True! That’s kind of strange. I guess it’s quite wide so the center was heavy enough to rip it all out? Maybe it was wet or something too.

Yeah I see where you’re coming from. I know as a creator it’s really hard to strike a balance between achieving an artistic vision and separating their pride in that from real accessibiliy concerns.

And like I said in my other comment, I cherish the way Fromsoft uses difficulty to direct players and tell stories and I hesitate to want to do anything to water that down. Too many games take the route of making that game for everyone and Fromsoft games are for me that gaming oasis I can escape to.

Oh yeah I 100% agree with you! I always try to make sure to point out all the other options available to people if they’re frustrated with difficulty. I think people don’t understand that a lot of the ‘options’ in Fromsoft games are not in menus - they’re baked into the gameplay itself with in-world/lore reasons for doing them. Like how co-op uses a sign instead of a multiplayer interface ‘room’ like most other games.

It is the best thing about Fromsoft games IMO, that everything is a vessel to help tell the story and create more immersion, and a difficulty slider is game-y and creates less immersion (as well as what you said - would ruin the opportunities the difficulty affords in directing pleayers).

All that being said, if they added a slider that would only affect others, the only way it affects me is that I’d be bummed that they didn’t get the great experience that I love about the game. I mean the other person mentioned Celeste which I also really enjoyed and I wasn’t even aware that it had difficulty sliders. So that’s how much they’d affect my enjoyment of the game.

I should say that I appreciate the candid discussion, nice to have a civilized chat on the internet. Also - in the end it wouldn’t really bother me if Fromsoft did implement a simple difficulty slider. I think it’d be a bit more difficult than you are assuming however since it is also a multiplayer game. I guess they could limit the difficulty options to offline players only.

But as a very long time fan, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that they have actually gone a long way to addressing the difficulty complaints of their games. ER is their most accessible game and there are a lot of in-game opportunities to customize the amount of difficulty one faces. I could go on and on about it but I’ll leave it at that for now.

It’s pretty cool! Especially the way the astroturf more or less looks like grass but then tears off in the sinkhole - it gives it that uncanny look

Eh I’m sorry but I still don’t buy it. Making it a game about ambiance and story makes it a different game, doesn’t it? Every game has a target audience right? Why does it seem like it’s just games like this that get this sort of outrage thrown at it? FPS games have a similar level of entry yet no one is out there demanding they make Counter Strike less twitchy.

Honestly how is this gatekeeping? That word gets slinged around a lot and it using it here seems like it diminishes the real situations where the word is useful. So they’re limiting access to the game from people who what? It’s hard for everyone, they’re not being selective about the difficulty somehow.

I think I have a couple I never played from an old Humble Bundle - which is the overall favorite?

The only difference is that Forza is barely five years old

Good old pookleblinky - really sad I haven’t been able to follow them since I jumped ship at Twitter.

And none of them want to leave DC and go back to the bumfuck shittown they got elected from.

Trump and the fed jumped at every last opportunity to juice the economy from 2016-2020 and they’ll do it again if he gets elected again. He was really damn lucky he inherited a decent economy to do that with, and was followed up by a responsible administration to keep things in check. I could go on and on about this but in the end I’m really just hoping we come to our senses and elect leaders who are interested in keeping the ship steady instead of this chaotic feast/famine cycle we’ve been living through these past few decades.

AFAIK the fragments are the only level scaling in the DLC

60 is really the second soft cap so there is plenty to be gained from leveling up to that point. After that it certainly matters less though.

And unless I’m misunderstanding you, the enemies in Elden Ring do not scale by your level so that wouldn’t play into the calculus at all.

Huh well I was going to read about French history but now I’m more curious about this

I’ve got 50 vigor and haven’t been one-shot by anything yet. Can’t say for sure about fragements ‘mostly’ locked behind bosses but I was quickly +4 just from wandering around the first map area. IMO they shouldn’t quote salty complaints like Flippikus’ because it waters down the real problems Fromsoft has and always had had porting their games to PC.

I love all their games and am a pretty big fanboy but also love PC gaming and it’s clear From is a console company. I think they’d just release on Playstation if it were up to them. But if they’re not going to resist the siren call of the PC money, they really should hire a team that knows what they’re doing. I know there’s some stereotypes that there aren’t great Japanese Windows devs - really don’t know if that’s true but even if it is, From is a AAA company with AAA sales and can afford proper devs for PC releases.

Yeah I stopped about 15 seconds in because it seemed to be showing multiple boss characters.

What a real Steve

Looks better than the live action. All I care about really though is that they don’t try to ‘fix’ an ending that was never broken.

I am in love with train travel but in the last years my local system has lost a step or two, to put it mildly. I’m seriously considering going back to more air travel, and I hate what the whole flying experience has become.

It used to be that one could spend three hours dealing with the airport experience plus an hour or two flying - or enjoy four or five relaxing hours on the train to somewhere, no garbage security checks, lines, etc. But nowadays on the train you’re almost guaranteed delays, cancellations, extra stopovers, etc., which means sometimes you’re not even sure on longer trips if you’ll make it home that day.

Obviously this cancels out any advantages of train travel aside from the environmental ones. And if you have someone like me, who like I said, absolutely loves traveling by train, considering going back to the airport - how are you going to convince the average person to ride instead of fly?

I’m sure it’s all the result of cost-cutting efforts but train companies desperately need to underderstand that what makes people more likely to ride are the things they’re choosing to sacrifice when they’re trying to cut costs.

I firmly believe train travel needs to be heavily subsidised and not run like a business. Leaders need to understand that it’s important infrastructure and enables business of all other sorts. Not unlike the highway system, which they do without batting an eye.