The worst gaff of Elden Ring is the " Confirm you want to summon the horse, it will cost you a flask" overlay which is preselected to "no." This literally kills me every time I'm fighting a Dragon.
@@quinnmaillot3882at least Fromsoftware has crisp UI menu inputs. You can switch weapons mid parry in these games. Choosing yes or no shouldnt take that much longer than summonimg the horse. Im not even good at fighting games and i can manage.
@@golmoshy hes not talking about the 1 flask cost to resummon, but the additional prompt you have to say yes to. that little bit of time can mean life or death when fighting a boss. it wouldve been better if it just automatically consumed 1 flask without asking.
It's a great video bud and agree with a lot, however you do miss a key point - this 'narrative' wasn't started by Elden Ring fans, no one was comparing the titles until a Horizon Forbidden West Dev indirectly made the comparison. You also paint the tweets as vastly different than they were; they weren't helpful positive tweets, they were absolutely petty and rude. Saying FS devs were smoking at their desks? How the quests design 'doesn't exist' tweeted by a HFW developer - this was straight up pettiness. But yeh I have never felt comfortable with the East vs West argument either - in reality it came down to this; a couple of Horizon Devs got salty and made some petty remarks. But that's it - no wider picture and I agree that it is a full dogma invented from a few tweets. But don't get it twisted - it was started by a Horizon Dev and it wasn't done 'because they cared' about Elden Ring being as successful as it could be. Edit: Yo those Godskin Noble Roll dodges 🤝
I absolutely don’t believe the idea that nobody was comparing them until a developers talked This is simply not true, elden ring fans and gaming fans in general act extremely obnoxious. ER compared it with GOW too in toxic ways and no dev was involved Gow fans did the exact same thing too Because gaming fans are often very immature when they like something
@anselmo pat it was just a bit of shade and gamer shittalk until HFW and ubisoft devs started posting. It's like what happens when kids are fighting and parents suddenly decide to get in the mud, it makes everything worse.
As some who bought Elden Ring back in April solely for the hype, I’m about to share my experience with this gem. When I first got Elden Ring Ill be honest I had no idea what the fuck I was doing. Didn’t know I could upgrade my weapons smithing stones so I spent around 38 hours in Linegrave and all I’ve managed to acomplish is killing Margit. Felt extremely stipid and lost for only being stuck on the 2nd boss and slowly stopped playing… 6 months later and i watch a few videos and find out the reason I can’t beat godrick is because Im using a fucking base longsword. I download it back and beat godrick on 2nd try. Once I figured out how to properly make my character stronger (not just leveling him up) the game became 100x better and here I am abt to start NG+3 for my chaos ending with my duel wield ROB and MoonVeil. The game does not by any means spoonfeed you information so my advice for any new players is to PAY TF ATTENTION TO DIALOGUE, DETAILS AND LVL UP YOUR WEAPONS
Your experience is a bit What I felt in Dark Souls 3, my First SOuls games, When I first played it and went to other souls games I noticed some dialogues and items descriptions give you advices. In Elden Ring for example, Gideon Ofnir tells you that Radahn Soldiers use fire against Scarlet Rot and I went with a lot of fire itens into Caelid and I already knew Malenia is weak against fire. The HolyWater pot tells you that is effective against skeletons and their kindle. So Discovering informations and teste some of them is a real interesting and immersion experience to me.
@@Gakusangi But naw bro 38 hours in Linegrave at lvl 33 with a longsword. At a point I thought I was sped for not being able to progress which led to me gradually stop playing
@@Shayster-_- Guess you missed/forgot about that anvil in the church the merchant is in at the start, where it told you about upgrading weapons and gave you an item to upgrade your weapon with. It's not unusual for new players, most of the veteran Souls people remember when it was a HELL of a lot more complicated with a lot less explanation.
They changed the golden seeds thing so now, if you have enough seeds or sacred tears to upgrade your flasks, it has a little glowing dot next to it. Also, you can sort your inventory by recently picked up items or put stuff you don't want to carry around in storage.
@@johndodo2062 It does have a story and I'm glad it doesn't have a quest log. That's just how FromSoft's games are. Nobody is forcing you to play them. 😂
Yeah, noticed that the also added a red dot to the map where the meteor hits too and a pop-up message informing you that it's on the map in the first place. It was a big step before just having descriptions for things like Souls/Runes telling you exactly how much they give you before you pop them to find out.
My biggest problem with "western devs" criticizing Elden Ring, is that it was so rude and just outright unprofessional. There were quite a few that had actually reasonable arguments. Sure, saying that the UX is bad and why is one thing, saying it's so bad that fromsoft devs are smoking at their desks and using CRTs is just being an asshole. I didn't like the UX in horizon, I don't like my screen cluttered with stuff, I don't like progress bars telling me to finish X camps and collect X items. I rather have those things come up naturally. But if instead I say "horizon's UX is so bad I must imagine they test their games on braindead monkeys" I'm being rude, and if I'm a fellow dev, it's being unprofessional.
To be fair - one of the three devs (Rebecca Fernandez O'Shea) criticized the technical issues and not necessarily the game design. Her statement was quote "nor PC graphics, stability & performance, apparently" end quote. And if we are honest the game had indeed a lot of technical issues in the beginning, the PC version in particular. Framedrops, frequent game crashes, lags, glitches, even corrupting save files - there where so many bugs and issues. At least the PC version was definetly not polished on release. In my opinion her criticism was valid because it was not directed at the way the game was designed, the UI or the story telling but on the technical aspects. The other two devs however criticized the UI and the game design itself. That's completely different from criticizing very real existing technical problems.
It’s admittedly been a while since I read the tweets in question, so forgive me if I’m mistaken, but didn’t her original tweet say something along the lines “I guess those things don’t matter”? I remember most of these tweets having an air or implication that Elden Ring didn’t deserve all the praise because of their criticisms. Please correct me if I’m wrong though.
@@dark_monarch0073 No I quoted her original post which was an answer to the first post of that other guy I can't remember the name of right now. The whole debate blew up on one dev making a comment about the UI, then she answered with the technical stuff and then the third dev making his comment about quest design. While the first and third posts are...debatable...her comment about the technical stuff was absolutely valid because the technical state of the PC version was not good at launch. I - and many other players - experienced massive framedrops (which shouldn't happen on the by far most powerfull hardware platform) and frequent game crashes. My game crashed at least once per hour. There where also lots and lots of glitches. The online mode also lost connection all the time. It was not Cyberpunk on PS4 levels of disastrous but it was not too far off either; the optimization on PC was terrible. The game should have been delayed for two or three months at least on PC to fix the issues.
@@shadystan0242 Well the dev complained about both, UX and UI. Yeah the OP mixed that up but since the dev in his Twitter post complained about both he's right nonetheless.
For your third point, I think it’s worth noting that From’s approach also caught the mainstream by surprise. It was hyped as a AAA title and people expected a AAA-level open world game, but they got a different one, and they realised hey this is pretty good too. Open world games have started to feel bland recently, and maybe to some, just the different style itself was refreshing. It helps that Elden Ring is an amazing game of course, but it also benefited from the genre’s apparent stagnation and saturation, especially in the AAA sphere. I think despite the drama, this has been good for the industry. Fans will have higher expectations and devs will have newer ideas.
At 40:40 you criticize the equipment menu for being too cumbersome and not having a sorting mechanism. But it does have a sorting mechanism, and the button for it is right there on the screen you're showing in the video. You can sort the equipment menu by type, attack power, weight, recent, and do it in either ascending or descending. And if there are items you want to keep but don't want to show up in your equipment screen, you can move them to your storage box at a site of grace. Then you complain that you can't tell what you picked up if you dismiss the item right away. But you can sort your inventory by most recent, and bam, there it is. So I can't help but think you're proving the point about these criticisms--that a lot of "problems" are that the player literally doesn't read the menu.
Good catch. I love the irony of him going on a one minute bit about how ER fans are deflecting valid criticism of the game, then going on to critique the game for lacking a feature that he was just too blind to see, and all the while showing a clip of that exact feature staring him right in the face for the entire section of that video. It really is pretty funny looking back.
I think it’s more so you that you can’t have your own custom order; as someone who uses swaps in PVP it gets annoying when I can’t just put things where I want them.
@@subashira I don't think that was what he was going at in the video, but that's valid nonetheless. Outside of pvp though there really aren't many things that can't be solved by just putting away all the things you don't need and sorting everything else. If we really want to talk criticism i wish they would've shipped an arena at launch this time instead of having to wait for dlcs. With the invasion/summoning changes and the gutting of covenants, there isn't really much diversity in the types of pvp compared to ds3. Fight club also got axed due to the summon limit so it would've been nice for from to throw a bone to pvpers who enjoy duels.
@@subashira I managed to sort "new" since if you put in the box and grab out the game treats the Item as "new" and allow for a customizable sorting order. But that doesn't mean it couldn't be implemented as "load out" or "builds" menu for example. It just isn't a core issue by any stretch of the imagination.
You are so right about wanting to feel surprised when exploring. I found the siofra river completely by accident, I just wandered into it somehow, and I had been staying away from spoilers for the game so I go down this huge lift and I'm like "holy crap there's more???" I was astounded by the size of the world they'd built for us, and I started seeing little secrets in every corner of the map. Little surprises that they had to know not everyone would find, and they were okay with that. That first playthrough of elden ring was downright magical
Here’s the deal… Elden Ring gives me something that I need while struggling through it. Horizon also gives me something I need while I’m breezing through it and enjoying Aloys journey. They aren’t the same and cannot be compared to each other as if they are.
Perhaps the general idea behind not having a quick item select system in Elden Ring is to make the player commit to a loadout before entering a boss room or firefight. So if they want to change loadout mid-battle, it's intentionally troublesome and tough to cheese the game.
I agree that difficulty isn't the MAIN draw of these games, but it is an important aspect of these games. Miyazaki said himself that he wants to give players opportunities to overcome difficult challenges and get that sense of achievement that comes with that, and something like an easy mode would undermine that. These games are made to be difficult for a good reason, and in a sea of games that are made to appeal and be easy for everyone, their design philosophy is hugely refreshing.
The irony is that so many Souls fanboys say that people using all the various tools the game provides to overcome hard bosses are "cheesing" or any amount of other ridiculous terms and that only people using melee only - preferrably on a level 1 no hit without using weapons or armor challenge run - are "real" gamers and everyone making use of the tools the devs spent a lot of time and energy on designing "doesn't play the game right". At the same time these people are the same that frequently comment on videos, forums, twitter etc on how Elden Ring bosses are "too hard" and "unfun because they are too hard".
@@soulfulcabbage7616 no, plenty of people support this idea, just to a different extent. Because it's true. Killing bosses with magic or summons is way easier than normally because even by this point, 10 years since DS1, FS still cannot design bosses that don't fumble to range spam or aggro split. In Elden Ring at least they gave everything fast combos ans AoE attacks, but older games don't even have that. So when someone finishes the game using both and expects validation, of course people would reply with something like "how is this impressive, you just cheesed the game". I'll also add that, contrary to popular belief, Souls games are not about challenge, but self improvement through overcoming that challenge. And I think a lot of people understand that subconsciously. That's why those who demand respect despite achieving nothing will get rejection or even hate in Souls community.
nothing is wrong w response videos lol. it’s annoying when u start ur vid off with “i don’t normally do this” and do that exact thing. own it bro this is a good video
The reason I say that is to make sure folks don't get the idea that I'll be doing this regularly on this channel. And yea, no shade on response videos or similar content, it's just not my usual M.O.
The whole vid makes perfect sense except for the part where you assume western devs aren't jealous of Elden Ring's success. This discourse actually started because a bunch of western devs made cringe public statements about it. There's a YongYea video about it close to Elden Ring's release window. Can't fault a guy for not keeping up with a couple of whiney devs on Twitter though lol. Still gonna sub.
I saw most of the tweets in question, and the "jealousy" in question was mostly projected onto them. If you read most of the threads they were a part of, it's clear that several of these devs were being tongue-in-cheek with some of their comments.
@@InfernalRamblings that's a pretty huge assumption and generalization. One of them was a Ubisoft employee saying "Reviewers don't care about good quest design" and there was no indication that he was joking. I get the elitism with eastern gaming is annoying but your assumption that all western devs are as good at critical thinking as you is a bit of a leap.
Your essays are getting better and better my friend. I think you're going to hit your breakout point soon with this channel and I can't wait to see you get the attention you deserve. Excellent video!
Thanks again friend for your continued support of the channel. I gotta say "no u" because your constantly improving production values and storytelling ability (when you already had a strong start) are a huge inspiration.
I agree with most of the complaints you raised about the UI, the flask screen, item queue, and even though you didn’t mention it, having to confirm that you want to resummon torrent, however I disagree on your point about the NPC’s because most have a way for you to recall the information. Take for example patches in liurnia of the lakes, where he tells you about Rya, where she is and that we should help her. Even once you heard the dialogue, he has an option that says “About what you said earlier…” I’m which case he will repeat the important thing from earlier. Plenty of NPC’s use this trick so that you can re ask them a question. Another example is Gideon Offnir who can repeat all of his relevant dialogue if prompted. Another trick is the repeating dialogue, which is how when exhausted of dialogue options, the NPC will say the same line over and over again. That line is a unique line that recaps all the practical information the NPC said before. Going back to the example from earlier, Rya’s repeating line tells you that she needs her necklace, and the approximate location of the thief, so should you forget what is happening in her quest, she will happily regurgitate for you. When you encounter Alexander, he will always tell you on loop where he is going next, he will tell you he is going to Caelid at first, then in the wailing dunes that he will go to Gelmir, and from Gelmir to the forage, so if you miss the dialogue, just ask him again. Diallos will outline each of his goals on loop until his death, how he must find his servant, that he will get revenge, that he will win glory etc. telling you repeatedly what he is doing. Sometimes the quest line can continue in an item description, the volcano manor quests all have accompanying letters that remind you too what you are doing in the quest at the moment Rogiers letter also tells you more on how to continue D’s quest line by giving information on his brother. These items are easy to find, as they are in the key items section every time. Some NPC’s will also reintroduce themselves when you meet again after a while, Boc for example recaps his quest more then once in case you forgot. Millicent will also remind you in Altus about the things you have given her, reviving the potentially fuzzy memory of the player. Also the devs listened to player feedback and added the NPC locations to the map, so you can easily go back and talk to them again. The vast majority of the information that isn’t repeated is lore or characterization. For example Rogier will repeatedly tell you that you should find Ranni, but only say the lines establishing his motivations once, as it isn’t pertinent to the gameplay experience. That stuff is there to reward players who seek to understand the characters, and engage the dialogue instead of skipping it, but the NPC’s repeat relevant dialogue for those who might miss it. Only a couple quest lines don’t have ways to actively follow them or catch up, namely Melina’s quest line, as she is hard to talk to and doesn’t repeat herself, and some characters are hard to find due to the order of the locations (which won’t necessarily be fixed by the UI). But overall I don’t think there is a need to a quest log, as what is currently there has built in ways to catch yourself up to speed, and not miss critical information.
41:50 - lol I know the game doesn't give a tutorial on it but - you CAN sort the inventory - for example by order of attainment. you CAN even use the chest to put away items and gear that you feel that you don't want to keep track of atm. you CAN customize it to your liking. another thing - which to be fair was an update is that the flask upgrades now have a little glowing dot if you have enough materials to upgrade them. and ofcourse - fromsoft games don't give you UI tutorials for the most part, maybe we should begin having game manuals again? anyone?
I don't agree with your UI complaints, first off, when a new player sees the options to increase flasks and increase their potency, if they select it, it tells them what they need to accomplish that, and then when you have enough to do either of those, there's an indicator, meaning after the first time, there's no reason to select either option if you don't have enough. second, if you don't like having a massive page of weapons you don't use but want to keep frustrates you, put them in the chest, y'know, the thing the game gives you for specifically that purpose? also, there is a sort function which also leads to your next point, you can just sort by the order in which you aquired items, scroll to the bottom, and there it is, sure it's a little inconvenient, but I'd rather do that on a rare occasion than constantly have to look at a massive list of things I've collected every time I open the menu. Slightly inconvenient, sure, I guess, maybe, if you squint a little. Bad? actually unhinged
Fantastic video, as always. I particularly found the notion of bucking "industry standards" to be pretty interesting, as I've come upon several examples in recent years of features that frustrate me at first glance, but then ultimately make sense. It's an idea that I think I first picked up from a couple of Hbomberguy's videos, where he would point out these more frustrating parts of games and how they can encourage different styles of play. I think one example that comes to the top of my mind, since I'm fresh off finishing God of War Ragnarok, was how GOW 2018 makes you play a significant portion of the game without fast travel. It feels especially frustrating when, as you travel the world, you pass by all these fast travel mystic gateways you can't really use except to return to the central teleportation hub of Midgard, pretty much. I cheered when I finally got through all the game I had to and Brok said "Oh by the way, we fixed up the gateways for you. They should work now." But later, I reflected and realized that all the time I'd spent going around on foot and boat to my objectives involved a lot of great characterization in dialogue between Kratos and Atreus, and that I likely would not have felt the emotional weight of certain later points of the game had I not had that literal bonding time with my character's son. You may argue in the standard game design "Games always have to be interactive" methodology that this lengthy dialogue could be an ultimately medium-betraying approach, and you could find some crumbs of truth in that path of argumentation, but I think for what this narrative approach was, locking out the majority of useful fast travel for a while actually worked wonders for the narrative. Immediately granting that to the player could have really crushed out a lot of the potential of the story.
Fromsoft did this exact thing with Dark Souls 1. You can’t fast travel for about half the game. Until then, you’re circling, traversing, and exploring the world for everything you can. Having less fast travel definitely helps with building an actual world in video games.
It is funny how the anti-woke game has LITERAL GOD being a nonbinary bisexual shapeshifter with confirmed sexual relationships with both male and females, one of the most powerful demigods is canonically gay, and both male and female players gain the title of Lord, and you can customize your character to be any gender and that that the clothes are non-gendered, so you can also be non-binary. But for some reason the conservative people believe that the game where you have to play as a woman is the woke one.
One thing I've always had issues with is that UIs are judged solely on how it is shipped instead of its customization potential. I like how I can get rid of most interruptive features of a Ubisoft game for example.
Awful UI? Hardly. Perfect? Nowhere close, but it puts the emphasis on those aspects of the UX that are critical for playing and enjoying. Learning to beat Mogh "wastes a heck of a lot more time" than inefficiently sorting my chest of weapons or getting caught by the "you don't have enough" message. The only really really bad UI/UX feature is the "A Stonesword Key Was Used" message that doesn't go away on its own AND prevents all of the other useful inputs you need at that moment. Getting ambushed and killed because you couldn't lock on or switch weapons due to a stupid message on the screen is the definition of infuriating and frustrating - even non game developer recognizes that is a stupid design that was worthy of a patch (how the heck has it not been fixed this far into the lifecycle when there have been hundreds of algorithm tweaks?). The nitpicks over UI/UX are largely BS resulting from our natural tendency to want to "bring down" greatness when it isn't our greatness... none of them are worthy of any of the clickbait texts or videos (which is true of almost all of the clickbait for ER, but sometimes you learn something really useful anyway).
Things I’d love to see in a update for elden ring is -the ability to set specific armor for looks and set specific armor for stats -X & Y coordinates for the map -the ability to move while the map is up & use the map while near aggro enemies -more marks to put on the map like a checkmark or X and better contrasting color marks that don’t blend into the map like the green ones -some kind of horde mode or bloody palace mode -a Evergeal at the round table to practice against Bosses you have killed or have killed you
I don't think you'd actually like these ideas after implementation. -Armor barely does a thing in Elden ring. The only outliers are a few armors with specific high resistances or High Poise armors to eat through enemy attacks that exceed poise damage. you just wanna wear bull goats armor for 'armor' and something else for 'fashion souls'. Why would Fromsoft intentionally decrease the Value of all the other armors by doing so. There is a cost to wearing one armor. 'you' have to choose it. -X & Y coordinates for the map. Can you give a reasonable application for having coordinates that cannot be solved through Map beacons and markers? a reasonable application that doesn't ruin the adventure for the sake of convenience? -More markers are indeed reasonable and an understandable update -horde mode or bloody palace: This is not a Style-Points based game or a MMO game with multiple modes to have those features. The best you can expect is the New update for the Arenas DLC. -EverJails at the Roundtable: I know examples for this in other MMORPGs but the closest thing to this released in Fromsoft games are the Community Dungeons in Bloodborne. Bosses are generally not there to be at your beck and Call. It's an Experience that depicts a Narrative as per the souls formula, Different from your run of the mill MMORPG field bosses or something like we see in the Bless Franchise Boss farming. If you want to fight the boss again start a NG+ at the roundtable. I know many of your suggestions would make it more convenient to you. But it would also bog down other aspects of the Game that are arguably its stronger points. But i get where you are coming from
@@megamicromanager2449 “I don’t think you’d like these” lol, you’re gonna tell me what will and will not like? That’s rich. And as for a wave based survival mode, who said it needed to be style based. I could be more like doom where each arena awards you a new weapon The X Y feature is something I want when looking up weapon locations. It will remove the spoiler part where all I need is just the location and no pictures or anything else to spoil how the adventure will go It’s funny you say that having the bosses at my “beck and call” ruins the experience when almost every boss is encountered multi times.
Is Horizon even an RPG tho? It's a named main character with a set backstory and personality, right? So where is the space to role play? Like Elden Ring feels way more like a traditional TTRPG where you get to make your own character and then gets "dropped" into a fantasy world that you don't know much about until you start to explore and meet characters. Which you get to decide yourself what you want to do, you can chose to listen to the NPCs, do their quests or ignore them or even kill them. I mean you don't even have to become the Elden Lord, which is the whole end goal of the game, and instead you can find other ways to end it. 42:00 you can always write your own quest log IRL if you so wish.
For me I grew up playing old and new nintendo I played hard games that were technically limited but offered amazing gameplay and story and that's the same kind of philosophy Miyazaki creates his games with I don't want to feel like the devs are calling me an idiot when they put in easy stuff I like that Miyazaki respects our intelligence and says "there either smart and good at the game or they suck and they will play something else" he is mega GOAT
Most of These young gamers haven't played games from the 90s most haven't even played shadow of the colossus. That's why they think Elden Ring is Soo difficult. Everyone starts out getting shit on, Elden Ring is no harder than Super Metroid or many games from the old days.
@@kevinbaconwasntinfootloose1742 yeah its not even hard if you start the game as astrologer and can find sorceress sellen you can go through the entire game with just what you started with and like 1 spell from her
Just wanted to add that there is actually a pretty good sort function in the inventory. There's a prompt in the inventory shown for the button to do it. It's kind of odd to me how many people don't seem to use it or even know about it. It's not like it's hidden or anything. I guess they could have a little tutorial window pop up the first time you open the inventory to mention it or something I suppose.
I dont find the UI particularly egregious in Elden Ring or any of the souls games. Is it less useful in some situations? Of course. More information is probably easier to deal with. The reason I like this form of UI is I don't need all that other information while Im in the middle of an immersive moment. But, I also find Everquest to be the superior MMORPG so maybe its just the conditioning Ive been subjected to in my gaming journey that makes a minimal UI more attractive to me.
Yeah, no, I took those dev complaints as extremely scummy. They reeked of envy, but to be fair, it's hard to gauge the actual intent of a written tweet. But you can't tell that either, can you? So saying that they weren't scummy to counter someone who says they were scummy does not disprove one way or the other. Even if they were right, it does not excuse scummy behavior or indicate otherwise. Now, I'd like to argue that ER UX is better than HZD. This isn't factual. It's really just subjective preference. It's okay to have the opinionated preference, but pretending that one is factually better than the other is just some entitled bullsh*t that I've seen in many Western devs. Personal opinion, and why I prefer the Eastern market is point 5. The East is free from the Western dogma. That's not to say Western games are bad (although I hate them), but it is extraordinarily boring that every AAA Western game follows the same rules. Now I know this isn't every Western dev, I know a lot of good indie devs. But it's the majority of the AAA industry. For some reason, I've only seen this behavior from the West, which is why people associate it with the West, even though this issue is NOT inherently Western. So in short, I agree that this isn't a West vs East issue. But I disagree that this fiasco wasn't telling of a flawed stale mentality of the Western AAA industry.
I didn’t get this impression. Seemed more like saying they are apples and oranges not red apples and green apples, then going on to compare them as fruit
Totally agree on the "It's not a difficult game" In fact that narrative was what held me back from playing Dark Souls until Dark Souls 3. Challenging and difficult isn't the same thing. But, the challenge is core to the game. Much like a Mega Man game of old.
Glad to have discovered your channel. The problem is that there are lots of gamers that are teenagers or are just immature, so flaming controversy is just an incredible pastime for them, more than playing games
I think the inventory thing is done on purpose, a minor punishment for players hoarding every item despite not have any intention to use the clutter. You want infinite pocket space? There is a price.
I was totally fine, as a first time souls player, who started on elden ring, having to figure out how to upgrade flasks, weapons, summons all by myself. I LIKED the No hand holding. I felt that figuring out those mechanics was just as gratifying as figuring out how to move along a quest I had done dozens of hours before. I want as little told or shown to me as possible because the game is so great, every little discovery has meaning, even the menus
Dialing back to the "LOL Salty UX western developer's cry on twitter" videos that were being milked out by every channel tangentially related to souls. You know Fromsoftware collaborated with activision on Sekiro SPECIFICALLY because they ADMITTED because their UI and UX is weak, Miyazaki himself brought on activision because he wanted to learn to make more friendly tutorials and control interfaces, I love these games, but they are critically FLAWED in alot of aspects in ways thay would not "ruin the experience" to fix, it is not sacriligious to criticize the games for not conforming to basic quality of life features.
Funny how he would take notes from Activision which makes the worst UIs I've ever seen in anywhere. The UI/UX of Call of Duty MWII is absolute dogshit for example. I would take Elden Rings UI any day. MWII's UI is painful to use.
@@Pyovali They make alot of iffy decisions from time to time, if I had to guess they(activision) were probably the only ones who were willing to help while relinquishing full creative control over to Miyazaki and FromSoftware(which shockingly Activision did accept those terms)
You don't understand what "Wokeness" is. A game becomes "woke" when the company changes or removes other characters, group of characters, plot, lore, or internal logic of the game in the name of "inclusion", "diversity", "social justice" or whatever buzzword liberals like. For example: A game where the protagonist is a woman is not woke per se. A game where the protagonist is a female character that is basically a Mary Sue that talks down to men and is entitled to everything in a story where all men are either dumb, assholes or dumb assholes is a "woke" game. A game that prouds itself in attention to detail and realism but breaks said realism and inner logic in order to add "diversity" is a "woke" game. A game that replaces a character for other with little or no explanation or respect for the original, in the name of "inclusion" is a "woke" game. A game/character that is racist against white people or sexist against men is woke. Obviously there are more examples and some games (or pieces of media) are more woke than others. Is not only about the "what" but also the "how" and "why"
I'm not sure how your video got recommended to me, but I'm really glad! Your perspective helps you see these events in a different light. I also can't believe how I've been more and more critical about corporations, culture dogmas, our current system, etc and failed to look/look back at this in a more critical way, so I'm definitely checking more of your content, as I hope others will, too! This kind of view/analysis on gaming stuff should be very interesting! (and probably a bit introspective/reflective to someone like me, who perceived things very differently, and very narrowly, before)
The difference between Japanese and western games is that westerners go realism over function, whereas Japanese like to keep their games more on fantasy and function. I think that Red Dead Redemption 2 is a good example of a game the Japanese devs wouldn't make . Or if they did, It would feel a lot more "cartoony" like Read Dead Revolver is. Some argue that RDR2 pushes the realism aspect way too much (everything has a slow animation and there's an input lag when aiming due to it). One of my personal complaints about western games is not so much about the gameplay or the ui or not even the stories necessarily, but how ugly characters have become - one thing also that comes from wanting to keep with realism. I actively dislike mo-capped faces, it's the most boring and lazy thing you can make, when video games allow every kind of designs to be created and applied. And now realistic body types is one thing that is brought to games, they made Aloy chunkier due to it for instance. It's a fantasy so why make your characters uglier? I don't understand.
i dont know which western game you play because 99.99% of western devs dont make rdr2. It will forever remain a novelty. in fact, AAA western devs have went increasingly gamey. Pop ups everywhere, an ui elements for every little thing, npcs sucking your dick the moment you walk in their los. Stop the game in its track every couple mins to take you to a tutorial room. A god of war, a master witcher, a trained spartan that need to level up to deal damage to a bogman...
@@mdd4296 Well they're game mechanics so you can't really get rid of them if you still wanna make a video game. I feel like people are overdesigning their games
"Video games allow every type of design to be created and applied." And then you proceed to complain about characters not being conventionally attractive. Which is it?
Bruh this video tackled all the arguments on the internet right now surrounding the gaming industry and Eldon ring in general. Phenomenal job bro. You sir earned a subscriber!
If I were the work on some things about Elden Rings game design, it would be only a few things. 1) Camera is ass in confined spaces. It feels less of a problem than in many other souls games since wide open spaces are much more common in Elden Ring. But the issues can still arrise in dungeons. 2) Some character questlines are easily missable. I missed out on half of Alexanders quest on my first playthrough because I had no idea he moved to the middle of a lava lake in Mt Gelmir that I had already been to. And due to quest timing he missed the Liurnia stage. I also had to look up where to go after giving Ranni the fingerslayer blade because I didnt think to ask Iji. 3) I dont think having to navigate a Yes / No menu to consume a crimson flask to resummon Torrent after he gets KO'd is convenient in a fight.
I never played Forbidden West, but I did play Zero Dawn. I think it's worth comparing Horizon to Elden Ring where it matters: How the open world is constructed/presented. There's few games I have played where the world immerses me as much as Elden Ring does, and I have played a lot of open world games, I quite like them. My issue with the "Ubisoft formula" is that it's not really about using the games mechanics to explore the game, as much as it's about moving from set piece to set piece collecting things off the map. Technically you do that in Elden Ring too, but in Elden Ring it's you the player who's tasked with figuring it out. Just today I opened my map in Altus, looked at the details and placed map markers on places I thought might be hiding something worth while. I think it's actually more worth it to compare Elden Ring to Breath of the Wild though. They are more similar in how they approach the open world. Here too I'm more drawn into Elden Ring. Breath ended up being very repetitive to me, where as Elden Ring feels rewarding to explore. (It might also be that Breath feels 0% like a Zelda game to me, which was a huge let down... I mean you need to find all the damn shrines in order to get the propper Hero of Hyrule outfit? Give me a break.) When I play open world games I love going off the main story path, to grab all the loot and secrets. Elden Ring was made to do that, which is why it resonates with me. On top of that the gameplay never really feels like it get's stale, something I often feel in other similar games. It's probably because there's so many builds and playstyles. So yes, there's aspects of Elden Ring that's unique to it, which enhances the open world. At the same time, many open word games are just open for the sake of being open, and could have benefitted from being a more closed experience like Dark Souls.
What I have noticed about the AAA formula over years of playing games is how much agency it takes out of the players hands and replace it with quest markers and "helpful dialog." It used to be that you got a quest, and had to read it in the quest log in order to know where to go and what to do. The log might explain what land marks to look out for in the game world, and off you went. Heck. I remember how revolutionary the quest log was for Morrowind. Oh, you didn't know Morrowind didn't have a quest log? All you had was a diary, which was chronologically written at first. It wasn't until the expansion that you could organize the diary into a quest log. And that's sort of what I have seen in videogames, over time what made sense in one game got copied over to other games as "must have" features. By all means I don't mind quest markers, but sometimes It adds to the feeling of having to go out into the world and find what you are looking for. Some games have taken it so far that it's almost impossible to find what you are looking for without all the in game aids. A good open world shouldn't need to tell you what to look for and where, but rather have you want to go look for it. Using good visual clues within the game world to tell the players "hey, this place looks interesting, doesn't it? Why not go over there?"
And people seem to forget that Konami was(is?) a Japanese game publisher who tried to turn Metal Gear into a soulless money making machine, and after that failed they turned their IPs into Pachinko machines.
The golden seed/ sacred tear UI thing was annoying . . . but they fixed it. There's an indicator that shows when you can upgrade your flasks now. They put merchants and other NPCs on the map too among other UI improvements. Open world was new waters for them and this is why discourse about flaws is important. FS devs clearly looked at feedback and listened, and they rebalanced a lot of weapons and abilities that players find annoyed too. They also improved the multiplayer massively and made it more accessible based on what players (and presumably devs like you) had to say. They made a good game and they kept honing it and its dope. Every point you made is fair. Criticism is a good thing, and no, all "Western game developers" shouldn't be lumped together and seen as people who are "jealous" and are just s***ing on Elden Ring every time they have criticism. Devs make games for a living most likely . . . well because they love games? Elden Ring (while not perfect) is a super awesome game so I'm sure there are countless devs who enjoyed the game as much as you. I had my criticisms too and still do. Despite updates, the game still isn't perfect. No game I've ever played is perfect and there is always room for criticism. There were absolutely A HANDFUL of devs on Twitter who were going about their criticism of Elden Ring in a way that came across as bitter and nasty, but yeah, I think the "WESTERN GAME DEVEOPERS HATE ELDEN RING" thing is generally click baity trash. "Western" and "Eastern" aren't two genres of games. Elden Rings and Souls drew a lot of inspiration from Western games (Demons' Souls and DS1 in particular specifically targeted Western audiences) just as countless, countless Western developers have drawn inspiration from Eastern games. "East vs West" is generally an overly generalizing conversation rooted in misconceptions. Epic vid, dude. Sorry for the essay.
ER was a culmination of fromsoft and an amalgamation of open world rpg inspired by western and eastern titles, also a dev of a studios doesn't stand for the entire studio or itself as what their respected studios stated. i totally agree w/ this.
I'll also split this other thought I had into its own comment: the way I had read some of those original tweets criticizing the UI/UX of Elden Ring... As someone who works in that discipline myself in the industry, I could perhaps sympathize with a little frustration seeing a game that succeeds so brilliantly having put very little effort into some of those systems by contrast. When you consider a traditional western open world game design with transparent quests and a full quest log + compass system complete with separate portions of the UI concerning quests available/in progress/completed + reward displays, pathfinding breadcrumb systems to ease players' navigation through tricky spaces and terrain, and the effort of putting all that together and squashing all the bugs... I could definitely understand if there was at least a little bit of jealousy going on. FWIW, I think I'm above the 300 hour mark on Elden Ring myself and I have no qualms saying I love the game and it deserves all of its success; I just wanted to offer a minor counterpoint.
This is a good point. I also get a sense that some of the frustration behind these critiques was also just thinking about how Elden Ring could be considerably better with a UI/UX pass on the stuff it already has.
40:35 This has actually been changed months ago. Now the game shows you when you can upgrade (which serves the exact same purpose as your suggestion). 42:05 That does exist (sort of): You can sort the items by "last aquired". I started playing video games in an era where the Internet didn't even exist. It was common to have pen and paper at hand to map out dungeons while playing The Bard's Tale or Ultima IV (which is an Open World game btw) or Pool of Radiance. Eye of the Beholder or Dungeon Master more or less required the player to map the levels on paper - that was part of the fun (unthinkable to modern day players I assume). Games like Gothic I and II where great while having terrible inventory management - and no maps; if you wanted to have a map showing the island in Gothic 2 you had to find one or buy it from the cartographer in Khorinis. I don't really get all that arguing about things like UI - if it serves its purpose and isn't making gameplay nigh impossible I don't care. If there is one thing I'd like to see added to Elden Ring it is something like an Adventurer's Journal where all the information I discovered can be found in a more organized fashion without the need to click through hundreds of items (or not finding the information at all because it was mentioned in a conversation with an NPC). If people don't like the idea of even such a basic quality of life feature it could be implemented as optional with the option of turning it off when starting a new game.
The UI "discourse" is pathetic to the fullest and smells of vitrolic envy. They see an amazing product and begin nitpicking on the color of the car's coating. It's what you do when you HAVE to find flaws in something, to a desperate level.
I'm not going to defend the people who are just racists, or sexists, or whatever, but thinking that the only people who are tired of Western gaming philosophy are like that is too much of a strawman for me to ignore, and it ignores the problem that these people are using as an in instead of attacking it at the source. Infernal, people are not, IN GENERAL, sick of Western game design because it involves a diversity quota, or anything like that. They're sick of it, because it's all following the same formula, either for the company that makes it, or by at large the Western gaming industry itself. I kinda want to point out how most of your Platinum'd titles are indies or, yes, indeed, games with Japanese design sensibilities, or whatever the hell Yoko Taro counts as because I don't think anyone designs games like him. I'm saying your distaste of open worlds, of nailing why Elden Ring's open world is compelling where others bored you (finding an unexpected treasure compared to another 1 out of a 1000 poonannies!) is something that a lot of people share, and I think you miscategorize them horribly by assuming that. I was with you up until that point. I _subscribed_ up to that point, but no, IMO your mistake was acknowledging them, let alone letting them be your conclusionary boogiemen. These people got in BECAUSE people like you let them drown out the people with legit complaints. The people who are tired of getting nickel-and-dimed for less, let alone things standard in games 10-20 years ago, the people who are tired of Western games releasing more and more unfinished, the people who are tired of feeling like they're just getting a yearly installment pushed out to make them pay another $60 dollars, and that's ignoring the utterly horrible things we've seen get pushed and normalized. Lootboxes, macrotransactions called microtransactions, "live services" meaning games that aren't worth playing for possibly entire years. And let's be honest, yes, as others said, some of these devs who worked on Horizon and whatnot genuinely think they did a better job than Elden Ring and it's getting "undue" credit. Arrogance on their behalf that doesn't help anyone. Those people you mentioned are beyond terrible because they've intentionally muddled the waters, made it be about them and not about wanting a healthier gaming industry in general. There's a reason I've not been excited for a new game until Phantom Fury, or why most the games I enjoy nowadays are indies or even god-forsaken Gacha games.
But really, this is fantastic. The line from Microsoft to games-as-utility-software seems obvious in hindsight, and you went into the limitations of that approach very effectively. I like how you take your industry experience and combine it with your artistic sensibilities. Really cool stuff! What was your favorite ER build?
Thanks so much! Re: build... I did a lot of variant Faith builds which was great because I didn't need to respec. Faith is just busted overall with the both how it's both powerful and versatile. In particular I found the red lightning build to be just a lot of fun (and also OP as heck). The Dragon King's Cragblade and the Bolt of Gransax have some of the coolest weapon skills in the game... and maybe they've nerfed them since I was rocking it because they were just silly powerful. I also had a lot of fun as an undead hunter with the Golden Epitaph and the Sacred Blade Ash of War, even though narratively I find what my character was doing as a Golden Order zealot to be really reprehensible. FromSoft is way too good at fostering such dissonance. I still haven't figured out which ending I "align" with... maybe the DLC will fix that?
@@InfernalRamblings Yeah, faith is great in this game. I loved my fth/str guy--named Greater William, played him as a useful idiot to the Golden Order, and gave him a crisis of faith for ng+. There are still so many incantations I've barely used, though. Red lightning seems cool as hell, but i mostly relied on the basics.
I don't really agree that the developers critique was constructive. Which is why I think people latched on to it. "UX is so bad that I can only imagine FromSofts devs smoking at their desks and using CRT monitors" "UI/UX is fine as long as the game makes up for it" "Not being able to do basic shit without seeing 5.000.000 you don't care about is good because agency" "I genuinely haven't found anything good about the UI/UX" The only one I think I could accept as constructive is "Very overly complicated menus to tell you the exact stats you have before everthing two shots you" And, we have to remember, Elden Ring to day and Elden Ring at launch was somewhat different. There were changes made to the UI between then and now. All of which are UX enhancements. The NPC markers, the yellow dot on features in the Grace menu that's available etc. But complaining that there's a lot of information on screen? Calling it useless? There's very little info in the game I would call useless. So yes, the game has flaws. But, I'm not sure the tweets in question are really pointing them out well. I know this video is looking at the game devs side of things, but the game journalists did jump on this bandwagon though. Which I think are the ones who rocked the boat too much honestly. They did have "suggestions" which in many ways fly in the face of the philosophy of the game, something I think game journalists should be able to tell...
You made a whole *raft* of good points. Let nobody take those away from you. As someone who will gleefully get into an hours long debate over the merits and demerits of Elden Ring,especially compared to other games,I happily admit to Elden Ring's many flaws; True combos. How certain unarmoured enemies,like Pages,can completely ignore arming swords and thrusting swords,while armoured enemies get stagger juggled like Devil May Cry mooks,thus violating the logic of armour = stability that was established throughout the rest of the game. And how Elden Ring's got nothing to help people with disabilities,like colourblindness correction settings or enlarged,clear subtitles for the dyslexic. But despite all of that,I love the game to bits,though I've never believed the "East vs. West" nonsense that people were pushing regarding Elden Ring. I just think that Elden Ring got a huge amount of positive press because it's a different animal,at least on the player-facing level,compared to just about everything else. It's a contrast,compared to Horizon or God of War,which themselves are extremely similar to the majority of the rest of the AAA action/RPG/open-world theatres. It's a breath of fresh air for many,not to mention that Elden Ring was a huge newbie boom for the franchise,which only amplified that,I believe. It was different and novel,in a space where novelty is king. Even though,for franchise veterans,it was more like a culmination of all of FromSoft's games since Demon's Souls. Elden Ring stood out for no other reason than because it refused to do otherwise. For good or ill.
You don't have to go back as far as D&D to see western influence on japanese game design. Elden ring was influenced by breath of the wild which in turn was influenced by Skyrim. Now that I think about I believe 12 years ago the conversation was how japanese rpg's were stuck in the past and western rpg's like skyrim were the future
For the reward being random and you may find things that you don't or ever use. I nevermind that in the game. For me when the game is good to explore it is fun to get the reward at the end even though it is not useful. It is the road to get to the reward that is the most important. And with that knowledge, my subsequence playthrough will be improved as I remember this place has the item that I want to pickup for this character, that place is not needed. Using my own experience for future playthrough in exploration is a very good feeling beside just experience from fighting. It makes me feel that I am getting better at the game and become more efficient. It is like they put every reward in each box at an event, you don't know what you will get but you can always get as many you want to know what is in each of the boxes. They also don't forbid you to comeback in the next event and they don't change the box content either. So the next time you come by you know exactly what box you need to get instead of them telling you. 41:39 I think they can fix it just by making the item you recently pick at the top of the tab with some sort of highlight to indicate. Then after you look through them the highlight is gone and the next time you open the inventory again it will be in where it is sorted. There is actually a sort function in the inventory to sorting them by weight, category and stuff but not very useful however. Most people ignore them ever since DS1 and just dump every item into the stash.
Also if you're a nerd for the lore like me, no matter what the item is, so long as it's something new, that means you're rewarded with a new little lore tidbit to read. I know not everyone is all that interested in that aspect, but I get excited when I find a new thing just because it means I get another little paragraph to read.
I kind feel western companies had more interest on creating add on than develop their products. Sell. Sell. Programmers works for them so they kind did a commissions work.
Completely agree about the UI being shit. Honestly find it a little lazy that it's essentially a reskinned dark souls menu. It wasn't good then and it isn't good now.
The fact that HFW is being bundle in with PS5's is, in my opinion, evidence that it is not as successful as desired. PS5's are still on short supply, so people are going to be buying them even if they cost $50 more just to get a PS5. If they would buy it anyway, then you wouldn't have to bundle it in with the system. However, I do think it's stupid to compare Elden Ring's total sales to HFW's sales, a more reasonable comparison would be Elden Ring's PS4/PS5 sales to Elden Ring's PS4/PS5 sales. Anyway, I bought both HFW and Elden Ring on day one, but I haven't been able to bring myself to play any "open world" game since playing Elden Ring (I did play Dark Souls 2 (for the first time) and Dark Souls 3 a few more times since playing it. For me, Elden Ring was a mixture of Breath of the Wild and Dark Souls 3, so it was basically as if it was designed just for me. I really like Horizon Zero Dawn, but I loved it for the world and the story, no the gameplay so much. I liked HFW for the same reason, but it's hard to go back to the gameplay as it feels very clunky and restricted compared to Elden Ring. Also, I'm old, so I think FF6 was the last truly great Final Fantasy, although it was called Final Fantasy 3 when I played it and I still think Final Fantasy 2 is the best Final Fantasy.
While it surprises me that someone with your taste enjoyed Elden ring so thoroughly as to platinum it, let me say, your good taste shows through in the music. Xenogears to open, Nier (not Automata), A Jazzy cover of Chrono Cross, FF VI, etc. All wonderful music that says a lot about the games you've played and what left an impact on you.
I think the main difference between the success of Elden Ring and Horizon Zero Dawn is that Fromsoft keept evolving it's formula, while EA merely keeps adding to it since Assasins Creed pretty much.
??? HZD is Guerilla, and Assassins Creed is Ubisoft. Yeah, HZD has some problems with not trusting its players, but EA has nothing to do with it. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go tell Aloy to shut up and stop telling me how to solve this mind numbingly easy "puzzle" just because I stopped to write this comment.
@@laylaalder2251 Whoah, I guess tripple A developers have been copying each other so long that I stopped distinguishing them and I was to lazy too check who made what LOL. OR it was some developer from EA or Ubisoft that started complaining why Elden Ring was so successful
thanks for making this video. I've seen this narrative brought up a bunch of times and it's always seemed silly to me. a couple of people tweeting about ui design or whatever is not "western game devs raging" about Elden Ring. glad someone is finally responding to it, because it felt like nobody was going to.
I agree with your thesis and the broad strokes of your argument, but the sections covering the UI flaws and criticism from game devs really spoil what could have been a great video essay. Like others have commented already, most of your UI criticisms were either inaccurate or fixed in updates before this video was published. With regards to the criticisms from game devs on Twitter, I don't think you sufficiently acknowledge how vitriolic some of those statements were. A lot of the tweets that were at the center of this discourse were completely unconstructive and dripping with condescension. I won't deny that the horde of reactionary gamer bros latched on to this and turned it into another culture war battleground, but the idea that this was just some impartial criticism does not match my interpretation of what happened. Apart from this I agree with everything else you said. Capitalism is at the center of all the worst trends in gaming, and moral crusades against inclusion and diversity in games are nothing but a distraction from the real problem. PS. I've been saying for years that the souls games being "hard" is a completely manufactured narrative, and that more people would try them out and enjoy them if it wasn't marketed as a "hardcore" franchise
Okay jeez what a goldmine of a channel I walked into this video expecting som bullshit and I'm a bit more than halfway through and I found myself really captivated by your arguments. You did a great job on this one
@@hedgehoginacanoe5838 he has not. he might have different opinions from me, but his argument is well structured and It's supported by evidence. He examined the actual arguments, provided rebuttals and conceded where it's appropriate. This is textbook video essay and if you don't see that you are just mad because you're clinging onto a wrong opinion. Grow up.
Many western games feature the same generic content, not due to a 'western culture' but because of capitalism pressuring game companies and producers to appeal to the lowest common denominator and take many simplified features from other games. Elden Ring, however, is the way it is not because of an 'eastern culture' but because of its creator, Hideo Myazaki, having a particular vision which many appreciate.
Dude! 19:10 You tapped into something deep in my subconscious with that bit about FF6. You're absolutely right in calling it opaque quest design. I played the first 6 Final Fantasy games, as well as some similar games like Earthbound, as a kid. So this approach to quest design never really bothered me. I loved your take on this issue. It felt like it came from an educated, sincere and respectful source. You have yourself another sub, good sir!
Cool thing is from soft is actually patching ui improvements in, like having an indicator that shows when you have enough seeds to upgrade or having a quit to desktop button
You earned my sub the second u said u bounced off BOTW ,the game sucks bland openworld and the same rewards over and over again no surprises, BOTW was one of my most regretted purchases
In the section of Elden Ring flaws you have mentioned some things that have either been fixed in newer patches (which proves you right because that was a problem!) Or are features present in the game that you might've missed. They added a marker for being able to upgrade your flask in later patches! Now when you look at your grace menu, you can see a little yellow mark that means you have enough golden seeds/tears to upgrade it. Next: the inventory can be sorted! Not only that, it's pretty clever how they did it. When you have a lot of stuff you don't need, you can just put them away in your storage, which makes equipment more convenient to navigate. Not only that, you can sort your inventory! If we're talking about equipment, you can sort them by Type, weight, attack rating and most importantly: Order of acquisition! The "Order of Acquisition" option is really cool, it wasn't present in previous fromsoft games. It allows you not only to see the items you have acquired recently (and even trace back an Item you have acquired a while ago!) You can also use the storage in the site of grace to put the items in whatever order you want them to be! Because when you take out the item in the storage, it counts as "acquired"! So you can just put them all in the storage and only take out those that you need, IN A SPECIFIC ORDER THAT YOU WANT! (You can tell I really really love this feature) What I am saying does NOT disprove your argument, though. All of that is not explained in the game, which is bad UI. You can only discover it by yourself, by accident or wiki. Which is not good in my opinion. Great fucking video man. Thank you for this.
As someone who grew up playing SNES and PS etc, I'd say it perhaps shaped many of us but at its core I think Horizon gets compared to Elden Ring because they released at the same time because to me its an apples and oranges comparison in many ways. It might also be worth mentioning with sales, Zero Dawn only just came to PC ad Elden Ring was a multiplat release, Forbidden West still has future sales waiting. I'll just throw this out there, I was drawn to Souls games for the difficulty. Fighting and learning a Souls boss reminds me of a single player MMO raid boss experience, most single player games aren't as challenging out of the box, and usually the higher difficulties aren't as fine tuned as a first run of a Souls game tends to be where you can plug 10 attempts into a boss and make only modest progress. I'd argue this is at least part of its mass appeal because, at least right now especially, you have a generation of adults who probably raided on an MMO in the past but doesn't have the time to keep pace with a current MMO to take on a similar challenge
The ui has been improved in 1.07 (or sooner even) you mentioned 40:00. there is a small seed icon next to the flask menu when a upgrade is available. Also the inventory does have filters. press left stick in the inventory menu and you have options to sort by stats, weapon type, and even order of acquisition amongst some others. to be fair this isn't mentioned anywhere.
21:17 I may quote Charles Pugh, professor of mathematics at UC Berkeley. In the preface of his book, Real Mathematical Analysis he says: “At the end of each chapter are a great many exercises. Intentionally, there is no solution manual. You should expect to be confused and frustrated when you first try to solve the harder problems. Frustration is a good thing. It will strengthen you and it is the natural mental state of most mathematicians most of the time. Join the club! When you do solve a hard problem yourself or with a group of your friends, you will treasure it far more than something you pick up off the web.” It’s obviously not a one-to-one case scenario, but as a mathematician I can relate the feeling of doing math to playing FromSoft games. The feeling of defeating Malenia after days of kicking my head against that wall is one I’ve felt after days of trying to solve a really hard problem. And when you overcome it you value it more than anything. The things that are worth it in life are the things that take you time and effort, and that inevitably leads to frustration, but when you overcome those challenges you feel at ease. I always say it to my students that I want them to cope with that frustration. That’s life! Of course, one has to learn how to manage it. Too much frustration is discouraging, but definitely removing it completely from the equation is not the way to go neither.
40:32 I'm assuming you either made this video before the patch or hadn't played the after the patch they did add a Icon to show you can upgrade your flasks Anyway, the UI is MOSTLY Fine, but the inventory needs better sorting options or something. A favorites tab for quick switching would be nice.
Yea, most of my playthrough was in June and July, and I hit max flasks before this change was made. Mea culpa on that one. And yea, agree on your second point. The UI is functional, but I think there's a lot of ways to make it more efficient and elegant.
Corporatism, not capitalism. If capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production, and the crontroll there of, then I would argue capitalism has created some of the best games in recent years. When developers are allowed to develop, and publishers just publish, we get great games. Corporatism, where a faceless company owns the rights to the IPs, that's where games get shitty as heck. But corporations aren't private companies, they are public companies. Which is the core of the issue. I know that's what people call "capitalism." I just want to point out that you can have a private ownership economy without corporations, and without Socialist ideas. I personally have started to no buy games made by the big corporations like EA, Ubisoft, Activision and so on. It's all predatory. Sure Bandai released Elden Ring, but they didn't dictate how Miyazaki should make his game. At least it doesn't seem so. They know he knows his art, and let him make it how he like. Sadly this corporate, top-down, style of production is so common across all entertainment today. Disney owning all the big franchises and basically churning out "content" instead of good works of fiction for instance. Yeah it's predatory, but it's not "capitalisms fault" it's corporatism. And I'll say it again: there's no finite resource in games development, we have infinite code and art we can make. The finite part is the person playing the game. Looking at the sheer number of bad games on Steam is proof that we can produce as much games as we want, but only a handfull will make it to the top. Sadly today that handful is corporate "content" and not actually fun games... for the most part.
Not how "resources" work. 300 years ago land was the big "resource." But technological development made it so now we can farm an order of magnitude more food then is nessaraly to survive on a fraction of the land. At the same time sometimes your land could be croupted by this kind of black sludge that was a real albatross on its value. Or as it's now known oil. Wealth doesn't come form resources. Wealth comes form the ability to combine the products in your environment in new and interesting ways. It's true that nothing can last forever, but it can last a lot longer then you think.
Tbh, I actually enjoyed the game more when these conventions weren't made. The problems you have or had with the game were limitations that I actually enjoyed. Oh, and there is a sort function in your video. Bottom of the menu it says L3 is the sort function. It is limited but it is there. Otherwise I understand your point...I just haven't seen anyone who makes the sexist and such complaints. If they exist, it seems it is in a circle that the algorithms target you with. Perhaps as a way to keep engagement up. Just a thing to ponder. (This all assuming I didn't misunderstand that point of the video.) ...and I won't argue the anti-cap stance you have...your choice. Outside of that, I actually see and agree with some of your standpoints. So good video.
Oh shit, you are/were an arenanet dev? GW2 is one of my favorite games, so seeing that name out of nowhere was kinda a shock LOL I know this is completely irrelevant to the actual video, but did anet treat you well? i've heard they're apparently fairly good to their devs, but i've never actually heard that from a first party source. Also sorta curious just what you did, if that's something you're willing to share. can't exactly say i'm particularly surprised to see someone like you worked on the guild wars series given their rather progressive nature LOL gw2 fangirling aside, as someone who's very "outside" this whole argument and wasn't even aware it existed until just now due to not really being in to games like elden ring, this was a really interesting watch. I'm personally not really the type of person who can just be set down into a world without any kind of quest log or general thing I can check back on to see what's up and what there is for me to do. I can be pretty forgetful, so being able to sort of "touch base" again and get a general rundown of what's needed of me when I find myself having just completely lost track of what i've gone somewhere to do can be a big help. Stuff like placeable waypoints/map markers are also great for helping with this. The whole thing about a game's success being directly tied to how well it's perceived "competitors" did is also so dumb, I absolutely agree. I've actually seen speculation regarding this with two series i'm personally very invested in that have two highly anticipated upcoming games, Sonic and Mario. ...I know, kinda showing how out of my field this video is LOL Anyways, i've seen a lot of people going on about how Mario Wonder is somehow going to completely outclass and "destroy" Sonic Superstars in every way, when in reality they're two very different games that people enjoy for different reasons. Mario's about tight platforming with extremely refined controls, while Sonic's about on your toes fast-paced decision making, and memorization of levels. Sure, they're both platformers, but both games are going for two very different things, and i'm expecting them both to be fun in their own unique ways.
I enjoyed my time at ArenaNet, even though I was part of the unannounced project that got cancelled as part of the 2019 layoffs. I can't go into much detail (NDA and such) but it was a cool place to work with a lot of awesome coworkers. I worked primarily as a tools engineer there, i.e. making the stuff that makes the game. And yea, absolutely agree that this constant pitting of two games against each other is really silly. Looking back, the console wars of yore were equally ridiculous. In the end, it's just another form of conspicuous consumption ("I have the best taste!"), which never makes anyone genuinely happy.
Man some people in the comments didn’t even make it past 10 minutes of the video. I only disagree with one thing regarding the whole capitalism thing because I just think its flawed and needs improvements because some snakes climbed the tree.
Nah, fuck movies. If I wanted to watch movies, I'll just go to the movies. Interactible movie shit is just plain bad when the stories get derivative and nothing new gets done. Games are a heavily regulated and censored medium rn anyway
I havent even finished the video yet and I already felt the need to sub, great stuff so far! I will definitely check out more of your content after I wrap up this one.
I'm sorry, but your criticisms of Elden Ring's UI/UX(as well as ones that these other western devs put forth) just come across as whining. I mean, you are actively being antagonistic towards the fans of Elden Ring and FromSoftware games as a whole before you even get the full criticism of the design element you dislike out of your mouth. I never once had an issue with the game "wasting my time" because it didn't give me a notification in the flask menu on whether or not I had enough golden seeds or a sacred tear to upgrade. Every time I collected one of the items for upgrades, I would go into the menu and try to do an upgrade. If I didn't have enough, I would just go back to exploring. It's really not that deep. If you are upset that the weapons menu is "unwieldy" because you collect literally every weapon in the game, I think that says something more about you as a player of said game and less about the game's UI. Your complaint about people grabbing loot from a trapped room in a rush and dismissing the UI notification of what the item is could easily be avoided if people weren't falling for obvious traps. FromSoft is many things, but they aren't the most subtle about when a room with loot is going to have a gank. Pretty much every complaint you and other western devs bring up about the game are the very same things that people like myself enjoy about the experience of playing FromSoft titles. If you don't like these things, fine. You don't necessarily have to. But when people like you say these things "suck" or are "bad design" when you should really be saying "I just dislike this", it does make you, as well as your criticisms, come across as less valuable to the dialogue or discourse about the game.
I'll only leave off with saying your criticism of the east vs west game design argument and why its idiotic is mostly correct. Leave out the ant-capitalist parts of the video and it'd be a must watch.
The issue is the language used. Yes what you suggest would improve the user experience, but that doesn't mean what they do do "sucks" or "is awful". It just means aspects could be better. Awful & Sucks are insulting terms, such that its no surprise that using those terms comes across as pejorative. "Kind of clunky", which you use later would be a lot better.
Some terrible & ignorant critiques concerning UI here (one reason many got so upset online - dumb, inaccurate statements should be torn apart): 1. Within the first few patches Golden Seeds menu included a golden icon letting players know they have enough for an upgrade. 2. From release there have been sorting options for all menus, including equipment & weapons. Furthermore, one option is sorting by newly acquired items. Good critique however is the idea of a log. If a person didn't play for a week, as a lot of working folks can't play games until the weekend, how can you recall vital details? Most people cannot; therefore, a simple log in-game tracking npc interactions & recording those conversations would go miles to improving the quest design.
I'm case you missed another comment, there is a sort function for the inventory and one of the options is by recency. Not as useful when you know what you're getting after 240hrs, but it's been there the whole time. (I missed it too)
The worst gaff of Elden Ring is the " Confirm you want to summon the horse, it will cost you a flask" overlay which is preselected to "no." This literally kills me every time I'm fighting a Dragon.
Yea, the resummon prompt is a real doozy. Luckily I knew about it from Twitter before I experienced it in game.
In hindsight it's kinda hilarious, a well meaning design choice that has some interesting results.
@@quinnmaillot3882at least Fromsoftware has crisp UI menu inputs. You can switch weapons mid parry in these games. Choosing yes or no shouldnt take that much longer than summonimg the horse. Im not even good at fighting games and i can manage.
Should there be zero consequence for getting your horse killed in a fight?
@@golmoshy hes not talking about the 1 flask cost to resummon, but the additional prompt you have to say yes to. that little bit of time can mean life or death when fighting a boss. it wouldve been better if it just automatically consumed 1 flask without asking.
It's a great video bud and agree with a lot, however you do miss a key point - this 'narrative' wasn't started by Elden Ring fans, no one was comparing the titles until a Horizon Forbidden West Dev indirectly made the comparison.
You also paint the tweets as vastly different than they were; they weren't helpful positive tweets, they were absolutely petty and rude. Saying FS devs were smoking at their desks? How the quests design 'doesn't exist' tweeted by a HFW developer - this was straight up pettiness.
But yeh I have never felt comfortable with the East vs West argument either - in reality it came down to this; a couple of Horizon Devs got salty and made some petty remarks. But that's it - no wider picture and I agree that it is a full dogma invented from a few tweets. But don't get it twisted - it was started by a Horizon Dev and it wasn't done 'because they cared' about Elden Ring being as successful as it could be.
Edit: Yo those Godskin Noble Roll dodges 🤝
I agree with this his video felt very one sided without necessarily exploring the counter arguments.
@@franciscor390 I had to stop watching.
The skewed arguments and blatant undermining of the problem makes it hard to watch this video.
I absolutely don’t believe the idea that nobody was comparing them until a developers talked
This is simply not true, elden ring fans and gaming fans in general act extremely obnoxious. ER compared it with GOW too in toxic ways and no dev was involved
Gow fans did the exact same thing too
Because gaming fans are often very immature when they like something
@anselmo pat it was just a bit of shade and gamer shittalk until HFW and ubisoft devs started posting.
It's like what happens when kids are fighting and parents suddenly decide to get in the mud, it makes everything worse.
As some who bought Elden Ring back in April solely for the hype, I’m about to share my experience with this gem. When I first got Elden Ring Ill be honest I had no idea what the fuck I was doing. Didn’t know I could upgrade my weapons smithing stones so I spent around 38 hours in Linegrave and all I’ve managed to acomplish is killing Margit. Felt extremely stipid and lost for only being stuck on the 2nd boss and slowly stopped playing… 6 months later and i watch a few videos and find out the reason I can’t beat godrick is because Im using a fucking base longsword. I download it back and beat godrick on 2nd try. Once I figured out how to properly make my character stronger (not just leveling him up) the game became 100x better and here I am abt to start NG+3 for my chaos ending with my duel wield ROB and MoonVeil. The game does not by any means spoonfeed you information so my advice for any new players is to PAY TF ATTENTION TO DIALOGUE, DETAILS AND LVL UP YOUR WEAPONS
Your experience is a bit What I felt in Dark Souls 3, my First SOuls games, When I first played it and went to other souls games I noticed some dialogues and items descriptions give you advices. In Elden Ring for example, Gideon Ofnir tells you that Radahn Soldiers use fire against Scarlet Rot and I went with a lot of fire itens into Caelid and I already knew Malenia is weak against fire. The HolyWater pot tells you that is effective against skeletons and their kindle. So Discovering informations and teste some of them is a real interesting and immersion experience to me.
Ahh I see you found Easy mode for Elden ring. Equip ROB 😂😂
EVERYONE's first Souls experience summed up.
@@Gakusangi But naw bro 38 hours in Linegrave at lvl 33 with a longsword. At a point I thought I was sped for not being able to progress which led to me gradually stop playing
@@Shayster-_- Guess you missed/forgot about that anvil in the church the merchant is in at the start, where it told you about upgrading weapons and gave you an item to upgrade your weapon with. It's not unusual for new players, most of the veteran Souls people remember when it was a HELL of a lot more complicated with a lot less explanation.
They changed the golden seeds thing so now, if you have enough seeds or sacred tears to upgrade your flasks, it has a little glowing dot next to it. Also, you can sort your inventory by recently picked up items or put stuff you don't want to carry around in storage.
Good callout. I guess I didn't see this because I hit max flasks/upgrades a few months ago before this was patched.
Now if they could just give a quest log and maybe an actual story they could make a complete game
@@johndodo2062 It does have a story and I'm glad it doesn't have a quest log. That's just how FromSoft's games are. Nobody is forcing you to play them. 😂
@@reizak8966 What are the main themes of Elden Ring and how does it develop them?
Yeah, noticed that the also added a red dot to the map where the meteor hits too and a pop-up message informing you that it's on the map in the first place. It was a big step before just having descriptions for things like Souls/Runes telling you exactly how much they give you before you pop them to find out.
My biggest problem with "western devs" criticizing Elden Ring, is that it was so rude and just outright unprofessional. There were quite a few that had actually reasonable arguments. Sure, saying that the UX is bad and why is one thing, saying it's so bad that fromsoft devs are smoking at their desks and using CRTs is just being an asshole. I didn't like the UX in horizon, I don't like my screen cluttered with stuff, I don't like progress bars telling me to finish X camps and collect X items. I rather have those things come up naturally. But if instead I say "horizon's UX is so bad I must imagine they test their games on braindead monkeys" I'm being rude, and if I'm a fellow dev, it's being unprofessional.
To be fair - one of the three devs (Rebecca Fernandez O'Shea) criticized the technical issues and not necessarily the game design. Her statement was quote "nor PC graphics, stability & performance, apparently" end quote.
And if we are honest the game had indeed a lot of technical issues in the beginning, the PC version in particular. Framedrops, frequent game crashes, lags, glitches, even corrupting save files - there where so many bugs and issues. At least the PC version was definetly not polished on release.
In my opinion her criticism was valid because it was not directed at the way the game was designed, the UI or the story telling but on the technical aspects.
The other two devs however criticized the UI and the game design itself. That's completely different from criticizing very real existing technical problems.
It’s admittedly been a while since I read the tweets in question, so forgive me if I’m mistaken, but didn’t her original tweet say something along the lines “I guess those things don’t matter”? I remember most of these tweets having an air or implication that Elden Ring didn’t deserve all the praise because of their criticisms. Please correct me if I’m wrong though.
@@dark_monarch0073 No I quoted her original post which was an answer to the first post of that other guy I can't remember the name of right now.
The whole debate blew up on one dev making a comment about the UI, then she answered with the technical stuff and then the third dev making his comment about quest design.
While the first and third posts are...debatable...her comment about the technical stuff was absolutely valid because the technical state of the PC version was not good at launch. I - and many other players - experienced massive framedrops (which shouldn't happen on the by far most powerfull hardware platform) and frequent game crashes. My game crashed at least once per hour. There where also lots and lots of glitches. The online mode also lost connection all the time.
It was not Cyberpunk on PS4 levels of disastrous but it was not too far off either; the optimization on PC was terrible. The game should have been delayed for two or three months at least on PC to fix the issues.
For the love of god man. UX MEANS USER EXPERIENCE NOT UI WHICH IS USER INTERFACE!
@@shadystan0242 Well the dev complained about both, UX and UI.
Yeah the OP mixed that up but since the dev in his Twitter post complained about both he's right nonetheless.
For your third point, I think it’s worth noting that From’s approach also caught the mainstream by surprise. It was hyped as a AAA title and people expected a AAA-level open world game, but they got a different one, and they realised hey this is pretty good too. Open world games have started to feel bland recently, and maybe to some, just the different style itself was refreshing. It helps that Elden Ring is an amazing game of course, but it also benefited from the genre’s apparent stagnation and saturation, especially in the AAA sphere. I think despite the drama, this has been good for the industry. Fans will have higher expectations and devs will have newer ideas.
At 40:40 you criticize the equipment menu for being too cumbersome and not having a sorting mechanism. But it does have a sorting mechanism, and the button for it is right there on the screen you're showing in the video. You can sort the equipment menu by type, attack power, weight, recent, and do it in either ascending or descending. And if there are items you want to keep but don't want to show up in your equipment screen, you can move them to your storage box at a site of grace. Then you complain that you can't tell what you picked up if you dismiss the item right away. But you can sort your inventory by most recent, and bam, there it is. So I can't help but think you're proving the point about these criticisms--that a lot of "problems" are that the player literally doesn't read the menu.
Good catch. I love the irony of him going on a one minute bit about how ER fans are deflecting valid criticism of the game, then going on to critique the game for lacking a feature that he was just too blind to see, and all the while showing a clip of that exact feature staring him right in the face for the entire section of that video. It really is pretty funny looking back.
I think it’s more so you that you can’t have your own custom order; as someone who uses swaps in PVP it gets annoying when I can’t just put things where I want them.
@@subashira I don't think that was what he was going at in the video, but that's valid nonetheless. Outside of pvp though there really aren't many things that can't be solved by just putting away all the things you don't need and sorting everything else. If we really want to talk criticism i wish they would've shipped an arena at launch this time instead of having to wait for dlcs. With the invasion/summoning changes and the gutting of covenants, there isn't really much diversity in the types of pvp compared to ds3. Fight club also got axed due to the summon limit so it would've been nice for from to throw a bone to pvpers who enjoy duels.
@@subashira I managed to sort "new" since if you put in the box and grab out the game treats the Item as "new" and allow for a customizable sorting order. But that doesn't mean it couldn't be implemented as "load out" or "builds" menu for example. It just isn't a core issue by any stretch of the imagination.
Exactly. It's disappointing.
You are so right about wanting to feel surprised when exploring. I found the siofra river completely by accident, I just wandered into it somehow, and I had been staying away from spoilers for the game so I go down this huge lift and I'm like "holy crap there's more???" I was astounded by the size of the world they'd built for us, and I started seeing little secrets in every corner of the map. Little surprises that they had to know not everyone would find, and they were okay with that. That first playthrough of elden ring was downright magical
That was a jaw-dropping moment for sure, *the* moment where I knew Elden Ring was going to be special.
Here’s the deal… Elden Ring gives me something that I need while struggling through it. Horizon also gives me something I need while I’m breezing through it and enjoying Aloys journey. They aren’t the same and cannot be compared to each other as if they are.
Exactly, different games and different styles. Homogenized content is how we got modern superhero movies.
Perhaps the general idea behind not having a quick item select system in Elden Ring is to make the player commit to a loadout before entering a boss room or firefight. So if they want to change loadout mid-battle, it's intentionally troublesome and tough to cheese the game.
I agree that difficulty isn't the MAIN draw of these games, but it is an important aspect of these games. Miyazaki said himself that he wants to give players opportunities to overcome difficult challenges and get that sense of achievement that comes with that, and something like an easy mode would undermine that. These games are made to be difficult for a good reason, and in a sea of games that are made to appeal and be easy for everyone, their design philosophy is hugely refreshing.
The irony is that so many Souls fanboys say that people using all the various tools the game provides to overcome hard bosses are "cheesing" or any amount of other ridiculous terms and that only people using melee only - preferrably on a level 1 no hit without using weapons or armor challenge run - are "real" gamers and everyone making use of the tools the devs spent a lot of time and energy on designing "doesn't play the game right".
At the same time these people are the same that frequently comment on videos, forums, twitter etc on how Elden Ring bosses are "too hard" and "unfun because they are too hard".
@@HH-hd7nd the irony here is your strawman honestly.
@@HH-hd7nd yeah like a minority of people say this. The only time I agree with them is how mimic tear will beat bosses for you.
@@HH-hd7nd huh? People who only do challenge runs are the ones who want souls games to be easy? You sure there's no contradiction?
@@soulfulcabbage7616 no, plenty of people support this idea, just to a different extent. Because it's true.
Killing bosses with magic or summons is way easier than normally because even by this point, 10 years since DS1, FS still cannot design bosses that don't fumble to range spam or aggro split. In Elden Ring at least they gave everything fast combos ans AoE attacks, but older games don't even have that.
So when someone finishes the game using both and expects validation, of course people would reply with something like "how is this impressive, you just cheesed the game".
I'll also add that, contrary to popular belief, Souls games are not about challenge, but self improvement through overcoming that challenge. And I think a lot of people understand that subconsciously. That's why those who demand respect despite achieving nothing will get rejection or even hate in Souls community.
nothing is wrong w response videos lol. it’s annoying when u start ur vid off with “i don’t normally do this” and do that exact thing. own it bro this is a good video
The reason I say that is to make sure folks don't get the idea that I'll be doing this regularly on this channel. And yea, no shade on response videos or similar content, it's just not my usual M.O.
The whole vid makes perfect sense except for the part where you assume western devs aren't jealous of Elden Ring's success. This discourse actually started because a bunch of western devs made cringe public statements about it. There's a YongYea video about it close to Elden Ring's release window. Can't fault a guy for not keeping up with a couple of whiney devs on Twitter though lol. Still gonna sub.
I saw most of the tweets in question, and the "jealousy" in question was mostly projected onto them. If you read most of the threads they were a part of, it's clear that several of these devs were being tongue-in-cheek with some of their comments.
@@InfernalRamblings that's a pretty huge assumption and generalization. One of them was a Ubisoft employee saying "Reviewers don't care about good quest design" and there was no indication that he was joking. I get the elitism with eastern gaming is annoying but your assumption that all western devs are as good at critical thinking as you is a bit of a leap.
Your essays are getting better and better my friend. I think you're going to hit your breakout point soon with this channel and I can't wait to see you get the attention you deserve. Excellent video!
Thanks again friend for your continued support of the channel. I gotta say "no u" because your constantly improving production values and storytelling ability (when you already had a strong start) are a huge inspiration.
I agree with most of the complaints you raised about the UI, the flask screen, item queue, and even though you didn’t mention it, having to confirm that you want to resummon torrent, however I disagree on your point about the NPC’s because most have a way for you to recall the information.
Take for example patches in liurnia of the lakes, where he tells you about Rya, where she is and that we should help her. Even once you heard the dialogue, he has an option that says “About what you said earlier…” I’m which case he will repeat the important thing from earlier. Plenty of NPC’s use this trick so that you can re ask them a question. Another example is Gideon Offnir who can repeat all of his relevant dialogue if prompted.
Another trick is the repeating dialogue, which is how when exhausted of dialogue options, the NPC will say the same line over and over again. That line is a unique line that recaps all the practical information the NPC said before. Going back to the example from earlier, Rya’s repeating line tells you that she needs her necklace, and the approximate location of the thief, so should you forget what is happening in her quest, she will happily regurgitate for you. When you encounter Alexander, he will always tell you on loop where he is going next, he will tell you he is going to Caelid at first, then in the wailing dunes that he will go to Gelmir, and from Gelmir to the forage, so if you miss the dialogue, just ask him again. Diallos will outline each of his goals on loop until his death, how he must find his servant, that he will get revenge, that he will win glory etc. telling you repeatedly what he is doing.
Sometimes the quest line can continue in an item description, the volcano manor quests all have accompanying letters that remind you too what you are doing in the quest at the moment Rogiers letter also tells you more on how to continue D’s quest line by giving information on his brother. These items are easy to find, as they are in the key items section every time.
Some NPC’s will also reintroduce themselves when you meet again after a while, Boc for example recaps his quest more then once in case you forgot. Millicent will also remind you in Altus about the things you have given her, reviving the potentially fuzzy memory of the player.
Also the devs listened to player feedback and added the NPC locations to the map, so you can easily go back and talk to them again.
The vast majority of the information that isn’t repeated is lore or characterization. For example Rogier will repeatedly tell you that you should find Ranni, but only say the lines establishing his motivations once, as it isn’t pertinent to the gameplay experience. That stuff is there to reward players who seek to understand the characters, and engage the dialogue instead of skipping it, but the NPC’s repeat relevant dialogue for those who might miss it.
Only a couple quest lines don’t have ways to actively follow them or catch up, namely Melina’s quest line, as she is hard to talk to and doesn’t repeat herself, and some characters are hard to find due to the order of the locations (which won’t necessarily be fixed by the UI). But overall I don’t think there is a need to a quest log, as what is currently there has built in ways to catch yourself up to speed, and not miss critical information.
41:50 - lol I know the game doesn't give a tutorial on it but - you CAN sort the inventory - for example by order of attainment. you CAN even use the chest to put away items and gear that you feel that you don't want to keep track of atm. you CAN customize it to your liking.
another thing - which to be fair was an update is that the flask upgrades now have a little glowing dot if you have enough materials to upgrade them.
and ofcourse - fromsoft games don't give you UI tutorials for the most part, maybe we should begin having game manuals again? anyone?
I don't agree with your UI complaints, first off, when a new player sees the options to increase flasks and increase their potency, if they select it, it tells them what they need to accomplish that, and then when you have enough to do either of those, there's an indicator, meaning after the first time, there's no reason to select either option if you don't have enough.
second, if you don't like having a massive page of weapons you don't use but want to keep frustrates you, put them in the chest, y'know, the thing the game gives you for specifically that purpose? also, there is a sort function which also leads to your next point, you can just sort by the order in which you aquired items, scroll to the bottom, and there it is, sure it's a little inconvenient, but I'd rather do that on a rare occasion than constantly have to look at a massive list of things I've collected every time I open the menu.
Slightly inconvenient, sure, I guess, maybe, if you squint a little. Bad? actually unhinged
Fantastic video, as always.
I particularly found the notion of bucking "industry standards" to be pretty interesting, as I've come upon several examples in recent years of features that frustrate me at first glance, but then ultimately make sense. It's an idea that I think I first picked up from a couple of Hbomberguy's videos, where he would point out these more frustrating parts of games and how they can encourage different styles of play.
I think one example that comes to the top of my mind, since I'm fresh off finishing God of War Ragnarok, was how GOW 2018 makes you play a significant portion of the game without fast travel. It feels especially frustrating when, as you travel the world, you pass by all these fast travel mystic gateways you can't really use except to return to the central teleportation hub of Midgard, pretty much. I cheered when I finally got through all the game I had to and Brok said "Oh by the way, we fixed up the gateways for you. They should work now." But later, I reflected and realized that all the time I'd spent going around on foot and boat to my objectives involved a lot of great characterization in dialogue between Kratos and Atreus, and that I likely would not have felt the emotional weight of certain later points of the game had I not had that literal bonding time with my character's son. You may argue in the standard game design "Games always have to be interactive" methodology that this lengthy dialogue could be an ultimately medium-betraying approach, and you could find some crumbs of truth in that path of argumentation, but I think for what this narrative approach was, locking out the majority of useful fast travel for a while actually worked wonders for the narrative. Immediately granting that to the player could have really crushed out a lot of the potential of the story.
Then don't tell it with a vidoe game.
Fromsoft did this exact thing with Dark Souls 1. You can’t fast travel for about half the game. Until then, you’re circling, traversing, and exploring the world for everything you can. Having less fast travel definitely helps with building an actual world in video games.
It is funny how the anti-woke game has LITERAL GOD being a nonbinary bisexual shapeshifter with confirmed sexual relationships with both male and females, one of the most powerful demigods is canonically gay, and both male and female players gain the title of Lord, and you can customize your character to be any gender and that that the clothes are non-gendered, so you can also be non-binary. But for some reason the conservative people believe that the game where you have to play as a woman is the woke one.
The UI does not suck
Thanks for the engagement.
One thing I've always had issues with is that UIs are judged solely on how it is shipped instead of its customization potential. I like how I can get rid of most interruptive features of a Ubisoft game for example.
1 year later and people are making the same “Western Game Devs HATE this company” videos about Baldur’s Gate 3
Awful UI? Hardly. Perfect? Nowhere close, but it puts the emphasis on those aspects of the UX that are critical for playing and enjoying. Learning to beat Mogh "wastes a heck of a lot more time" than inefficiently sorting my chest of weapons or getting caught by the "you don't have enough" message. The only really really bad UI/UX feature is the "A Stonesword Key Was Used" message that doesn't go away on its own AND prevents all of the other useful inputs you need at that moment. Getting ambushed and killed because you couldn't lock on or switch weapons due to a stupid message on the screen is the definition of infuriating and frustrating - even non game developer recognizes that is a stupid design that was worthy of a patch (how the heck has it not been fixed this far into the lifecycle when there have been hundreds of algorithm tweaks?). The nitpicks over UI/UX are largely BS resulting from our natural tendency to want to "bring down" greatness when it isn't our greatness... none of them are worthy of any of the clickbait texts or videos (which is true of almost all of the clickbait for ER, but sometimes you learn something really useful anyway).
Things I’d love to see in a update for elden ring is
-the ability to set specific armor for looks and set specific armor for stats
-X & Y coordinates for the map
-the ability to move while the map is up & use the map while near aggro enemies
-more marks to put on the map like a checkmark or X and better contrasting color marks that don’t blend into the map like the green ones
-some kind of horde mode or bloody palace mode
-a Evergeal at the round table to practice against Bosses you have killed or have killed you
I like the evergael idea, i wonder jow good it would be if you could do settings like you cant take dmg etc
I don't think you'd actually like these ideas after implementation.
-Armor barely does a thing in Elden ring. The only outliers are a few armors with specific high resistances or High Poise armors to eat through enemy attacks that exceed poise damage. you just wanna wear bull goats armor for 'armor' and something else for 'fashion souls'. Why would Fromsoft intentionally decrease the Value of all the other armors by doing so. There is a cost to wearing one armor. 'you' have to choose it.
-X & Y coordinates for the map. Can you give a reasonable application for having coordinates that cannot be solved through Map beacons and markers? a reasonable application that doesn't ruin the adventure for the sake of convenience?
-More markers are indeed reasonable and an understandable update
-horde mode or bloody palace: This is not a Style-Points based game or a MMO game with multiple modes to have those features. The best you can expect is the New update for the Arenas DLC.
-EverJails at the Roundtable: I know examples for this in other MMORPGs but the closest thing to this released in Fromsoft games are the Community Dungeons in Bloodborne. Bosses are generally not there to be at your beck and Call. It's an Experience that depicts a Narrative as per the souls formula, Different from your run of the mill MMORPG field bosses or something like we see in the Bless Franchise Boss farming. If you want to fight the boss again start a NG+ at the roundtable.
I know many of your suggestions would make it more convenient to you. But it would also bog down other aspects of the Game that are arguably its stronger points. But i get where you are coming from
yeah I like the last one
I want to practice parry on crucible knights and bell bearing hunters
I m not sure about the other points tho
@@megamicromanager2449 “I don’t think you’d like these” lol, you’re gonna tell me what will and will not like? That’s rich.
And as for a wave based survival mode, who said it needed to be style based. I could be more like doom where each arena awards you a new weapon
The X Y feature is something I want when looking up weapon locations. It will remove the spoiler part where all I need is just the location and no pictures or anything else to spoil how the adventure will go
It’s funny you say that having the bosses at my “beck and call” ruins the experience when almost every boss is encountered multi times.
@@Rocky-yw1zo just a simple mode similar to the void from dmc 5 will do
Is Horizon even an RPG tho? It's a named main character with a set backstory and personality, right? So where is the space to role play?
Like Elden Ring feels way more like a traditional TTRPG where you get to make your own character and then gets "dropped" into a fantasy world that you don't know much about until you start to explore and meet characters. Which you get to decide yourself what you want to do, you can chose to listen to the NPCs, do their quests or ignore them or even kill them. I mean you don't even have to become the Elden Lord, which is the whole end goal of the game, and instead you can find other ways to end it.
42:00 you can always write your own quest log IRL if you so wish.
For me I grew up playing old and new nintendo I played hard games that were technically limited but offered amazing gameplay and story and that's the same kind of philosophy Miyazaki creates his games with I don't want to feel like the devs are calling me an idiot when they put in easy stuff I like that Miyazaki respects our intelligence and says "there either smart and good at the game or they suck and they will play something else" he is mega GOAT
Most of These young gamers haven't played games from the 90s most haven't even played shadow of the colossus. That's why they think Elden Ring is Soo difficult. Everyone starts out getting shit on, Elden Ring is no harder than Super Metroid or many games from the old days.
@@kevinbaconwasntinfootloose1742 yeah its not even hard if you start the game as astrologer and can find sorceress sellen you can go through the entire game with just what you started with and like 1 spell from her
Just wanted to add that there is actually a pretty good sort function in the inventory. There's a prompt in the inventory shown for the button to do it. It's kind of odd to me how many people don't seem to use it or even know about it. It's not like it's hidden or anything. I guess they could have a little tutorial window pop up the first time you open the inventory to mention it or something I suppose.
I dont find the UI particularly egregious in Elden Ring or any of the souls games. Is it less useful in some situations? Of course. More information is probably easier to deal with. The reason I like this form of UI is I don't need all that other information while Im in the middle of an immersive moment. But, I also find Everquest to be the superior MMORPG so maybe its just the conditioning Ive been subjected to in my gaming journey that makes a minimal UI more attractive to me.
You can sort the inventory
Yeah, no, I took those dev complaints as extremely scummy. They reeked of envy, but to be fair, it's hard to gauge the actual intent of a written tweet.
But you can't tell that either, can you? So saying that they weren't scummy to counter someone who says they were scummy does not disprove one way or the other. Even if they were right, it does not excuse scummy behavior or indicate otherwise.
Now, I'd like to argue that ER UX is better than HZD. This isn't factual. It's really just subjective preference. It's okay to have the opinionated preference, but pretending that one is factually better than the other is just some entitled bullsh*t that I've seen in many Western devs.
Personal opinion, and why I prefer the Eastern market is point 5. The East is free from the Western dogma. That's not to say Western games are bad (although I hate them), but it is extraordinarily boring that every AAA Western game follows the same rules.
Now I know this isn't every Western dev, I know a lot of good indie devs. But it's the majority of the AAA industry. For some reason, I've only seen this behavior from the West, which is why people associate it with the West, even though this issue is NOT inherently Western.
So in short, I agree that this isn't a West vs East issue. But I disagree that this fiasco wasn't telling of a flawed stale mentality of the Western AAA industry.
"Elden Ring and Forbidden West are so different, you can't compare them"
*proceeds to compare them*
I didn’t get this impression. Seemed more like saying they are apples and oranges not red apples and green apples, then going on to compare them as fruit
Totally agree on the "It's not a difficult game"
In fact that narrative was what held me back from playing Dark Souls until Dark Souls 3.
Challenging and difficult isn't the same thing.
But, the challenge is core to the game. Much like a Mega Man game of old.
Masahiro Sakurai: ''Fun is always the priority''
Neil Druckman: ''We dont like to use the word fun''
Karl Marx was a mistake
As someone who has actually read Marx. This comment makes no sense.
WTF are you talking about? You're having a conversation with yourself, either explain what role Karl Marx played in TLOU2's game design or shut up.
Glad to have discovered your channel. The problem is that there are lots of gamers that are teenagers or are just immature, so flaming controversy is just an incredible pastime for them, more than playing games
I would suggest that you start a new game of Elden Ring and look through the bonfire menus. They added a glowy circle next to the flask upgrades.
I think the inventory thing is done on purpose, a minor punishment for players hoarding every item despite not have any intention to use the clutter. You want infinite pocket space? There is a price.
@@kreadapelu8813 Also, there *is* a sort function in the inventory, though many people don't seem to use it for whatever reason.
@@itsaUSBline there are also a few people who do not know there is lore to be read on items.
I was totally fine, as a first time souls player, who started on elden ring, having to figure out how to upgrade flasks, weapons, summons all by myself. I LIKED the No hand holding. I felt that figuring out those mechanics was just as gratifying as figuring out how to move along a quest I had done dozens of hours before. I want as little told or shown to me as possible because the game is so great, every little discovery has meaning, even the menus
Dialing back to the "LOL Salty UX western developer's cry on twitter" videos that were being milked out by every channel tangentially related to souls.
You know Fromsoftware collaborated with activision on Sekiro SPECIFICALLY because they ADMITTED because their UI and UX is weak, Miyazaki himself brought on activision because he wanted to learn to make more friendly tutorials and control interfaces, I love these games, but they are critically FLAWED in alot of aspects in ways thay would not "ruin the experience" to fix, it is not sacriligious to criticize the games for not conforming to basic quality of life features.
Funny how he would take notes from Activision which makes the worst UIs I've ever seen in anywhere. The UI/UX of Call of Duty MWII is absolute dogshit for example. I would take Elden Rings UI any day. MWII's UI is painful to use.
@@Pyovali They make alot of iffy decisions from time to time, if I had to guess they(activision) were probably the only ones who were willing to help while relinquishing full creative control over to Miyazaki and FromSoftware(which shockingly Activision did accept those terms)
You don't understand what "Wokeness" is. A game becomes "woke" when the company changes or removes other characters, group of characters, plot, lore, or internal logic of the game in the name of "inclusion", "diversity", "social justice" or whatever buzzword liberals like.
For example: A game where the protagonist is a woman is not woke per se. A game where the protagonist is a female character that is basically a Mary Sue that talks down to men and is entitled to everything in a story where all men are either dumb, assholes or dumb assholes is a "woke" game.
A game that prouds itself in attention to detail and realism but breaks said realism and inner logic in order to add "diversity" is a "woke" game.
A game that replaces a character for other with little or no explanation or respect for the original, in the name of "inclusion" is a "woke" game.
A game/character that is racist against white people or sexist against men is woke.
Obviously there are more examples and some games (or pieces of media) are more woke than others.
Is not only about the "what" but also the "how" and "why"
Western design: We must make sure the customer sees everything we designed and find ways for them to.
Japanese design: good luck!
Y’all really some weebs for anything Japanese lol
Its nothing to do with them being Japanese. Its down to the Fromsoft, not Japanese, design ethos.
I'm not sure how your video got recommended to me, but I'm really glad! Your perspective helps you see these events in a different light.
I also can't believe how I've been more and more critical about corporations, culture dogmas, our current system, etc and failed to look/look back at this in a more critical way, so I'm definitely checking more of your content, as I hope others will, too!
This kind of view/analysis on gaming stuff should be very interesting!
(and probably a bit introspective/reflective to someone like me, who perceived things very differently, and very narrowly, before)
The difference between Japanese and western games is that westerners go realism over function, whereas Japanese like to keep their games more on fantasy and function. I think that Red Dead Redemption 2 is a good example of a game the Japanese devs wouldn't make . Or if they did, It would feel a lot more "cartoony" like Read Dead Revolver is. Some argue that RDR2 pushes the realism aspect way too much (everything has a slow animation and there's an input lag when aiming due to it). One of my personal complaints about western games is not so much about the gameplay or the ui or not even the stories necessarily, but how ugly characters have become - one thing also that comes from wanting to keep with realism. I actively dislike mo-capped faces, it's the most boring and lazy thing you can make, when video games allow every kind of designs to be created and applied. And now realistic body types is one thing that is brought to games, they made Aloy chunkier due to it for instance. It's a fantasy so why make your characters uglier? I don't understand.
Because WOKEEEE AND FEMINISMMMMMM
i dont know which western game you play because 99.99% of western devs dont make rdr2. It will forever remain a novelty.
in fact, AAA western devs have went increasingly gamey. Pop ups everywhere, an ui elements for every little thing, npcs sucking your dick the moment you walk in their los. Stop the game in its track every couple mins to take you to a tutorial room. A god of war, a master witcher, a trained spartan that need to level up to deal damage to a bogman...
@@mdd4296 Well they're game mechanics so you can't really get rid of them if you still wanna make a video game. I feel like people are overdesigning their games
"Video games allow every type of design to be created and applied." And then you proceed to complain about characters not being conventionally attractive. Which is it?
Bruh this video tackled all the arguments on the internet right now surrounding the gaming industry and Eldon ring in general. Phenomenal job bro. You sir earned a subscriber!
Thanks!
If I were the work on some things about Elden Rings game design, it would be only a few things.
1) Camera is ass in confined spaces. It feels less of a problem than in many other souls games since wide open spaces are much more common in Elden Ring. But the issues can still arrise in dungeons.
2) Some character questlines are easily missable. I missed out on half of Alexanders quest on my first playthrough because I had no idea he moved to the middle of a lava lake in Mt Gelmir that I had already been to. And due to quest timing he missed the Liurnia stage. I also had to look up where to go after giving Ranni the fingerslayer blade because I didnt think to ask Iji.
3) I dont think having to navigate a Yes / No menu to consume a crimson flask to resummon Torrent after he gets KO'd is convenient in a fight.
I never played Forbidden West, but I did play Zero Dawn. I think it's worth comparing Horizon to Elden Ring where it matters: How the open world is constructed/presented.
There's few games I have played where the world immerses me as much as Elden Ring does, and I have played a lot of open world games, I quite like them.
My issue with the "Ubisoft formula" is that it's not really about using the games mechanics to explore the game, as much as it's about moving from set piece to set piece collecting things off the map.
Technically you do that in Elden Ring too, but in Elden Ring it's you the player who's tasked with figuring it out. Just today I opened my map in Altus, looked at the details and placed map markers on places I thought might be hiding something worth while.
I think it's actually more worth it to compare Elden Ring to Breath of the Wild though. They are more similar in how they approach the open world. Here too I'm more drawn into Elden Ring. Breath ended up being very repetitive to me, where as Elden Ring feels rewarding to explore. (It might also be that Breath feels 0% like a Zelda game to me, which was a huge let down... I mean you need to find all the damn shrines in order to get the propper Hero of Hyrule outfit? Give me a break.)
When I play open world games I love going off the main story path, to grab all the loot and secrets. Elden Ring was made to do that, which is why it resonates with me.
On top of that the gameplay never really feels like it get's stale, something I often feel in other similar games. It's probably because there's so many builds and playstyles.
So yes, there's aspects of Elden Ring that's unique to it, which enhances the open world. At the same time, many open word games are just open for the sake of being open, and could have benefitted from being a more closed experience like Dark Souls.
The animation of "details and nuance" getting steamrolled was sublime.
What I have noticed about the AAA formula over years of playing games is how much agency it takes out of the players hands and replace it with quest markers and "helpful dialog."
It used to be that you got a quest, and had to read it in the quest log in order to know where to go and what to do. The log might explain what land marks to look out for in the game world, and off you went.
Heck. I remember how revolutionary the quest log was for Morrowind. Oh, you didn't know Morrowind didn't have a quest log? All you had was a diary, which was chronologically written at first. It wasn't until the expansion that you could organize the diary into a quest log.
And that's sort of what I have seen in videogames, over time what made sense in one game got copied over to other games as "must have" features. By all means I don't mind quest markers, but sometimes It adds to the feeling of having to go out into the world and find what you are looking for.
Some games have taken it so far that it's almost impossible to find what you are looking for without all the in game aids.
A good open world shouldn't need to tell you what to look for and where, but rather have you want to go look for it. Using good visual clues within the game world to tell the players "hey, this place looks interesting, doesn't it? Why not go over there?"
And people seem to forget that Konami was(is?) a Japanese game publisher who tried to turn Metal Gear into a soulless money making machine, and after that failed they turned their IPs into Pachinko machines.
The golden seed/ sacred tear UI thing was annoying . . . but they fixed it. There's an indicator that shows when you can upgrade your flasks now. They put merchants and other NPCs on the map too among other UI improvements. Open world was new waters for them and this is why discourse about flaws is important. FS devs clearly looked at feedback and listened, and they rebalanced a lot of weapons and abilities that players find annoyed too. They also improved the multiplayer massively and made it more accessible based on what players (and presumably devs like you) had to say. They made a good game and they kept honing it and its dope.
Every point you made is fair. Criticism is a good thing, and no, all "Western game developers" shouldn't be lumped together and seen as people who are "jealous" and are just s***ing on Elden Ring every time they have criticism. Devs make games for a living most likely . . . well because they love games? Elden Ring (while not perfect) is a super awesome game so I'm sure there are countless devs who enjoyed the game as much as you. I had my criticisms too and still do. Despite updates, the game still isn't perfect. No game I've ever played is perfect and there is always room for criticism.
There were absolutely A HANDFUL of devs on Twitter who were going about their criticism of Elden Ring in a way that came across as bitter and nasty, but yeah, I think the "WESTERN GAME DEVEOPERS HATE ELDEN RING" thing is generally click baity trash. "Western" and "Eastern" aren't two genres of games. Elden Rings and Souls drew a lot of inspiration from Western games (Demons' Souls and DS1 in particular specifically targeted Western audiences) just as countless, countless Western developers have drawn inspiration from Eastern games. "East vs West" is generally an overly generalizing conversation rooted in misconceptions.
Epic vid, dude. Sorry for the essay.
ER was a culmination of fromsoft and an amalgamation of open world rpg inspired by western and eastern titles, also a dev of a studios doesn't stand for the entire studio or itself as what their respected studios stated. i totally agree w/ this.
I'll also split this other thought I had into its own comment:
the way I had read some of those original tweets criticizing the UI/UX of Elden Ring... As someone who works in that discipline myself in the industry, I could perhaps sympathize with a little frustration seeing a game that succeeds so brilliantly having put very little effort into some of those systems by contrast. When you consider a traditional western open world game design with transparent quests and a full quest log + compass system complete with separate portions of the UI concerning quests available/in progress/completed + reward displays, pathfinding breadcrumb systems to ease players' navigation through tricky spaces and terrain, and the effort of putting all that together and squashing all the bugs... I could definitely understand if there was at least a little bit of jealousy going on. FWIW, I think I'm above the 300 hour mark on Elden Ring myself and I have no qualms saying I love the game and it deserves all of its success; I just wanted to offer a minor counterpoint.
This is a good point. I also get a sense that some of the frustration behind these critiques was also just thinking about how Elden Ring could be considerably better with a UI/UX pass on the stuff it already has.
Excellent video breaking down common arguments both for and against one of my favorites games from one of my favorite series.
40:35 This has actually been changed months ago. Now the game shows you when you can upgrade (which serves the exact same purpose as your suggestion).
42:05 That does exist (sort of): You can sort the items by "last aquired".
I started playing video games in an era where the Internet didn't even exist. It was common to have pen and paper at hand to map out dungeons while playing The Bard's Tale or Ultima IV (which is an Open World game btw) or Pool of Radiance. Eye of the Beholder or Dungeon Master more or less required the player to map the levels on paper - that was part of the fun (unthinkable to modern day players I assume).
Games like Gothic I and II where great while having terrible inventory management - and no maps; if you wanted to have a map showing the island in Gothic 2 you had to find one or buy it from the cartographer in Khorinis.
I don't really get all that arguing about things like UI - if it serves its purpose and isn't making gameplay nigh impossible I don't care.
If there is one thing I'd like to see added to Elden Ring it is something like an Adventurer's Journal where all the information I discovered can be found in a more organized fashion without the need to click through hundreds of items (or not finding the information at all because it was mentioned in a conversation with an NPC). If people don't like the idea of even such a basic quality of life feature it could be implemented as optional with the option of turning it off when starting a new game.
Absolutely agree on the journal bit - most people who've made such comments would've liked a Morrowind-style journal, pretty sure.
The UI "discourse" is pathetic to the fullest and smells of vitrolic envy. They see an amazing product and begin nitpicking on the color of the car's coating. It's what you do when you HAVE to find flaws in something, to a desperate level.
I'm not going to defend the people who are just racists, or sexists, or whatever, but thinking that the only people who are tired of Western gaming philosophy are like that is too much of a strawman for me to ignore, and it ignores the problem that these people are using as an in instead of attacking it at the source.
Infernal, people are not, IN GENERAL, sick of Western game design because it involves a diversity quota, or anything like that. They're sick of it, because it's all following the same formula, either for the company that makes it, or by at large the Western gaming industry itself. I kinda want to point out how most of your Platinum'd titles are indies or, yes, indeed, games with Japanese design sensibilities, or whatever the hell Yoko Taro counts as because I don't think anyone designs games like him. I'm saying your distaste of open worlds, of nailing why Elden Ring's open world is compelling where others bored you (finding an unexpected treasure compared to another 1 out of a 1000 poonannies!) is something that a lot of people share, and I think you miscategorize them horribly by assuming that. I was with you up until that point. I _subscribed_ up to that point, but no, IMO your mistake was acknowledging them, let alone letting them be your conclusionary boogiemen. These people got in BECAUSE people like you let them drown out the people with legit complaints. The people who are tired of getting nickel-and-dimed for less, let alone things standard in games 10-20 years ago, the people who are tired of Western games releasing more and more unfinished, the people who are tired of feeling like they're just getting a yearly installment pushed out to make them pay another $60 dollars, and that's ignoring the utterly horrible things we've seen get pushed and normalized. Lootboxes, macrotransactions called microtransactions, "live services" meaning games that aren't worth playing for possibly entire years. And let's be honest, yes, as others said, some of these devs who worked on Horizon and whatnot genuinely think they did a better job than Elden Ring and it's getting "undue" credit. Arrogance on their behalf that doesn't help anyone.
Those people you mentioned are beyond terrible because they've intentionally muddled the waters, made it be about them and not about wanting a healthier gaming industry in general. There's a reason I've not been excited for a new game until Phantom Fury, or why most the games I enjoy nowadays are indies or even god-forsaken Gacha games.
Not a truer comment was posted in here.
They did update the game so that it would alert you, when resting, at a sight of sight of grace. When you could update your flasks
But really, this is fantastic. The line from Microsoft to games-as-utility-software seems obvious in hindsight, and you went into the limitations of that approach very effectively. I like how you take your industry experience and combine it with your artistic sensibilities. Really cool stuff!
What was your favorite ER build?
Thanks so much!
Re: build... I did a lot of variant Faith builds which was great because I didn't need to respec. Faith is just busted overall with the both how it's both powerful and versatile. In particular I found the red lightning build to be just a lot of fun (and also OP as heck). The Dragon King's Cragblade and the Bolt of Gransax have some of the coolest weapon skills in the game... and maybe they've nerfed them since I was rocking it because they were just silly powerful.
I also had a lot of fun as an undead hunter with the Golden Epitaph and the Sacred Blade Ash of War, even though narratively I find what my character was doing as a Golden Order zealot to be really reprehensible. FromSoft is way too good at fostering such dissonance. I still haven't figured out which ending I "align" with... maybe the DLC will fix that?
@@InfernalRamblings Yeah, faith is great in this game. I loved my fth/str guy--named Greater William, played him as a useful idiot to the Golden Order, and gave him a crisis of faith for ng+. There are still so many incantations I've barely used, though. Red lightning seems cool as hell, but i mostly relied on the basics.
Greater William... that's fantastic. :D
I don't really agree that the developers critique was constructive. Which is why I think people latched on to it.
"UX is so bad that I can only imagine FromSofts devs smoking at their desks and using CRT monitors"
"UI/UX is fine as long as the game makes up for it"
"Not being able to do basic shit without seeing 5.000.000 you don't care about is good because agency"
"I genuinely haven't found anything good about the UI/UX"
The only one I think I could accept as constructive is "Very overly complicated menus to tell you the exact stats you have before everthing two shots you"
And, we have to remember, Elden Ring to day and Elden Ring at launch was somewhat different. There were changes made to the UI between then and now. All of which are UX enhancements. The NPC markers, the yellow dot on features in the Grace menu that's available etc.
But complaining that there's a lot of information on screen? Calling it useless? There's very little info in the game I would call useless.
So yes, the game has flaws. But, I'm not sure the tweets in question are really pointing them out well.
I know this video is looking at the game devs side of things, but the game journalists did jump on this bandwagon though. Which I think are the ones who rocked the boat too much honestly. They did have "suggestions" which in many ways fly in the face of the philosophy of the game, something I think game journalists should be able to tell...
You made a whole *raft* of good points. Let nobody take those away from you. As someone who will gleefully get into an hours long debate over the merits and demerits of Elden Ring,especially compared to other games,I happily admit to Elden Ring's many flaws; True combos. How certain unarmoured enemies,like Pages,can completely ignore arming swords and thrusting swords,while armoured enemies get stagger juggled like Devil May Cry mooks,thus violating the logic of armour = stability that was established throughout the rest of the game. And how Elden Ring's got nothing to help people with disabilities,like colourblindness correction settings or enlarged,clear subtitles for the dyslexic. But despite all of that,I love the game to bits,though I've never believed the "East vs. West" nonsense that people were pushing regarding Elden Ring. I just think that Elden Ring got a huge amount of positive press because it's a different animal,at least on the player-facing level,compared to just about everything else. It's a contrast,compared to Horizon or God of War,which themselves are extremely similar to the majority of the rest of the AAA action/RPG/open-world theatres. It's a breath of fresh air for many,not to mention that Elden Ring was a huge newbie boom for the franchise,which only amplified that,I believe.
It was different and novel,in a space where novelty is king. Even though,for franchise veterans,it was more like a culmination of all of FromSoft's games since Demon's Souls. Elden Ring stood out for no other reason than because it refused to do otherwise. For good or ill.
You don't have to go back as far as D&D to see western influence on japanese game design. Elden ring was influenced by breath of the wild which in turn was influenced by Skyrim. Now that I think about I believe 12 years ago the conversation was how japanese rpg's were stuck in the past and western rpg's like skyrim were the future
For the reward being random and you may find things that you don't or ever use. I nevermind that in the game. For me when the game is good to explore it is fun to get the reward at the end even though it is not useful. It is the road to get to the reward that is the most important. And with that knowledge, my subsequence playthrough will be improved as I remember this place has the item that I want to pickup for this character, that place is not needed. Using my own experience for future playthrough in exploration is a very good feeling beside just experience from fighting. It makes me feel that I am getting better at the game and become more efficient. It is like they put every reward in each box at an event, you don't know what you will get but you can always get as many you want to know what is in each of the boxes. They also don't forbid you to comeback in the next event and they don't change the box content either. So the next time you come by you know exactly what box you need to get instead of them telling you.
41:39 I think they can fix it just by making the item you recently pick at the top of the tab with some sort of highlight to indicate. Then after you look through them the highlight is gone and the next time you open the inventory again it will be in where it is sorted. There is actually a sort function in the inventory to sorting them by weight, category and stuff but not very useful however. Most people ignore them ever since DS1 and just dump every item into the stash.
Also if you're a nerd for the lore like me, no matter what the item is, so long as it's something new, that means you're rewarded with a new little lore tidbit to read. I know not everyone is all that interested in that aspect, but I get excited when I find a new thing just because it means I get another little paragraph to read.
I kind feel western companies had more interest on creating add on than develop their products. Sell. Sell. Programmers works for them so they kind did a commissions work.
Completely agree about the UI being shit. Honestly find it a little lazy that it's essentially a reskinned dark souls menu. It wasn't good then and it isn't good now.
The fact that HFW is being bundle in with PS5's is, in my opinion, evidence that it is not as successful as desired. PS5's are still on short supply, so people are going to be buying them even if they cost $50 more just to get a PS5. If they would buy it anyway, then you wouldn't have to bundle it in with the system. However, I do think it's stupid to compare Elden Ring's total sales to HFW's sales, a more reasonable comparison would be Elden Ring's PS4/PS5 sales to Elden Ring's PS4/PS5 sales.
Anyway, I bought both HFW and Elden Ring on day one, but I haven't been able to bring myself to play any "open world" game since playing Elden Ring (I did play Dark Souls 2 (for the first time) and Dark Souls 3 a few more times since playing it. For me, Elden Ring was a mixture of Breath of the Wild and Dark Souls 3, so it was basically as if it was designed just for me. I really like Horizon Zero Dawn, but I loved it for the world and the story, no the gameplay so much. I liked HFW for the same reason, but it's hard to go back to the gameplay as it feels very clunky and restricted compared to Elden Ring.
Also, I'm old, so I think FF6 was the last truly great Final Fantasy, although it was called Final Fantasy 3 when I played it and I still think Final Fantasy 2 is the best Final Fantasy.
While it surprises me that someone with your taste enjoyed Elden ring so thoroughly as to platinum it, let me say, your good taste shows through in the music. Xenogears to open, Nier (not Automata), A Jazzy cover of Chrono Cross, FF VI, etc. All wonderful music that says a lot about the games you've played and what left an impact on you.
I think the main difference between the success of Elden Ring and Horizon Zero Dawn is that Fromsoft keept evolving it's formula, while EA merely keeps adding to it since Assasins Creed pretty much.
??? HZD is Guerilla, and Assassins Creed is Ubisoft. Yeah, HZD has some problems with not trusting its players, but EA has nothing to do with it. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go tell Aloy to shut up and stop telling me how to solve this mind numbingly easy "puzzle" just because I stopped to write this comment.
@@laylaalder2251 Whoah, I guess tripple A developers have been copying each other so long that I stopped distinguishing them and I was to lazy too check who made what LOL. OR it was some developer from EA or Ubisoft that started complaining why Elden Ring was so successful
thanks for making this video. I've seen this narrative brought up a bunch of times and it's always seemed silly to me. a couple of people tweeting about ui design or whatever is not "western game devs raging" about Elden Ring. glad someone is finally responding to it, because it felt like nobody was going to.
"As someone who is not a fan of capitalism" okay buddy you got me subscribed
They need to fire whoever's responsible for somehow releasing horizon right next to both BOTW AND Elden Ring
About "opaque quests", sadly many quests in ER are a little too opaque and tell too little imo, even compared to DS3.
I agree with your thesis and the broad strokes of your argument, but the sections covering the UI flaws and criticism from game devs really spoil what could have been a great video essay.
Like others have commented already, most of your UI criticisms were either inaccurate or fixed in updates before this video was published.
With regards to the criticisms from game devs on Twitter, I don't think you sufficiently acknowledge how vitriolic some of those statements were. A lot of the tweets that were at the center of this discourse were completely unconstructive and dripping with condescension. I won't deny that the horde of reactionary gamer bros latched on to this and turned it into another culture war battleground, but the idea that this was just some impartial criticism does not match my interpretation of what happened.
Apart from this I agree with everything else you said. Capitalism is at the center of all the worst trends in gaming, and moral crusades against inclusion and diversity in games are nothing but a distraction from the real problem.
PS. I've been saying for years that the souls games being "hard" is a completely manufactured narrative, and that more people would try them out and enjoy them if it wasn't marketed as a "hardcore" franchise
Okay jeez what a goldmine of a channel I walked into this video expecting som bullshit and I'm a bit more than halfway through and I found myself really captivated by your arguments. You did a great job on this one
@@hedgehoginacanoe5838 he has not. he might have different opinions from me, but his argument is well structured and It's supported by evidence. He examined the actual arguments, provided rebuttals and conceded where it's appropriate. This is textbook video essay and if you don't see that you are just mad because you're clinging onto a wrong opinion. Grow up.
Many western games feature the same generic content, not due to a 'western culture' but because of capitalism pressuring game companies and producers to appeal to the lowest common denominator and take many simplified features from other games.
Elden Ring, however, is the way it is not because of an 'eastern culture' but because of its creator, Hideo Myazaki, having a particular vision which many appreciate.
Dude! 19:10 You tapped into something deep in my subconscious with that bit about FF6. You're absolutely right in calling it opaque quest design. I played the first 6 Final Fantasy games, as well as some similar games like Earthbound, as a kid. So this approach to quest design never really bothered me.
I loved your take on this issue. It felt like it came from an educated, sincere and respectful source. You have yourself another sub, good sir!
Cool thing is from soft is actually patching ui improvements in, like having an indicator that shows when you have enough seeds to upgrade or having a quit to desktop button
This video is so high quality that I originally thought you had 650k subscribers rather than 650
You earned my sub the second u said u bounced off BOTW ,the game sucks bland openworld and the same rewards over and over again no surprises, BOTW was one of my most regretted purchases
In the section of Elden Ring flaws you have mentioned some things that have either been fixed in newer patches (which proves you right because that was a problem!) Or are features present in the game that you might've missed.
They added a marker for being able to upgrade your flask in later patches! Now when you look at your grace menu, you can see a little yellow mark that means you have enough golden seeds/tears to upgrade it.
Next: the inventory can be sorted! Not only that, it's pretty clever how they did it. When you have a lot of stuff you don't need, you can just put them away in your storage, which makes equipment more convenient to navigate. Not only that, you can sort your inventory!
If we're talking about equipment, you can sort them by Type, weight, attack rating and most importantly: Order of acquisition!
The "Order of Acquisition" option is really cool, it wasn't present in previous fromsoft games. It allows you not only to see the items you have acquired recently (and even trace back an Item you have acquired a while ago!) You can also use the storage in the site of grace to put the items in whatever order you want them to be! Because when you take out the item in the storage, it counts as "acquired"!
So you can just put them all in the storage and only take out those that you need, IN A SPECIFIC ORDER THAT YOU WANT! (You can tell I really really love this feature)
What I am saying does NOT disprove your argument, though. All of that is not explained in the game, which is bad UI. You can only discover it by yourself, by accident or wiki. Which is not good in my opinion. Great fucking video man. Thank you for this.
As someone who grew up playing SNES and PS etc, I'd say it perhaps shaped many of us but at its core I think Horizon gets compared to Elden Ring because they released at the same time because to me its an apples and oranges comparison in many ways. It might also be worth mentioning with sales, Zero Dawn only just came to PC ad Elden Ring was a multiplat release, Forbidden West still has future sales waiting. I'll just throw this out there, I was drawn to Souls games for the difficulty. Fighting and learning a Souls boss reminds me of a single player MMO raid boss experience, most single player games aren't as challenging out of the box, and usually the higher difficulties aren't as fine tuned as a first run of a Souls game tends to be where you can plug 10 attempts into a boss and make only modest progress. I'd argue this is at least part of its mass appeal because, at least right now especially, you have a generation of adults who probably raided on an MMO in the past but doesn't have the time to keep pace with a current MMO to take on a similar challenge
The ui has been improved in 1.07 (or sooner even) you mentioned 40:00. there is a small seed icon next to the flask menu when a upgrade is available. Also the inventory does have filters. press left stick in the inventory menu and you have options to sort by stats, weapon type, and even order of acquisition amongst some others. to be fair this isn't mentioned anywhere.
Except it’s literally in the button guide on the bottom of the screen. Like if he’d paid any amount of attention he would have seen it.
21:17 I may quote Charles Pugh, professor of mathematics at UC Berkeley. In the preface of his book, Real Mathematical Analysis he says:
“At the end of each chapter are a great many exercises. Intentionally, there is no solution manual. You should expect to be confused and frustrated when you first try to solve the harder problems. Frustration is a good thing. It will strengthen you and it is the natural mental state of most mathematicians most of the time. Join the club! When you do solve a hard problem yourself or with a group of your friends, you will treasure it far more than something you pick up off the web.”
It’s obviously not a one-to-one case scenario, but as a mathematician I can relate the feeling of doing math to playing FromSoft games. The feeling of defeating Malenia after days of kicking my head against that wall is one I’ve felt after days of trying to solve a really hard problem. And when you overcome it you value it more than anything. The things that are worth it in life are the things that take you time and effort, and that inevitably leads to frustration, but when you overcome those challenges you feel at ease. I always say it to my students that I want them to cope with that frustration. That’s life! Of course, one has to learn how to manage it. Too much frustration is discouraging, but definitely removing it completely from the equation is not the way to go neither.
40:32
I'm assuming you either made this video before the patch or hadn't played the after the patch
they did add a Icon to show you can upgrade your flasks
Anyway, the UI is MOSTLY Fine, but the inventory needs better sorting options or something.
A favorites tab for quick switching would be nice.
Yea, most of my playthrough was in June and July, and I hit max flasks before this change was made. Mea culpa on that one.
And yea, agree on your second point. The UI is functional, but I think there's a lot of ways to make it more efficient and elegant.
Corporatism, not capitalism.
If capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production, and the crontroll there of, then I would argue capitalism has created some of the best games in recent years.
When developers are allowed to develop, and publishers just publish, we get great games.
Corporatism, where a faceless company owns the rights to the IPs, that's where games get shitty as heck.
But corporations aren't private companies, they are public companies. Which is the core of the issue.
I know that's what people call "capitalism." I just want to point out that you can have a private ownership economy without corporations, and without Socialist ideas.
I personally have started to no buy games made by the big corporations like EA, Ubisoft, Activision and so on. It's all predatory. Sure Bandai released Elden Ring, but they didn't dictate how Miyazaki should make his game. At least it doesn't seem so. They know he knows his art, and let him make it how he like.
Sadly this corporate, top-down, style of production is so common across all entertainment today. Disney owning all the big franchises and basically churning out "content" instead of good works of fiction for instance.
Yeah it's predatory, but it's not "capitalisms fault" it's corporatism.
And I'll say it again: there's no finite resource in games development, we have infinite code and art we can make. The finite part is the person playing the game. Looking at the sheer number of bad games on Steam is proof that we can produce as much games as we want, but only a handfull will make it to the top.
Sadly today that handful is corporate "content" and not actually fun games... for the most part.
Not how "resources" work. 300 years ago land was the big "resource." But technological development made it so now we can farm an order of magnitude more food then is nessaraly to survive on a fraction of the land. At the same time sometimes your land could be croupted by this kind of black sludge that was a real albatross on its value. Or as it's now known oil. Wealth doesn't come form resources. Wealth comes form the ability to combine the products in your environment in new and interesting ways. It's true that nothing can last forever, but it can last a lot longer then you think.
A sub is a must and thats what you got. Excited for your future work.
Tbh, I actually enjoyed the game more when these conventions weren't made. The problems you have or had with the game were limitations that I actually enjoyed.
Oh, and there is a sort function in your video. Bottom of the menu it says L3 is the sort function. It is limited but it is there.
Otherwise I understand your point...I just haven't seen anyone who makes the sexist and such complaints. If they exist, it seems it is in a circle that the algorithms target you with. Perhaps as a way to keep engagement up. Just a thing to ponder. (This all assuming I didn't misunderstand that point of the video.)
...and I won't argue the anti-cap stance you have...your choice.
Outside of that, I actually see and agree with some of your standpoints. So good video.
Oh shit, you are/were an arenanet dev? GW2 is one of my favorite games, so seeing that name out of nowhere was kinda a shock LOL
I know this is completely irrelevant to the actual video, but did anet treat you well? i've heard they're apparently fairly good to their devs, but i've never actually heard that from a first party source. Also sorta curious just what you did, if that's something you're willing to share.
can't exactly say i'm particularly surprised to see someone like you worked on the guild wars series given their rather progressive nature LOL
gw2 fangirling aside, as someone who's very "outside" this whole argument and wasn't even aware it existed until just now due to not really being in to games like elden ring, this was a really interesting watch. I'm personally not really the type of person who can just be set down into a world without any kind of quest log or general thing I can check back on to see what's up and what there is for me to do. I can be pretty forgetful, so being able to sort of "touch base" again and get a general rundown of what's needed of me when I find myself having just completely lost track of what i've gone somewhere to do can be a big help. Stuff like placeable waypoints/map markers are also great for helping with this.
The whole thing about a game's success being directly tied to how well it's perceived "competitors" did is also so dumb, I absolutely agree. I've actually seen speculation regarding this with two series i'm personally very invested in that have two highly anticipated upcoming games, Sonic and Mario.
...I know, kinda showing how out of my field this video is LOL
Anyways, i've seen a lot of people going on about how Mario Wonder is somehow going to completely outclass and "destroy" Sonic Superstars in every way, when in reality they're two very different games that people enjoy for different reasons. Mario's about tight platforming with extremely refined controls, while Sonic's about on your toes fast-paced decision making, and memorization of levels. Sure, they're both platformers, but both games are going for two very different things, and i'm expecting them both to be fun in their own unique ways.
I enjoyed my time at ArenaNet, even though I was part of the unannounced project that got cancelled as part of the 2019 layoffs. I can't go into much detail (NDA and such) but it was a cool place to work with a lot of awesome coworkers. I worked primarily as a tools engineer there, i.e. making the stuff that makes the game.
And yea, absolutely agree that this constant pitting of two games against each other is really silly. Looking back, the console wars of yore were equally ridiculous. In the end, it's just another form of conspicuous consumption ("I have the best taste!"), which never makes anyone genuinely happy.
Man some people in the comments didn’t even make it past 10 minutes of the video. I only disagree with one thing regarding the whole capitalism thing because I just think its flawed and needs improvements because some snakes climbed the tree.
Nah, fuck movies. If I wanted to watch movies, I'll just go to the movies. Interactible movie shit is just plain bad when the stories get derivative and nothing new gets done. Games are a heavily regulated and censored medium rn anyway
I like how this video came out only a few days before the game awards in an attempt to sway votes.
It's a Jewish conspiracy I tell you, Kanye said so!
I havent even finished the video yet and I already felt the need to sub, great stuff so far! I will definitely check out more of your content after I wrap up this one.
I'm sorry, but your criticisms of Elden Ring's UI/UX(as well as ones that these other western devs put forth) just come across as whining. I mean, you are actively being antagonistic towards the fans of Elden Ring and FromSoftware games as a whole before you even get the full criticism of the design element you dislike out of your mouth.
I never once had an issue with the game "wasting my time" because it didn't give me a notification in the flask menu on whether or not I had enough golden seeds or a sacred tear to upgrade. Every time I collected one of the items for upgrades, I would go into the menu and try to do an upgrade. If I didn't have enough, I would just go back to exploring. It's really not that deep.
If you are upset that the weapons menu is "unwieldy" because you collect literally every weapon in the game, I think that says something more about you as a player of said game and less about the game's UI.
Your complaint about people grabbing loot from a trapped room in a rush and dismissing the UI notification of what the item is could easily be avoided if people weren't falling for obvious traps. FromSoft is many things, but they aren't the most subtle about when a room with loot is going to have a gank.
Pretty much every complaint you and other western devs bring up about the game are the very same things that people like myself enjoy about the experience of playing FromSoft titles. If you don't like these things, fine. You don't necessarily have to. But when people like you say these things "suck" or are "bad design" when you should really be saying "I just dislike this", it does make you, as well as your criticisms, come across as less valuable to the dialogue or discourse about the game.
I'm sorry who thinks horizon forbidden west wasn't a commercial success??
I'll only leave off with saying your criticism of the east vs west game design argument and why its idiotic is mostly correct. Leave out the ant-capitalist parts of the video and it'd be a must watch.
Can we start adding a tag to games with light rpg elements like Forbidden West or God of War FRPGs or Faux rpgs.
The issue is the language used. Yes what you suggest would improve the user experience, but that doesn't mean what they do do "sucks" or "is awful". It just means aspects could be better. Awful & Sucks are insulting terms, such that its no surprise that using those terms comes across as pejorative. "Kind of clunky", which you use later would be a lot better.
People should stop use the word "philosophy" when it really factually is ideology.
Finished the video and really dug it! I appreciated the careful nuance with which you tackled each talking point.
Oh my god, that opening had me howling with laughter!
Some terrible & ignorant critiques concerning UI here (one reason many got so upset online - dumb, inaccurate statements should be torn apart):
1. Within the first few patches Golden Seeds menu included a golden icon letting players know they have enough for an upgrade.
2. From release there have been sorting options for all menus, including equipment & weapons. Furthermore, one option is sorting by newly acquired items.
Good critique however is the idea of a log. If a person didn't play for a week, as a lot of working folks can't play games until the weekend, how can you recall vital details? Most people cannot; therefore, a simple log in-game tracking npc interactions & recording those conversations would go miles to improving the quest design.
WE had a "log" back in the day, it's called pen and paper!
I'm case you missed another comment, there is a sort function for the inventory and one of the options is by recency. Not as useful when you know what you're getting after 240hrs, but it's been there the whole time. (I missed it too)
Loved tha whole video but when it got to "What you really hate is Capitalism" you got a new subscriber
the game puts a little sign next to the flasks when an upgrade is available, pay attention 🙃😊