Can’t believe I got Blork-chan the Blockchain Knight killed already…hope @fridgeboy had better luck 
fell for the >!mine warp chest trap!< but luckily had a blunt weapon to take out a few morans on my way to the exit
@“kory”#p60723 lmaoooooooo I was pretty proud of that one
I like the heavy atmosphere of these games but appreciate the humorous touches like the >!spiders on skis!< south of the >!regent‘s topiary!<. Definitely made me LOL although they’re a pain in the ass to fight. On the bright side they seem to drop >!obsidion coins!< often, which is huge for my build
It is Done… installed my thing and set up my stupid damn PS+ subscription
Where do I input the donkeymilk?
>
@“2501”#p60804 Where do I input the donkeymilk?
it's on the multiplayer section of the main "pause" menu. you have to press triangle to open the password fields and put it into the group section. it'll be nice to not be the only donkeymilker in the very starting area!
@“2501”#p60804 it's specifically “group password” and password must be all caps
Making my character now
Prisoner looks cool, I’m gonna try that.
Okay I’m sorry but “body type A/B” is the weirdest and most confusing way to get around writing out “sex” as a characteristic I’ve ever seen. The game asks you to select your “body type” like it’s self-explanatory before explaining what that actually means!! Did the localization team get threatened by people on Twitter or what
@“Syzygy”#p60816 I assume none of these confusing euphemisms are present in the Japanese version lol
Very strange!
Okay so after the customary exposition dump of Proper Nouns and sick metal album covers that I guess starts every _Souls_ game, I can conclude that I’m… some nobody who was killed in an apocalyptic demigod civil war? And is now destined to be the Elden Lord? (Looks like Tim was right that the game should’ve been called “_The_ Elden Ring”)
I for one would not complain if there was a little roleplaying in these games outside of combat (a persuasion stat? Int checks?), but Miyazaki hates NPCs or something almost as much as he hates plots and characters right?
Enjoying that all the player messages in the tutorial zone are like, 4/5 trolling, and of those maybe half are taking advantage of the fact that the preselected message words include “but”
When you're an archer. part 2.
https://youtu.be/TFDffjVpYtk?t=74
squirrel bones
@“Syzygy”#p60858 I’m only really speaking here from having played Demon’s and a portion of Bloodborne, where it definitely felt like the roleplaying aspects were pretty limited outside of combat-related mechanics and the “story” mostly consists of like vague environmental hints + flavor text dumps on menus where you can read the rich millennia-spanning history of the basic recovery potion. Which I get some people like!! I’ve seen the games praised to high heaven for their “austere” and “subtle” storytelling. But for me it never really connected, all the story stuff seemed so divorced from the actual experience of playing the games 99% of the time and the game worlds felt so artificial and empty I couldn’t bring myself to care. These games are obviously more about atmosphere than storytelling anyway, and the atmosphere’s thick as molasses and deeply tied in with the frigid impenetrability.
@“2501”#p60811
The best part of the body type A/B thing is that I picked body type B and all the NPCs refer to my character as "her." They really messed that one up in each direction.
@“Syzygy”#p60872 Not to harp on the point, but is this narrative communicated through anything substantive you actually do or experience in the game, or is it more like if Mario 3 had a bunch of cryptic loading screen text spell out the tragic backstories of the Koopa Kids? Because I remember it being more of the latter.
@“Herb”#p60905 Yeah if the game were truly doing something experimental and spectrum-based with sex/gender characteristic selectors I would sort of get it, but it just obviously is a binary sex selection with a strange dehumanizing euphemism, which makes me suspect said euphemism was slapped on very late in development (if surprisingly not only in localization). You can make a female with a beard though, hurrah
there was a sex change coffin in dark souls 2
@“Syzygy”#p60952 Look I will try and think about why Metroid Prime and Shadow of the Colossus and SMT: Nocturne’s approaches to storytelling were slam dunks for me while Soulsborne has thus far left me detached and uninterested in learning the backstory explanation for why that enemy type looks the way it does or w/e. And maybe Elden will yet change my mind! I basically like GRRM (though his greatest strengths that I’ve seen seem kind of antithetical to FromSoft’s style of narrative) and the intro seems cool enough even if the “bombard the audience with a bunch of made-up proper nouns, backstory and high magic with as little context as possible” approach to fantasy storytelling is not my typically preferred interpretation of in medias res.
yes well said I find the playing of the game and what strands that pulls together more memorable than the wiki-scouring that is sometimes presented as necessary to ‘getting it’. Not the case!
Feeling like I should drop Elden Ring and play Dark Souls 2
@“Syzygy”#p60960 I think an essential microcosm of my disconnect with these games’ storytelling is that my immediate response to reading this - as someone who played Demon’s Souls to completion - was 1) “King Who did what?” and 2) “What ‘people’, there are no people in that game except four or five muttering hobos so idk how I was supposed to care”
Maybe if I was an architecture nerd I would find the levels in and of themselves to be powerful expressions of humanity?? Maybe