I think bloodborne holds a lot of reverence because of the themes it portrays. Besides Sekiro, which also has a cult following, all the other Souls games are based in and around medieval fantasy of some sort.
Bloodborne starts in Victorian England with a Van Helsing story and the descends into Lovecraft really fast. For a lot of people, myself included, that’s inherently a more interesting setting than medieval fantasy. People who are into victorian England are really passionate about it, and people who are into Lovecraft are really into Lovecraft.
It’s an excellent game, was a lot of peoples first From Software game, and unlike the majority of big titles from that time period, hasn’t been ported, updated or remastered.
Additionally, out of all the “Souls” games, Bloodborne is still the only one that can’t be played at over 30fps.
The verticality is absolutely the best part. My biggest gripe with Elden Rings world is that it’s an “open world” game in kind of the same way Ubi games are. Traversal is largely trivial, so you stop paying attention to the map after you’ve reached major areas.
In my opinion, Dark Souls I is also an open world game, but instead of a 2D map all the zones are tangled up together in a confusing but interesting web.
Shadow of the Erdtree brought some of that back by having zones stacked on top of each other to a much heavier degree than the base game, while also segmenting off geographically close regions.
I wanted to be a level designer for a lot of years, so this is admittedly a bit of a soft spot for me, but I absolutely loved having the game world come at you as as a challenge, almost a character to be fought and bested, outside the legacy dungeons.
To me the essence of 2016 is the scene in the beginning where an info screen tries to dump exposition on you and you chuck it into a wall.
There is plot, but you don’t need to pay attention to it. Doomguy is angry and needs to kill demons.
To me a big fumble in Eternal was trying to explain why doomguy is angry and so good at killing. He’s like an inverse Cthulhu, terrifying, unknowable and mysterious. Trying to explain or understand him breaks the basis for the character.
On gameplay, I didn’t mind the changes, but I thought the embellishments were a little on the nose. The technicolor rainbow explosion of ammo when you chainsaw someone, and the increased focus on using abilities to replenish resources scream “This is a video game!” in a over the top way that I felt took away from the immersion and grit that I associate with Doom.
I don’t know what you’re up to, but I ain’t shitting on the Bethesda games, that’s on you.
Put it down to age. I’m sure not a lot of people who jumped in at Fallout 4 bothered to go all the way back to the beginning, but I gotta say, nothing says “PC gamer forum” like lumping every age group together and calling something dead just because you didn’t dig it.
Tencent own preference stock. They could sell their stock, which could potentially harm the company, but they hold no voting rights and carry no decision making power.
I am not a fan of China, nor Tencent, but spewing bile without understanding the context does NOT help this discourse.
Ex game dev here who jumped ship and is now doing VR training stuff for a big medical company.
I don’t regret it one bit. You definitely lose some of the spirit and excitement of working with people who are super excited to make the fun games they grew up playing, but on the flip side, if you’ve been in the industry long enough to have 18 years under your belt, you’ve probably had enough of that excitement to see the bad sides of it.
By far the nicest thing about being in an industry that isn’t entertainment is that the success of the “product” you’re making is so much easier to define than “is this fun” or “will this help playing retention”. I can’t describe how nice it is to have actual users instead of players, and UX’ers who to come tell me what people want. Sure, it might not be as fun as games, but to be honest, I’m OK with that. I get vastly better pay, better work life balance, and most importantly, a complete lack of any kind of game director whose vision I must try to make real.
Dear, oh dear. What was it? The Money? The Fame? Or the Copyright? Oh, it doesn’t matter… It always comes down to the Hunter’s helper to clean up after these sort of messes.
I think there are two age groups of Fallout players. Those who started with the original games, and those who started with Fallut 3.
I’m young enough to have started with 3. I did go back and play the original two, and I absolutely see what you mean. New Vegas was somewhat better, despite still being a shooter, probably owing to the fact that it was written and designed by the remnants of the people who worked at Interplay when they made Fallout.
I think the main problem with the world of Horizon is that the most interesting event in their world has already happened.
The story of Zero Dawn worked so well because it is the interwoven tale of a young woman who sets out to discover why she was cast out of her village at birth, and the almost archaeological unraveling of why the world is the way it is. When you finally piece together both the plot is almost already at it’s climax, and you are left with both the understanding of why it must be Aloy who stops the new threat to the world, and the motivation to do so.
But that doesn’t work for a sequel. The format of Zero Dawn relies on exposition about the very nature of the world, that’s why the main quest has a bunch of missions that more or less boil down to walking around an old facility and listening to recordings.
How are you going to translate that into a new sequel? Either you’ve got sequels planned already, which I find unlikely given what Forbidden West amounted to, or you need to try to invent more world building and plot. It seemed quite clear to me that Guerillas writers for Forbidden West didn’t know their own world as well as I had assumed they did. The “how did we get here” plot in Zero Dawn revolved around a small cast characters, who, with the exception of one, were all both very neuanced and strongly invested in their own plot. The Zeniths of Forbidden West come across almost as inverse Deus Ex Machina, characters who fly in from the moon with what seems like no other reason to mess up the plot than “We had to find something”.
I thought the story in Horizon was fantastic. I’m a Sci-fi nerd, so that all hit home with me. The second game, not so much though. It was like they didn’t quite get why the story of the first game worked.
I have problems with God of War though. The story feels like an attempt to copy what The Last of Us did with Ellie and Joel, but without really understanding why their dynamic worked.