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Old Man Ring - Part 2
I am up to 10 hours of Elden Ring played, and I am still having fun. The purpose of this post is to tell you my thoughts on what the appeal of "souls" games is, and why even beyond the fact that I am getting too slow for them, they aren't really for me.
Did you like raiding in World of Warcraft? Failing the first attempts at a raid boss, then learning "the dance", the correct moves and reactions to signals that allow you to overcome that boss, until your guild finally succeeds beating him? Elden Ring is the solo version of that.
There are a lot of games these days, especially in the mobile space, that shower you with rewards for doing very trivial tasks. Some people like that, for others it is not very satisfying. A reward should be granted for actually achieving something! But how do you know that you actually achieved something worthwhile? Well, if you failed repeatedly at a task, that task must be difficult. And so, finally beating that challenge feels very rewarding and worthwhile.
Only, of course, all of this is as manufactured as the mobile game rewards. Elden Ring is full of surprises that you couldn't possibly have foreseen, and that are likely to kill you. Bosses even more so, because they tend to have initial moves you learn to overcome, only to then get surprised when the boss pulls some very different surprise move after being down to half health and kills you again. You have to learn the whole "dance" of a boss over multiple failures to be able to beat him. And that, to many people, will feel very good.
Not for me though. I already hated the "dance" of WoW raiding. I definitively don't want a solo version of that. But I kept playing WoW long after I stopped raiding, because there are a lot of other things to do as well in that game. Elden Ring with the option of turning cheats on is very much the same. Without cheats I might be blocked at some point, or not being able to do certain things or reach certain things. With cheats I can just fast forward the boss encounters and pretend I beat them.
Note that I am pretty certain that if I wanted, I would be able to beat the first story boss, Margit, without the use of cheats. To some extent you can overcome a lack of reaction speed in Elden Ring by grinding to gain more levels and better equipment. So if I wanted, I could play until I feel really powerful, and then try Margit. It would take me multiple attempts, but as long as you spend all your runes before you don't lose anything from dying. So I could "learn the dance" in X failed attempts, and ultimately succeed. It is just that I absolutely feel no desire to do so. Overcoming challenges isn't rewarding to me when the "challenge" is only pressing buttons in the right sequence and the right timing. Of course, your mileage may vary. As there is a way to circumvent the first boss and reach other regions of Elden Ring without beating him, you could potentially become rather powerful before trying him. And then you probably would be able to manage this challenge, even if you are a bit slow. The question is, do you want to? Is that something that would be fun for you? Or do you find, fail, fail, fail again, until you succeed a not-so-fun game mechanic?
- posted by Tobold @ 10:43 AM Permanent Link
I have a very simple test to decide whther or not a video game is worth the time and energy it's asking of me: would I feel better about my life if I spent an hour playing the game or an hour doing household chores? In many cases the answer is clearly the latter, in which case I drop the game and go clean my kitchen or do some gardening instead. At the end of doing those I have exactly the same sense of satisfaction you describe from beating the difficult boss but I also have a clean kitchen or a tidy garden. Which sense of satisfaction is going to last the longer?
Souls games do scratch a similar itch of overcoming a challenge. Elden ring in particular is great for me because I can jump on for an hour and just do a mini dungeon or overworld area.
It is similar to Breath of the Wild where you get a general main objective but the bulk of the content is found through exploration. And the game offers you subtle hints at what may be in the area but leaves it up to you to find the secrets and dungeons.
All the souls games did this to an extent but Elden Rings overworld really suits this style of game. It's much more densely packed with content then BOTW.
Isn't the alternative to this... beating everything on the first try?
I get that you mean this in the context of button timing and raid dancing. But what is the functional difference between that and more cerebral/strategic games in which you lose until you win? Slay the Spire is a deckbuilding game with infinite time between turns, but it is highly unlikely that you win anything the first dozen or so times you play because you don't know the enemies or bosses you face, what sort of attacks you'll need to defend against, or what kind of deck is needed to beat them. Is that sort of Trial and Error better? Or is it really just the same?
For the record, I dislike Trial and Error design and other surprise failure states. At the same time, I play a lot of roguelike games, both deckbuilding and more action ones, like Hades and Dead Cells and others that are basically Souls-like too. Some of those take hours to get through, only to die to the last boss when they have a Phase 2 with different moves. The cognitive dissonance is real. I like figuring out systems and optimizing things though, so perhaps it's the getting randomized loot with interesting synergies that propels me through these games over and over.
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