I thought the weapons were samey until I saw some videos discussing it. The weapon combination system is crazy! Some of them genuinely feel unique, playable, and fresh (though I did not reason my way into any of these on my own).
I am so excited to return to it and enjoy the DLC. It was a very satisfying base game.
Linearity hurts it a little bit, but I love the setting and mechanics. Feels really good, and in a different way than many fromsoft titles (at least how I played them). Worldbuilding worked for me, I wanted to spend more time with lore videos than I could find.
I hope it does well and we can see more entries in the series/universe.
(Standard souls warning: I don’t think this is a good first-entry into the souls games. I’m currently recommending “another crabs treasure” for that, and please go right for the accessability menu without shame.)
Note that game dev is a setting where both users and developers already tolerate a fair bit of jank or bugs, and where having ideas is relatively cheap but iterating on them is not at all. It makes sense as a fit.
I’m going to make a mildly stronger claim. I think this game really is quite moddable by a non-coder. What you need is to implement a different ruleset with new win conditions; everything else can be done with copying existing files into the correct file structure. New win conditions are specified by a pretty boring JSON file, docs here:
See here for an MVP for a mod of this type (probably replaces/strips away too much, but you should be able to find the vanilla files in the github linked in the OP):
I’ve also tried getting AI to program really simple things, like using js to find particular elements in a webpage (which I don’t control and involves far too many lines). It did fine.
It’s not ready for commercial use, but it makes hacking around unfamiliar code more accessible.
Kozy asked for a different rule set; essentially changing a few numbers related to non-combat victory (shorter research times, lower policy points required, etc). Identifying these numbers in a complicated code base, especially for a non-programmer, could be very difficult. For the non-programmer, understanding how the code works isn’t very important. You just need to know what to change, and perhaps make sure you don’t change more.
I think this is exactly a case where getting a novice programming friend to make a mod would make sense. Equivalently, to vibe code.
That sounds like something easily modded; like a couple of integers somewhere. It would be cool to do (and seems vibe-code accessible if a model can hold the full script in context?)