I had wildly different experiences with teachers within my own schools growing up. There was legitimately no standard that valued this kind of nuanced exploration of the world. Just a focus on standardized tests. It was almost entirely on the individual teachers to spend more of their time and effort to go any further than that.

I had some great teachers that made everything interesting and taught us more like the classes I eventually had in college, but I definitely have had more that were like this one math teacher I remember who, when I asked about why we had to do a math problem in a specific way we were learning about, answer something along the lines of “because I say so.”

And if it took ads on the pause screen to get you to see the issues with growth capitalism,

I don’t know why you’d assume that. I’m pretty staunchly communist from a mix of seeing our current problems and understanding history enough to know that this didn’t start yesterday. But if it takes companies being really obviously greedy for some consumers to see anything is wrong, it doesn’t hurt to try to focus their anger to a productive understanding of the problem rather than whatever other nonsense they might get drawn to.

As far as alternatives. I’m always up front with people in saying that I don’t have precise answers for what our future ought to be after capitalism. That’s a difficult problem and up to everyone to work together to figure that out. But there is no future where we stick with capitalism. Or at least, not one we’d want to live in for very long. It’s a cruel system and it’s going to be responsible for ending the human habitable environment if we don’t do something about that. People need to understand this and they need to understand that tweaking around the edges isn’t going to fix the issue.

The thing about if they were ok with a reasonable profit is a thought experiment or rhetorical device more than it’s a proposed solution. It’d be nice if it worked that way. Capitalists want us to think things do or could work that way. Hence corporations saying they NEED to cut costs or raise prices while continuing to make increasing profits. But it’s important to understand why it could never work that way, at least for very long.

Agreed. I really hate it when people see the problems in the world, fall for misanthropy, and blame everyone, most of whom are blameless beyond their failure to put their lives at risk to change things.

People are great. We’ve done great things. We’re a species who’s defining advantage is cooperation. None of what we see today would be possible if most of us were greedy, hateful, idiots.

People can be lead astray. but who can blame them? We’ve created a world more complicated than any one of us could fully understand. It’s bad enough that a handful of psychopaths can take advantage of that, we don’t need to add to it by making it seem like everyone’s at fault for not instantly bashing their heads in.

I’m not terribly sympathetic to arguments about covering costs when it comes to corporations. If they were just looking to cover costs or even just make a reasonable profit, there are all sorts of arrangements we could come up with that would be acceptable to most people.

But they’re not trying to do that. Profit isn’t enough for a corporation. They need to make the most profit. And then after that they somehow need to make more than the most.

So they put in ads. But that’s not enough and oh look there are more places we haven’t put in ads, we should fix that. Oh look, our studies show that if we make the ads more obnoxious in these ways they increase this number by 3%. Oh wait, we have all this info we got from spying on people, why don’t we sell that too? Hey guys, we’ve heard you about the ads. Have we got a solution for you! For a small protection payment subscription fee of $10/month, you can get rid of those pesky ads we know you don’t like! Oooh sorry everyone, the price of the subscription went up again. We promise this is all necessary. Oh by the way, we’re adding ads back into the service. But don’t worry, wait until you hear about our NEW subscription tier! (I don’t think that last one’s happened with YT premium yet, but it’s happened with cable and most of streaming at this point, so I wouldn’t put it past them.)

There’s no way we can have nice things while this is the driving force organizing where our resources go.

Imagine all the cool stuff we could be doing if we weren’t wasting the time of hundreds of engineers figuring out how to shove ads in people’s faces.

Reddit API fiasco. Practical issue since I didn’t want to use Reddit’s shitty app for my phone browsing and it was just the writing on the walls.

Wars are plenty profitable if you’re a lot bigger than your opponents and can force them to be subservient to your business interests. It’s not a fluke that the richest country on earth is also the one with the most frequent wars.

Even for the single player games?

2 things:

• Remember 2016 when the media gave Trump an absurd amount of free publicity by covering every stupid thing he said and did then he won? It wasn’t the only reason, but it clearly didn’t help.

• People know who Trump is at this point. He’s awful in a way that’s really easy to see and either you’re someone that’s a problem for or you’re someone who loves the awful.

Whoever is the current corporate lackey being put forward by the DNC is the one that needs to claim to be the good one, co-opting the language of progressives while taking corporate money and maintaining the brutal status quo.

So for people who come looking for someone who’s gonna do good, the bad stuff represents inconsistencies with that narrative and despair at a lack of representation in a supposedly democratic system.

Maybe they’re raising an army of nature’s angriest animal.

Because when I explore I want to go see something new and interesting. Half the time in Elden Ring I’d just run into something I’ve seen before. It made it not feel good to explore.

I don’t blame them for this, but this is the reality of making a project this big in scope. You can’t possibly fill it with good content. They made one of the like top 3-5 best open world games, but it’s still stuck with all the same drawbacks as open world games.

I just want them to go back to making more focused content.

Elden Ring doesn’t even feel like a game for everyone who liked Dark Souls. They completely lost the plot on what a fun challenge is.

That is how I used to play all the other games. I just stopped having fun with it in Elden Ring.

Fair enough. But most of the time when I finally beat the bosses it just felt like I found the right spell/weapon and got a bit lucky. I’ve yet to get that sense of relief and achievement that the earlier games gave me.

I mean, to some extent yes. The hostile, uncaring world complemented by challenging gameplay that doesn’t hold your hand is an important part of the design. I just think they went too far in Elden Ring to the point where it stops being a challenge I can feel good about overcoming. But that’s not really what I meant as far as the flaws with the games.

Setting aside difficulty, their games are filled with flaws, both minor and major. Some they’ve learned from over the years, some they haven’t, and some which they’ve gone backwards. I could get into a whole discussion about them, but it’s a testament to the rest of the design that I can acknowledge all of these and look past them to enjoy what was done right. Just a few off the top of my head:

• The stats are obtuse and frequently either broken or useless. Resistance from DS 1, Poise from DS 3, armor in basically any game, etc. This makes engaging with the RPG elements feel kind of pointless and why in a lot of the games I played basically naked.

• The stat requirements and the need for upgrade materials makes it so that most items you find will be useless to you. They alone don’t really contribute to the desire to explore. I do end up exploring around in these games, but it’s in spite of the rewards rather than because of them.

• Demon Souls made you go back to a hub through a load screen to level. Dark Souls 1 fixed this. Then every game after that until Sekiro has gone back to forcing you to go through a load screen to level.

• The games are really inconsistent with their use of bonfires and shortcuts. I think to this day Dark Souls 1 has the best level design of the series. The lack of fast travel for the first half really makes you engage with the levels and makes you appreciate the shortcuts you find and eventually the fast travel once you have it. Since then all of the games have gone bananas with the bonfires/sites/etc with fast travel right from the start. There were some absolutely absurd places in DS3 where there was another bonfire within sight of the first. Then you have areas with absolutely no bonfires and shortcuts all the way through, or none at all. In Elden Ring sometimes you get sites of grace or stakes of Marika right outside the boss door and sometimes there just isn’t one anywhere close.

• Consumables feel pretty useless since they’re non-renewable. If you use them and still can’t kill the boss before they run out, you’re now just gonna have to beat the boss without them, so you might as well not have bothered. Elden Ring kind of helped this with crafting, but honestly I haven’t used it much because I just am trained not to think about consumables in these games at this point.

• Some weapons/spells end up being completely useless. Some feel like they were designed for a different game. I don’t know how they imagined people would make use of them. And iirc bows and spells have been a joke until like DS3, and even then from what I’ve heard people say bows are still pretty crap.

I think what’s interesting about these games is that they’re unpolished. That’s not to say I wouldn’t want these problems fixed with better design, but I think I prefer what we have to the usual AAA design where everything rough gets sanded down until the whole game is bland and appeals to nobody equally.

Yeah that’s basically how I felt. It was binary. The game was unfairly and frustratingly hard when I was trying to play fair and take the game on its terms. And then when I went to cheese everything it was so trivial that it felt empty. Sometimes I think about going back to the game to try to get the “real” experience, but then I remember the frustration and just can’t bring myself to do it.

Although part of my reluctance to replay the game has less to do with boss difficulty and more to do with the repetitiveness of the open world. Without the sense of exploration and discovery you get on the first playthrough, the world becomes a checklist of places you need to go to grab stuff for your build with little desire to go replay the other content because so much of it is copy pasted filler. Even going through the DLC now, with it being smaller in scope than the full game, but still pretty huge, I’m already seeing a lot of repeat content.

As much as I appreciate the attempt at putting a twist on the formula, I think the open world was a net negative for the game. The flaws in the reward systems of the previous games were exacerbated by the structure which led you to explore all the boring repetitive stuff on a first play-through because you don’t know if the thing you need might be in catacomb #20 and then on subsequent playthroughs you just skip vast parts of the game which aren’t relevant to you.

It also just doesn’t seem like they have the content output necessary to fill an open world with content that is of a comparable level of novelty and quality to what we’d come to expect from their level design. There’s a good dark souls game in Elden Ring, it’s just that it’s spaced out and everything in between is padding.

The funny thing is, despite all of that, Elden Ring is still one of the top 3 open world games alongside the 2 Zelda titles. But I think that says as much about the state of the industry and genre as much as it does about the skill of FROM’s and Nintendo’s designers.

I’m working my way through it now. They’re not really much different from the main game. The problem is the bosses in the main game were also pretty frustrating. A lot of absurdly long attack chains where it’s hard to read when you have an opening. Delayed attacks you have to memorize the timing for. Attacks where the enemy either dashes or stretches their model an absurd distance to hit you so it’s hard to get away from them or gauge distances. Damage values that will kill you in a few hits even with high health and armor. Attacks that start and execute so fast that anything with a cast time gets punished.

Outside bosses we have the enemies behind half the corners, we have platforming sections in a game that doesn’t really support that, etc.

I’ve always like their games in spite of a lot of the flaws. The level design, world building, atmosphere, weird writing, etc all are still great and what draws me to the games. In what in what other games can you see: bald scam man, onion man, sunny d man, “dip head in wax”, rolling lightning goats, doot doot boat ghost, etc?

But it feels like in terms of gameplay design it’s kind of stagnated. A lot of the same design patterns for difficulty plus the pressure to keep making the game feel hard to people who have played all their games before has led to them stretching their design about as much as they can. In my first play through of Elden Ring for the first time I gave up trying to play my usual Ooga booga strength build in favor of that stupid comet azure magic combo to just anihate the bosses rather than deal with their bullshit. And in previous games I happily smashed my face against things like Nameless King or Madam Butterfly and Dancer well before I was supposed to fight then.

I think at this point I just want to see FROM do some different things. Sekiro was a nice mix-up on the basic formula and while it wasn’t really my cup of tea, Armored Core 6 felt like a breath of fresh air. The mainline souls style games feel like they’re trying to keep linking the fire over and over.

Yeah. I got this a while ago too, but my friends from college now have jobs and live in 4 different time zones. It’s pretty hard organizing more than two of them being around for more than like an hour or so.

It’s crazy that this is real. It looks like a comic someone would make to make fun of the idea. Like the fact that they’re watching some guy shoot someone, then the burger commercial comes on and the guy stands up and cheers “McDonalds!” Before sitting back down to watch more of guy shooting other guy.

This is peak “dumb Americans” humor, and they’re using this unironically to describe their business idea.

Yeah. I don’t know what the % breakdown is, but I get the sense that while the general community is inherently anti-corporate/anti-commodification, there are some that view this in the left wing sense of communities supporting each other and some who view this more of as a consumption/voting with your wallet individualized choice. They recognize that some or even all corporations are bad, but think opting out of those structures without directly challenging them is all that they need.

But like I said, idk what the actual distribution of these views are. It’s just the sense I get from seeing some of the comments.