boredom in players is taken to be an intrinsically good thing which proves the game’s purity and anyone who disagrees just isn’t Hardcore Enough. The assumption that every single thing is purposeful (and thus above criticism) and it’s the audience’s responsibility to prove they’re galaxy-brained enough to Get It loosely mirrors the circular logic of conspiracy theorists who interpret every apparent point of evidence against their preferred conspiracy narrative as proof of just how deep the conspiracy goes, a point I made in (what I thought was obvious) jest.

If none of this applies to you, as a Conscientious Soulsborne Appreciator - cool!!

2501

Syzygy You seem to be taking criticisms of a game and generalized frustration with fandom behavior very personally, which actually seems to support MDS’s point about From fans getting overly defensive when someone even lightly criticizes the games (thus making debate with them exhausting and exasperating) but oh well

And for the record, the passage you’re quoting was intended in good faith and not me being sarcastic at all. I actually, literally did mean that maybe if I was into architecture as an artform I would find more beauty in the level designs. I was not mocking anybody. Sorry if that didn’t come across.

captain

I come to this McDonald’s every day, get my Happy Meal, and ask the cashier as he puts the toy in the bag whether my meal includes the Dark Souls II servers coming back online. He stares at me, dumbfounded.

sabertoothalex

captain I am patiently waiting…..

Syzygy

captain
You know, that is weird and probably better suited to “news discussion”. Talk about it is scattered all over the forum so for posterity: around Jan/Feb 2022, a white-hat exposed that a RCE exploit has existed since Dark Souls 1 that carried over to all sequels, whereby someone connecting to you in multiplayer can take control of your PC.

Apparently it has been known for some years and forwarded to From / Bandai Namco who never did anything about it, so the hacker released public proof right before the release of Elden Ring in hopes of forcing them to action. In a hurry the multiplayer servers for the PC versions of all the Dark Soulses were taken down and remain offline still.

Here’s the original reddit post (archived) and a couple news articles. I also see an article from yesterday noting that the multiplayer tags have been silently removed from the Steam pages for each game.

captain

Syzygy an article

That article has a couple constructions like “This could mean the end! ……….or it could be temporary,” which sure is doing its job of making me wring my hands raw with fright. I had only just gotten my feet wet! I knew why they took them down and suppose I was being naively optimistic about how quickly they’d be able to fix the issue, and about how vocal they would be about those efforts. (………if they are indeed able to fix the loophole in the first place!!!!!!!!)

DaveedNoo

Syzygy yeah i was playing ds3 not too long ago and was sad I couldn’t get any multiplayer action

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