this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
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I agree with all your points but cannot disagree more on the inclusion of a difficulty slider for Souls games. I have been very adamant about a difficulty slider "cheapening the experience" or "jeopardising the artistic intent", but it really doesn't make a difference - at all.
If your enjoyment of the game stems from the fact that the game is difficult and the inclusion of a difficulty slider cheapens your "sense of accomplishment", then you might have to reevaluate your priorities.
Consider people with disabilities, for example, who are interested in the lore of Souls games and want to experience them themselves but can't because the games present themselves to be too difficult (for example in the way some bosses in Elden Ring have seemingly endless attack chains that give you no breathing room at all, requiring very precise input on the player's side), thus gatekeeping the experience from a potentially enthusiastic and interested player.
Or consider people who are just not interested in a hyper tense and difficult time and just want to experience the story and atmosphere of the game. What's wrong with that? How does that impact your enjoyment of the game if their experience is completely separate from yours?
For reference, I have platinumed numerous FromSoft Souls games and would not feel any less "proud" of that if the games had difficulty settings.
Nailed Souls on the head. I'm an older gamer and my reflexes are dead. I never really liked hard games. I like the story. I bought Bloodborne for the lore, and fully regret it. Hours of fighting the same area with zero progress is NOT why I wanted to play it. I bought Elden Ring after I found out there were cheat mods, tried to play it without them and enjoyed nothing, so added the Easy mod knowing I risked screwing up my Elden Ring account (whatever that means to me), having to play offline the whole time.
I regret buying Elden Ring because I don't want to have to almost pirate the game I bought just to play it because they want to make it hard.
Thing is you're trying to compare two different things, one is the (lack of) quality of the product in general compared to what was promised, the other is a design choice.
The irony is, I feel that sentence is more applicable if "lack of quality" is assigned to Soulslike games and "Design Choice" to Bethesda games.
Weird design choice to have games riddled with bugs that need to be fixed by modders 🤷
Could you quantify "riddled with bugs that need to be fixed by modders" regarding Starfield?
Every complaint I've seen so far has involved bullets, physics, or the AI. In my own experience, I've seen exactly 1 bug (the outpost-won't-respond bug) and it only hit me once and was easy to fix.
My first issue with Elden Ring was crash-bugs and screen-stutter. It didn't like my monitor streaming (all my other games were fine, including games using raytracing). And crashing every couple hours sucked. I haven't had one Starfield crash yet.
Also, have you ever ridden torrent across the sky? I have.
I don't claim my experience is everything, but I've seen far more bugs in Elden Ring than in Starfield.
I'm not talking about a game specifically, I'm talking about the way the studio works in general.
If you go back to the comment chain the original complaint is about a lack of quality control (releases full of bugs, missing features, bad UI, bad optimization), the other complaint is about a design choice (the game is hard because the devs intentionally made it so). My point is that it's two different things and saying "Your complaint about Bethesda's game is the same as complaining about Fromsoft not including a difficulty setting." is a false equivalency.
The major complaints people have about Elden Ring are endemic in every Fromsoft game. Janky controls, Rhythm-Game fighting with terrible balance, QOL features that are missing not only out of negligence, but out of design.
And except a couple "releases full of bugs", I don't really agree with those criticisms. You can find people who hate the featureset or UI of most games, and their optimization hasn't particularly been terrible.
I meant to discuss Souls games' exclusion of difficulty sliders in a vacuum, separate from the Garfield discussion.
As prefaced in my comment, I agree with your points about Garfield: the developers should definitely be held accountable for their shortcomings and for hyping up a product that falls flat of its promised contend.
But I don't agree with difficulty sliders being shunned by the "hardcore" community. I feel like this nurtures an elitist environment that doesn't do its fanbase any good other than gatekeeping and separating fans.
Again, just a separate discussion altogether, not related to the Garfield discussion.
What shortcomings, what did Bethesda promise in Starfield that isn't there?
I love how people keep asking this question, yet nobody is answering us when we do. Almost like they can't name a single thing Bethesda promised that we didn't get.
But OMG, the landing sequence isn't seamless. Let's burn the game to the ground.
Which I had seen Todd confirm to be the case months ahead of time. It was never going to be an Elite/NMS style game.
I'd love to see a summarized list of the one you (or others) find truly important. I am not sitting through 30 minutes of his annoying voice.
I did spot-check through and every complaint he brought up was inane and subjective, like not liking the design of the space suits, or just plain cherry-picked.
I have nowhere near a bleeding edge gaming rig, and I get 60fps on High and 30fps on Ultra. I also have a decent experience playing it on XBox's cloud streaming, nice and cheap. And the bugs he's depicted? I haven't seen them, so I'll just have to trust him on that.
I haven't played the game myself, tbf - just mirroring other people's opinions of the game. The game could be amazing for all I know - I just know that the reviews haven't been stellar and that the community response to the game isn't all too great.
Reviews seem to have hovered around 7 which is think is fair and by far from a bad title. I'd probably be a bit more lenient and go to an 8 due to the subject matter since I'm a huge sci-fi fan.
Reaction depends on the community, of all my big gaming friends in real life are enjoying it, as are the hosts of several podasts I listen to.
That's totally cool, I'm not trying to devalue your experience or people's experience at all!