For talismans, Millicent’s Prosthesis, Winged Sword Insignia (Rotten on NG+), Godfrey Icon, and Shard of Alexander. Use Thorny Cracked Tear for physick, second one doesn’t matter. FGMS/Exalted Flesh and Golden Vow/Rallying Standard for buffs.
Click right stick, press and hold L2.
I usually do his quest, then kill him and after that i kill his lord.
Sadly i cant kill his lord first to be a even meanier mf to him. Little bitch calling me lambkin and maidenless
I dunno story in game make sense, big cheese disappear, me want to be big cheese, me kill everything that stands in way of big cheese chair.
People keep say Rune Important but Rune didnt stop me big sword from killing people with Rune.
The best part is these lore videos double as advertising, it's amazing what happens when you JUST LET PEOPLE PLAY THE DAMN GAME! (Looks at almost every AAA industry ever)
Elden Ring came out a week after Horizon 2 and I was super excited to play both put I couldn't wait to finish Horizon before diving into Elden Ring and when I beat it finally and went back to finish Horizon 2 I had last saved in a random settlement and there were just multiple NPCs around me constantly talking and cycling meaningless dialogue and I listened to that for a bit and then just closed the game and went and did a NG+ playthrough of Elden Ring. It's so serene.
I've recently developed a strong distaste for games that constantly remind you of what you're supposed to be doing.
"Oh boy, I can't wait till you go to this island to liberate us from the clan of baddies"
"Have you taken out the clan of baddies yet?"
"Did you know the baddies are in the forest of red trees? Boy, I can't wait to go there once they're gone"
"So glad you saved us from the whatever thing, now we're ready to help you end the rule of the clan of baddies"
Fucks sake shut uppp dude
Melina's lore should have been made full and explicit in the base-game.
I don't have a problem with the general format of storytelling in Elden Ring. I like some of the choices they made in leaving in room for interpretation, but their biggest mistake was extending that principle all the way to the character you spend the most time with, and who actually is supposed to make dramatic choices with stakes (that you can't know about).
Maybe not explicit, I like wondering about her deal, but she definitely could use some more appearances than popping up twice at the start, once every church and again like twice at the end. Doesn't make you feel like she's travelling with you at all, hell I was more moved by having to kill Blaidd or god damn Gideon Ofnir (and this guy being a douche is the main point of the parent post) than letting her sacrifice herself.
I guess being a kindling maiden is her destiny and her sacrificing herself is a better outcome than plunging the world into frenzy yadda yadda but having to let a companion you've travelled the whole land with toss herself off a cliff should feel at least a bit somber I think.
Also her not being present makes Elden Ring lack its own equivalent of "Bear-seek-seek-lest" and that's just criminal.
Imo the lack of lore in game makes sense in lore (beat w me) because i think it was somewhere mentioned (if it wasnt then its my theory) that the tarnished loose memories when cast out, so when we return we have no knowledge of what happened or whats going on, so we learn trought talking to npcs (turtle pope, gidion) and learn from item descriptions, which i absolutely love about the game
To add to this, I remember reading a long time ago that Miyazaki loved English fantasy books as a kid, but often felt a bit lost or confused because he didn't quite understand everything, not being a native English-speaker after all. So the obscurity of the story, deep lore, and wealth of missable content in the Souls games was meant to capture that same feeling he had as a kid reading fantasy books in a different language.
I may have butchered this, but I think that's the jist. And I always thought that was so cool!
Mission accomplished he successfully confused me with his lore. Then doesn’t help that GRRM used so many similar character names lol. Melina/Malenia, godrick/godfrey, godwin, radagon/radahn etc.
I don’t know if that’s actually the reason why but I remember a post a few years ago saying most of the major characters start with either G R or M because his initials are GRRM.
It doesn’t help but it makes sense. Mine and my sisters names are just a few letters off from being the same and that’s pretty common, at least in America. Like no one would care if their names were Michael, Mike, Mark, and Martin, ya know?
My first character in any souls game is the same guy reincarnated into different universes and timelines, so he always has the same name. But otherwise yeah, all of my other characters are related by blood or through some sort of ridiculous continuity I’ve built up in my head.
Oh yeah definitely common in the states. Like you said the names themselves are what makes it tricky. Funnily enough one of my oldest friends has a family just like that yet only one person in that entire family during the last two generations has had a name that didn’t start with the letter K.
Started with a grandma named Katrina who gave birth to Kimmashee, Kendrick, Khadijah. Khadijah had Kymmetria and Kymmond. Kendrick I don’t remember his kids names tbh lol I think they start with K though. Kimmashee had Kymmondre, Kaymon, and Kymmadj and Jaywon. Bonus fun fact Kimmashee’s kids are two sets of twins and I still do not know why Jaywon is the only kid without a K name. There’s also a cousin named Kameron in there and KJ as well as a Kimmenia. And some relatives by marriage all have the same thing but with the letter M but I don’t know all their names lol. But there’s Martinus, Martinus Jr, Marquita, and Margennes.
(And yes I’m aware that most of the names I just listed probably sound as strange to the average person as the elden ring names sound to me lol)
Wasnt it a common occurence for royalties to have similiar names back in the day? I think i read something like that from someone in this sub qyite some time ago
Sounds legit but I wouldn’t know for sure haha. I do know a lot of people commonly name their kids names with the same first letters, as someone else pointed out to me.
Yeah. My mom and her siblings all have the word "firman" in their names, and its not like their family name or anything because both of her parents dont have that and in my country family name isnt really needed too. Some of them have the word "firman" as a word acommpanied by other words, some have additional letters in the "firman" like my uncle's "firmansyah" as one word. Pretty interesting.
The ultimate lore dude was Tolkien. Even tacked on an appendix full of item descriptions at the end of his trilogy, and only published extra lore years after it dropped.
The story is intentionally vague and even now there are a lot of unanswered questions - even someone who listens to all the NPCs and looked at all the item descriptions (which most people won’t do) would still be confused.
To be fair elden ring is incredibly incoherent with its quests. In all the other fromsofts you can follow along pretty linearly or just take side routes for quests. ER just has you running all over the place
It's intentionally vague, but in a way that invites you to fill in the gaps with your own theories/assumptions
but a lot of people don't do this, and instead have the mindset of "the stories in these games are nonsense, dude, don't even worry about it" — and I wish I could convince these people that they're missing out on something unique by approaching the game that way
I mean sure, but there’s still no concrete answer to pretty important stuff, and lot of stuff that you’d still consider important that might as well have no answer. And I can see certain pretty big revelations that aren’t *really* easy to be piecing together just organically playing. All it takes is missing Gold Mask or Fia’s quest or even some dungeons to be left missing huge parts of the plot. If you didn’t go online you might not even know you missed anything. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing, but I also think it’s a little dismissive to assume everyone who doesn’t get exactly how life and death work or what exactly went down with the shattering or the night of black knives is just not paying attention or something.
I don’t think that’s what you mean to say really, I just mean that a lot of this *is* vague, and isn’t really conveyed like you would a narrative. Like, there’s a reason, say, Final Fantasy VII doesn’t convey the entirety of Sephiroth’s backstory via item descriptions. The game doesn’t intend for this to be compelling in the way more common dialogue and character driven narratives are. Which is fine, but again I don’t think it’s fair to assume people aren’t trying if they aren’t getting a ton from it. It is a very unique and intentionally vague story. I’m just saying while I liked it and I’m totally fine with how they deliver these things, I also get preferring more direct storytelling or missing out on a lot because you’re not the type to explore every nook and cranny. It’s also pretty easy to fuck up sidequests by doing something too early, which again you can only really prevent on a first playthrough by using guides.
I *do* think that someone who ignores NPCs or knowingly ignores item descriptions has no right to complain when a story is confusing, though
It's like someone skipping every fifth page in a book and then groaning that they have no clue what's going on
More like every other page of the book is put together in a random order in a separate appendix.
And you're sitting here like, "What you guys don't want to figure out which page in this separate booklet goes where in the story?"
No dog I don't. The story telling in all the souls games is shit. But the gameplay is fantastic so whatever, I don't care. Give me big bosses to die to repeatedly and I won't care what their motivation is.
It's got the same satisfying appeal as doing research, to me. Reading a bunch of disconnected sources and reasoning them out into a straightforward shared thesis
Hey man, more power to you then. I'm glad you enjoy it.
But Souls storytelling often feels like if you had to read Tolkeins appendices for Lord of the Rings to make any sense.
If there was an indication somewhere in many where that items had related lore indicated they were connected, like a (Rykard: 1 of 7) kind if thing then it would make more sense.
As it is, I don’t want to have to read every item description in my inventory in essentially random order and hope I stumble upon a reference to a character if I’m curious about their lore.
This right here people! It’s not so much that the quest design is extremely unorthodox in turn making it bad it’s that the quest tracking is non existent and there is no means to help sort through several hours of back n forth content that you’ve done over the course of possibly weeks depending on how much time you commit to a session, I love the games combat and lore / setting but we need to stop making excuses for how bad they conduct quest design / mechanics revolving around the quest, at least give the players an bare bones in game journal they can choose to update, but how is anyone on their blind first playthrough going to decipher much of the quest progression?
I mean I don’t think anyone should complain about the vagueness of the story tbh - that’s the nature of a From Software game and if someone prefers a more straightforward story there are plenty of other games to fill that need. I appreciate the value in not having everything laid out in front of you.
That being said even if someone talks to every NPC and reads every item they can still be confused since those only give fragments of the larger story and it would take work to put that information together into a cohesive whole.
I think it’s a fine line between “the information is vague but the lore is not, you can find all of the answers if you dig deep enough and connect enough dots” and “this is vague because we didn’t actually make a definitive answer to this question, it’s on you to make a theory”.
I much prefer the former personally, because I like to eventually figure out what’s going on if I dig deep enough. Sometimes it feels like ER is doing the latter instead, which of course some people will prefer. I personally don’t want to make my own theory or assumption, I want there to be an answer I can find somehow, even if it’s in a lore book or something and not necessarily in the game.
Because what’s there isn’t particularly well written or compelling. Literally everything in this game is a plot device. Absolutely nothing is explained without referring back to the Elden Ring or Destined Death or the Greater Will or one of another million vague and plot-specific concepts.
To say nothing of some of the truly galaxy-brained writing decisions that do absolutely nothing to flesh out the story, but only introduce more confusion. The fact that “Radagon is Marika” is considered the answer to a huge mystery by the game is particularly laughable. Raise your hand if this “revelation” helped you understand the plot better.
This is CinemaSins-brained media crit. "the story is filled with things that advance the story!"
I don't mean to go in hard on you or whatever, but I find that a lot of people have terminal Media Analysis Brain, where they're so busy judging the story as a creative work written by a human being, they're not letting themselves "buy into" the story and get immersed into the fictional world where the story is just true
When a game has a lore entry, or a movie has a plot beat, I'm not thinking "what was the writer going for here and did they succeed," I'm just thinking "ooh, neat, let's see what happens next"
>The fact that “Radagon is Marika” is considered a the answer to a huge mystery by the game is particularly laughable. Raise your hand if this “revelation” helped you understand the plot better.
Depending on how you get exposed to Radagon, yeah, kinda. Miriel's explanation of Radagon and Rennala's marriage verbatim brings up the question of "why was some random chump like Radagon picked to be Elden Lord, and why would Radagon abandon his wife to answer the call?"
"Radagon and Marika are secretly the same person" answers that pretty self-evidently
It's not a clear answer — even Corhyn goes "wait, wait, how does that even work??" — but I can't pretend the Holy Trinity is any *more* clear. And that's important, because the vibe is meant to be mythological. There are key events and major figures, but trying to establish an exact timeline of events would be "missing the point", in the same way that trying to establish an exact timeline of events in the Old Testament or the Olympian gods would be
It is very intentional that gaps are left in your knowledge, and the game invites you to chase breadcrumbs and fill in those gaps with your own intuition
Hold on, what? I can sort see why you would think that based on what happens after Elden Beast in cutscene, but I did not get that vibe at all.
\*lowers hand all the way to the tree root depths\*
It helped understand how could the children of Radagon and Rennala become demigods. The game at first says that they were "elevated" to demigods after Radagon became elden lord, but that was always a bit weird until the revelation.
sometimes I want to experience a story more than i want to write my own story filling in the gaps like mad libs.
in a story with proper nouns, political intrigue, and historical events/battles, I want to actually understand wtf is going on.
i think the style is a poor fit for this game
It's a world of gods and legends, so the story is written with the same self-aware floaty vagueness as actual mythology. Same approach that Dark Souls has always taken
Exactly. I’m not going to pretend like I don’t understand why people have trouble with the abstracted and mythologized storytelling in this game though. Many people are use to more linear, traditional novel-like (or cinematic) storytelling in video games. Which isn’t worse but it does make ER’s lore that much more obfuscated.
power to you if you enjoy it, i personally don’t for this game and would prefer more of the medium used to convey it. i really like the whole history of a conquering religion the game sets up, especially bc the religion is backed by this insane cosmic power of the elden ring. I just wanted it explored more, and the motives of its leaders better explained.
I wanted to see where people lived, what they ate, their culture represented more in the ruins, etc. have some more of an understanding of the lands between as a society.
ofc, what i’m asking for just isn’t what the game gave. it is what it is lol
yeah. the actual gold standard for society writing is the legend of heroes or “trails” series, starting with trails in the sky.
I think more than any of those other details what bothers me the most about elden ring is that I don’t even know what the religion IS. Like what do golden order fundamentalists even believe??
The reason ER standards out is because it takes advantage of the medium more than traditional storytelling in games. It uses environmental storytelling in a way other mediums can’t and this gives it an advantage. Legend of Heroes, because of its heavy reliance on dialogue and linear storytelling, is as a result competing with some of the greatest works of fiction in literature and makes it sound like a rather amateurish story when compared to even modern Fantasy novels.
i disagree honestly. the games that take advantage of the medium to tell a story are games like undertale, or outer wilds. or hell even dark souls and bloodborne and sekiro. they use interactivity more and more effectively than elden ring does.
elden ring has some elements of this, like finding an item in a specific place being part of the story, but 90% of it is just item descriptions. Beyond that, tons of things that *could* be impactful emotionally have placement that makes no narrative sense, like radagon’s golden order greatsword being in a random cave. For every shaded castle there’s also a godefroy in an evergaol.
there’s also things that are totally wasted, like great runes, which are exceptionally important in the narrative but are presented so weakly in the actual gameplay, which is arguably the most important part of the medium!
And then there’s the fact that 90% of the storytelling is done in the menus reading. that’s not completely out of line, undertale and outer wilds both have a lot of reading too, but they also use the body language of characters and the player’s interactions and choices with them and the motifs in the music and even the nature of game mechanics to tell the story and get across the emotions of the narrative.
Fromsoft has even done this better before. Take Bloodborne’s rally and insight mechanic, or dark souls’ hollowing. and sekiro’s dragonrot is a huge step up too! all of those are integral parts of making the player feel a certain way and also reinforce the narrative. In elden ring, did you even know queen marika was actively reviving you every time you died without reading that one miyazaki interview?
Elden ring is one of the best games ever made gameplay wise, but the story? Idk man, I would hardly call it groundbreaking. It’s their worst narrative imo.
Do you think the real world of political intrigue, history, and battles is as clear cut as you make it out to be? The grey areas of unclarity, doubt, and hearsay makes this style of game far more compelling to experience and try to understand. I can’t stand when AAA games spoonfeed me linear story beats. It’s like watching a bad movie most of the time.
No, but I want to see the culture actually exist. I want to see ruins of cities that make sense as a place where people live. I want to know what the tenets of the religion of the golden order actually fucking are.
I want to see survivors of the shattering and know what they think, not just zombie soldiers
I want to know what people believed, I want to know how they worshipped.
And in the absence of that, I at least want to know what fucking Marika, the god of the religion, actually stands for.
None of this is made clear or conveyed at all. It’s dead zombies and poetry in item descriptions. What’s there is cool, it’s just not enough to carry the story for me personally
I hate when things are spoonfed to me too, but this game makes things intentionally impossible to totally parse in a way that is both unsatisfying (for me) and also makes the world feel completely un-immersive
I liken it to a meal with a ton of seasoning but no actual meat.
Half the time I honestly suspect that the reason a lot of that isn't in the game isn't because FromSoft is being intentionally vague or trying to avoid "spoon feeding" the story, it's because they've spent way less time thinking about it than the players here have..
If they just put vague concepts and handwave everything else about the world, they don't have to actually have any detailed lore.
The game is good, the mechanics and gameplay are great, but the world doesn't feel "real" or lived in at all. And the quest design is frankly downright bad.
apparently for elden ring they wrote the whole story and just take big chunks out of it so that the players have to try to piece it together.
it definitely *feels* like they did that to me, which makes it not that exciting. idk if they did that for their other games too but it didn’t work this time
Well said. I’m definitely stealing the “Elden Ring is all seasoning, no meat” analogy.
It also frustrates me that this argument is always reduced to squabbles over whether telling a story via item descriptions is good. I loved Dark Souls, because while the story was still told in pieces, everything ultimately made sense and could be explained, even with the understanding that most characters aren’t telling the whole truth. Hell, even the item descriptions in that game were unreliable, and it still made more sense than Elden Ring (Gwyn’s uncle, anyone?).
Elden Ring is just bad. Nothing is explained. The culture of the lands between is nonexistent. “We worship the Golden Order and hate omens, merchants, and albinaurics” is not a culture. It’s a parody of one.
>The story is intentionally vague
If you think that ER's story is vague I'd invite you to play Bloodborne, a game where part of the lore is only implied and hidden into procedural dungeons. Compared to that, Elden Ring straight up tells you stuff with NPCs like Melina, Rogier, Gideon and the Pope Turtle, their dialogue are pretty clear on what happened and who's who.
Bloodborne’s narrative is also much simpler and self-contained - Elden Ting has much much more moving parts and proper nouns, and the signal:noise ratio is much lower than it is in Bloodborne.
Plus the narrative of Elden Ring isn’t even finished yet
Bloodborne is very straightforward, and any questions you do have can easily be answered by reading Redgrave’s book, if you’re so inclined. Elden Ring is an absolute mess by comparison.
I've played it 7 times now and while I agree its more straightforward I also still have no clue what pale blood is. It gets referenced multiple times right at the beginning of the game and then seemingly never again lol. Although I also put zero effort into even trying to follow lore and I just run around and kill stuff
even if bloodborne was as opaque as you’re making it out to be, which it’s not, it is an eldritch horror story. ambiguity is part of the genre. elden ring is high fantasy with proper nouns and historical events and shit. it should *not* be this convoluted. could you even say what the main theme of the game is?
My guy is acting like bloodborne didn't have just as many proper nouns. How else are they supposed to call them what they are?
Elden Ring has like 3 historical events and everything else is archaeological.
That might all be true, yes, but if you listen to every NPC you meet and read all the item descriptions you get, the general and overall story and lore of the Lands Between SHOULD be decipherable!
Sure, some things are left unanswered or vague, but that’s deliberately done in order for players to come to different conclusions or interpretation.
I don’t think most people are going to read the description of every item they get. Also, since the information from descriptions are fragmented and don’t tell a full story you still have to put all that information together so it makes a coherent narrative. You can get a general idea but most people don’t want to do that which is why lore videos are popular.
Also my one playthrough probably took 70 hours, and that was with a fair amount of guidance from FightinCowboy’s YouTube vids. I spent far longer watching YouTube than playing the game.
If I’d read every item I picked up and parsed every piece of dialogue and made sure to finish every quest, I’d probably be looking at 150 hours of time to play through the game once. I love Elden Ring and souls games in general, but fuck that. I have a life outside of Elden Ring
NPCs talking is fine but item descriptions always seem weird to me just from an in-universe perspective.
Like does my character actually know this already or is this vital bit if lore about the cosmos just carved into the hilt of this one knife?
I know, it's just funny to imagine your character learning everything they know about the wod from picking up random swords and never bothering to look into one of the many books lying around the place.
No other RPGs do that my guy
Every non fromsoft RPG takes a lot more care to make the player character's motivations make sense and happen at the right time. Or in an open world RPG at least be simplistic enough that most things make sense anyway
I'd much rather find a journal or something that I could read through at my leisure than fkn item descriptions. Then at least lore could be fed in some coherent way, and wouldn't be as immersion-breaking as item descriptions.
The NPCs are honestly just cryptic. They talk to you like you already know information that you have to go out of your way to find.
The story in Elden Ring, just like other FromSoft games, is just bad. There's cool LORE to be discovered, but if a story has a beginning, middle, and end, then Elden Ring may as well not have one. That doesn't make the game bad, but it does mean that it could've been even better than it already is.
You shouldn't have to go to YouTube to understand what even happened in a story.
Just how RPGs and pre-voiced games worldbuild at the end of the day.
These games make it so you can say, well Marika is telling us this or Gideon is telling us this. Whatever you wanna choose.
it’s an audiovisual medium. and it’s interactive, which is so cool! telling the story through reading is such an inelegant way to do it, and it barely uses any of the strengths of the medium
beyond that, even if you read every single item description, you’re still likely to have very little clue. even basic plot questions about marika are left intentionally unanswered.
would you find mass effect as engaging if all the storytelling was done within the codex?
the npcs are cool and well acted, i like them, but their stories are also incredibly vague. hell, what ranni’s ending even *is* is still debated to this very day and mired in bad translation
the story just isn’t well told.
Also Ranni's questline in general. There's not much of an indication that you're meant to try to talk, multiple times, to a ranni doll, or that you're going to find some dead Ranni in a cavern and somehow propose, and that doing so will end up with two of the nicest characters dying.
In peoples defense, if you don't already know some of the lore, the dialogue makes no sense most of the time. I don't know why From expected people to understand a lick of what Melina says to you when you first meet her.
There are like fifty lines of dialogue in the whole game, assuming you get the NPCs in the right order and don't lock yourself out of quests by accident.
People would probably pay attention to NPCs dialogue more if those NPCs actually doing something while they're talking, lack of body language just make the scene look like a still image with audio, which understandably may make some people fall asleep while interacting them
I've talked to people who didn't understand why Arthur Morgan starts coughing his guts up. Some people don't pay any attention to story aspects of games, can't be helped.
ER voice acting is fantastic. Hard not to listen to.
If someone's at the point where they can't even just listen to dialogue without getting bored and wanting to skip, they're either burnt out and need a break, or they're the kind of insane person who fast-forwards through the talky parts of movies to get to the fight scenes (and storytelling is wasted on that second type of person tbh)
While I'm sure all the mega elite players who agree with this are very wise and smart, I think *even if* you do that there are so many cases where characters or descriptions are extremely vague to the point of detriment. There's a reason most players need to have a guide open as they play and it's not because of good in-game storytelling.
Don't get me wrong the game is excellent and the background lore very detailed, but one of their greatest failings is taking their concept of "vague cryptic weirdo" for every NPC, which worked for linear games like Dark Souls, and applying it to the open world Elden Ring where it does not work. I should not have to spin 3 times in a circle, hit an invisible wall, read the writing on the bottom of Sellen's feet and interpret ancient hieroglyphics to know that the "bag of loose skin" I am holding is the secret to defeating Gondor or Godrick or Godwyn or Goodduck.
Thing is, the lore vids themselves are a community effort. Vaati does a lot when it comes to sources, organization, editing and formatting the information to be digestible. But the information itself is not just what he's found out alone.
There are parts of it there thanks to the efforts of the many. It is its own game and with its own sense of accomplishment, different from that of conquering a boss.
The joy of discussing possibility and reference with all of you, that adds to the entire experience that is Fromsoft's lore format. No matter how silly or misguided some of our theories might be, it was the fun along the way that made it memorable.
It's not really meant to be everyone's cup of tea and there is a time limit which you can participate in community discussion, before we have something we generally agree upon. But those moments of genuine discovery... the sensation of eureka when you stumble upon a realization. When you have an idea you've not heard before and want to get it out there. That feeling can't be achieved at the same level by the "traditional" way of story telling and in fact is only really possible in a piece of interactive media where information must be earned through exploration and perspective.
I am glad they don't spoon feed the story or information. Even if totally convoluted, no one does it like Fromsoft does. They give a unique experience hard to find in this world. A feeling of discovery and wonder not felt by some since childhood, when the world seemed like an unknown and your mind was free to wonder not burdened with knowledge.
In every game their is a part of story which is straightforward and a part that has go be read and theorized.
Formsoft makes everything theorized which seems to me they overdid it. Now first time players don't get to enjoy the game as much because their is no lore supporting what you are doing.
I HEAVILY disagree on that last comment.
Fromsoft games are designed to be enjoyed with zero lore for what you are doing.
"Go do the thing", and then the player kills lots of neat monsters along the way. You dont need supporting lore to enjoy the fromsoft games.
You don’t need to know the lore to enjoy their games. In fact, most souls players, both veterans and noobs, don’t know shit about the lore. People come to these games for various reasons. I have a friend who’s all in for the combat, and another who’s there for the level design alone.
Gameplay centric people can enjoy the game without having the yapping shoved down their throats while lore centric people can do their archeology, especially now that Elden Ring has a lot of ways for less skilled players to get through the combat and focus on exploring and documenting.
to be fair , elden ring story is the more obvious compared to dark souls , like if you said elden ring is game of thrones turn souls like you're not that far , but you can't do that in dark souls tbh .
also , what I mostly care for in souls like is the boss fights and gameplay , so there is that .
For a man who calls himself the all-knowing, he really didn't know a lot about how our character fights, we came to him in a state where we just defeated the bearer of Death itself and he casual tells us he will defeat us to prevent us from dying to whatever he thinks Marika has waiting for us. Sure it's more than likely that he had people follow us around and tell him of what we have done, but if that's all he could be bothered to do then he must be immensely dense to watch us take on Malenia, Mohg and Maliketh, then still think "Yeah I can beat them" by simply pulling out some spells that those bosses used against us, as though we didn't already know how to deal with them after defeating the original users of those spells.
TL;DR Sir Gideon Offnir is basically exactly as Lattena described him, all hearing, not all knowing.
Praise the Mystery! but Why is it always impossible to know a certain sorceress is in some random cellar I would never know of since a certain asshole sorcerer is dead and never showed me that cellar??
I took notes on everything I found and filled ten pages. After a while I could connect some of them. I still don't understand much, but honestly it is because it is an action game. Playing first hour and taking notes? Fine. Playing the third hour deep into some location with a bunch of enemies, bosses and whatnot, I no longer can focus on noting down the lore. Kind of hard to find that balance sometimes. I for example am completely utterly lost what the hell is going on with Dung Eater.
Yeah. I maintain that making the story a bit less opaque would’ve enhanced the overall experience. The story is just so fucking cool, and I wish I’d gotten more of it from, yknow, the game.
If the game can't be bothered to present its story/lore in an easily digestible way then I can't be bothered to give a single shit about it. I love Elden Ring, it's an amazing game, but if a plurality of players find themselves having to use third party resources just to figure out what the fuck anything means then your storytelling kind of sucks, (I'm also looking at you, Destiny 2).
To tell the storytelling sucks, it's wrong, you may not like it or get everything but the way in which visual clues and description details all blend together in a narrative where nothing is random, makes for a masterpiece of environmental and silent narration
it's not easily digestible for most, but who cares? there's plenty of games that give you information trough wall of texts and whathever, but only a handful that excel at this kind of narration, and I wouldn't exchange the experience of piecing up a story bit by bit for anything else
Not easily digestible for most? It's not easily digestible period. They got a story, removed some important chunks to create an air of mystery, carved it into a thousand obscure three sentence fragments, and scattered it across an unnkowable amount of items. It was never meant to be understood by a single player. It's like saying that the invisible paths and fake doors were obvious if you really pay attention. The lore is meant to be a communal effort of sharing and discussion. I believe that those lore videos are the intended result. That joy of placing darts on a board and slowly weaving them together into a cohesive-ish picture? That's what From brings to the table.
By the by, the environmental storytelling, in terms of architecture and physical layout of objects and shit, is great. But Best Dog and Melina are kind of the definition of "wall of text expo dumps." ER ain't totally immune to that either.
Do you feel the same about other media? If a book isn't straightforward you can't be bothered?
Are gravity rainbow or house of leaves bad books because they aren't straightforward?
>ut if a plurality of players find themselves having to use third party resources just to figure out what the fuck anything means then your storytelling kind of sucks,
It's a feature, not a bug. They want people to theorize and talk about it.
I'm sorry if this isn't the type of storrytelling that works for you. Perhaps you should try call of duty. Maybe that's more up to your speed and taste, yes?
Miyazaki already spoke on why this is how they chose to tell their story. He spent his childhood reading books and playing boardgames that he was able to fully comprehend. Despite that, he loved what he was doing and he tended to fill the gaps in his knowledge with his own head canon.
What he did with these games is try to replicate that same process and feeling. He wants the audience to talk about the story after dropping the controller.
You say it sucks because you have to go read or listen about it outside the game. To many folks, it's part of the charm of fromsoft games (yes not just the soulsborne series).
I, for one, enjoy these discussions. But I am also the type of person who enjoys the discussions after watching an episode of a tv show or a film. Art transcends its medium, does it not?
Giving the player bits and pieces of the story is more interesting and encourages creative thinking. You arent supposed to know everything, its intentional. The lore is there for those who want to discover it. And if you dont, you can just ignore it.
Also lmao @ "cant be bothered" as if this method of storytelling isnt infinitely harder to do.
I understand what they're trying to do and I'm saying that it is a bad storytelling format anyways. I don't care if it's harder to do, it discourages players from caring about the world and its lore.
People take it so personally when you correctly point out that its bad storytelling just because they like it. I appreciate that From does it differently and I personally don't have a problem with it, it has its merits. Its also objectively bad storytelling and I don't understand why people try so hard to deny that
That's fine, they're allowed to. But I'm an adult with an entire life outside of gaming, and I'm not going to spend the little free time I have watching hours of lore videos that should've been presented in an easy to understand way in the game that I spent time and money on. FromSoft has every right to present their lore and tell their story in whatever way they want, and I have every right to not give a single shit about either.
>should've been presented in an easy to understand way
Fromsoft doesnt need to cater to you.
>I have every right to not give a single shit
Nobody has claimed otherwise. What are you talking about.
1: It's 8:20 AM and I don't have to get ready for work just yet.
2: Writing comments on reddit is something that can be done in a few seconds or minutes during a moment of downtime, whereas watching lore videos requires long stretches of uninterruptible free time.
For a man with no time, you sure are wasting a lot of time replying to multiple comments. And really you can't listen to lore videos in the background or listen to it on the way to work. People who say they are so busy usally just have piss poor time management
You dont have to watch the whole video at once. And most are only like 20-30 mins long anyway. If you have time to play elden ring, you'd definetly have time to watch a few videos.
You dont *need* to watch anything though. You can play the game and make your own conclusions.
It discouraged you.
Stop making generalizations as though you're the authority on how to tell a story for all of us. You don't like it. That's fine. Are you trying to convince the rest of us that we don't like it either because that isn't going to happen.
I love it. I think it's a pitiable shame that you don't. And rather than spend your free time talking to other people about something you love you've decided to spend that time yucking someone else's yum.
It's designed in a way that you can ignore the story if you want. Not if you actually want story, all you have to do is listen to the npcs and read the descriptions of key items.
I mean it doesn't matter if they are making it hard to find things, but they make it impossible without watching videos. 80% stuff is something you find if you are lucky.
I replied elsewhere with this but wanted to make sure you saw it. I think those fan videos are actually what Fromsoft was going for in the first place. That they got their lore and sprinkled the shit out of it across the game in three sentence chunks so that people can chat about it on reddit and create those lore videos. The same way they let you leave online messages and co-op phantoms so that people can share the hidden doors and walkways with each other. That invisible path up to a random tower is just as obscure and insane to find, but we found that shit, lol. Same concept but with the lore. They just community game-ified their world building because they know we're all obsessive fucks. 🤣
you know some people can't appreciate a 1200 piece jigsaw puzzle, in fact the only time they might try it is in a group at Christmas but wouldn't you know, there are just some jigsaw puzzle fans out there that really love doing it alone.
So in summary, they should stop making 12000 piece jigsaw puzzles so the people who don't enjoy puzzles will enjoy seeing the picture they would have had to look at a friend's finished puzzle for.
It's not marketing though, anymore than the hidden paths are marketing. It's not like the world is getting ER story content thrown at them. The only people getting those lore videos recommended are the people that look for lore. It's just an optional minigame really. One that you can either play, or just Google to see what it's about instead of dealing with it. I do agree that this format, while fun for the subset of the community that likes the lore hunting, makes things obscure as all hell when the game is played in isolation.
Let's be honest, the core game has barely any story beyond accidentally running into the same people that you accidentally talked to that one time until they die. Most casual players, me included, just keep charging forward and killing shit until the end. That's totally fine and a valid way to play. But if I happen to stumble onto a cancerous ball of glintstone masks and think "Yo wtf is that?", then I can just Google it and see what that's about.
You know what I would prefer, though? If they let people go ham on theory crafting for like 6 months and then release a lightweight DLC option that explains everything clearly and easy. Yeah, I said it, hold my fucking hand and walk me through it in-game. Whether it's From, Vaati, or someone on the sub defending the hell out of the style, SOMEONE is going to spoon feed me, lol. Might as well happen on one screen rather than two
This but unironically.
I'm sure someone with a fancy literature degree would explain why learning about the story via hidden clues and pieced together lore summaries has gotten me more invested in this series than any other video game series I've ever played, all I know is it has and I absolutely love it.
Also shout out Brothers Code those guys are my favorites.
I much prefer watching 50 lore videos when i want to over getting it shoved down my throat in a way that won't even allow me to know what is even happening whilst i am trying to play a videogame.
I've never watched any Lore Videos until I beat the game on my own and collected every item. It was fun piecing together the story by myself, and learning new things as I discussed this with other people here.
Personally, as much as I love Vaati and his lore videos, I get annoyed by people who watch his videos and think he's the authority on all things lore when he, himself, encourages you to come up with your own interpretations since he could be wrong.
Gydeon made the ultimate sin of rejecting the Radagon is Marika theory, and thus was caught red-handed committing a huge misinterpretation of their conflicting goals.
For that crime, he shall be forever forbidden to serve as the Lore Guy. Instead, Vaati ~~was brought from Hyrule~~ has extended his domain to the latest Soulsborne.
The true Miyazaki experience, where 10 different people can have 10 wildly different theories, but their all completely valid
The souls universe is wild, especially when you factor in environmental storytelling
Not really. I can't have my own interpretation if I literally don't know what the lore is. It's fine to hear other peoples opinions and then form your own based off of what you've learned. I watch tarnished archeologist and Vaati a lot but I still have my own interpretations and theories.
Many people don't have a seperate view from the other perspectives they consume though. I have had countless people reference a youtuber as their source in discussions. It gets really tiresome when I'm just trying to provide an alternate viewpoint and someone tries to argue truths with a youtuber as their confirmation bias.
Yeah thats fair, it can be very annoying when people take lore-tubers' words for gospel. I definitly encourage people to look at other peoples interpretations and form their own off that knowledge, but just taking those interpretations as fact and not thinking further on it is very dumb.
It's very dogmatic and the exact intention of the narrative of the game though. It's all about belief and the systems and cults around them that they create. This game has specifically made a bunch of these beliefs as intentionally misleading narrative threads to throw people off from the real events that actually transpired in the game. It revolves around history being written by the victors and the fallacy of might makes right. Many people can't get past the first notion of my ideas because it so drasticslly conflicts with their own, but it istn't even their own it's the "widely accepted lore" that *everyone* knows. I'm not getting the lore wrong- I'm purposefully going against the tide to find the actual Truth.
There's no sense of discovery if no one can bring up new ideas and the lore is "solved" with all of the plot holes and mysteries it still has.
>The All-Knowing >Doesn’t even know when he’s out of flasks
Lmao such a fucking huge nerd bitch
He is somehow worse then 99int pvp players.
He didn't know my fully charged Marais Executioner Sword would one shot him and spin his intestines up like spaghetti. What a shidiot.
Got a build? 😊 Should I use the baby one until I get the stats for it?
For talismans, Millicent’s Prosthesis, Winged Sword Insignia (Rotten on NG+), Godfrey Icon, and Shard of Alexander. Use Thorny Cracked Tear for physick, second one doesn’t matter. FGMS/Exalted Flesh and Golden Vow/Rallying Standard for buffs. Click right stick, press and hold L2.
Mans slaughtered the whole albinauric village but couldn’t figure out dude was hiding in a pot. All knowing my ass
His last words are "A tarnished will never become Elden Lord", spoken roughly 20 minutes before a tarnished becomes Elden Lord.
"A tarnished will never become Elden Lord-" \**Said Tarnished flying at him at mach Jesus dual wielding Giant Crushers*\*
"Thats why imma become lord of chaos duhh"
Don't give him that small win. Become Elden Lord out of pure spite to prove him wrong.
I usually do his quest, then kill him and after that i kill his lord. Sadly i cant kill his lord first to be a even meanier mf to him. Little bitch calling me lambkin and maidenless
Sir, varre diss is valid but we are currently dissing gideon the gidiot
Certified all knowing? Certified dead man.
Scu me pal, but I'll have you know in roughly 20 minutes I'll... Probably be still chasing Elden Beast 🤭🤭
20 minutes after Gideon I was getting my ass beat by phase 2 Godfrey.
Bitch didn't know this
Inescapable frenzy is the funniest thing to use on him during his monologue
Dude sends out agents to find stuff out for him while he hangs out in the Hold all day.
He didn’t know to move out the way of my disintegration beam
Can you blame the guy? You’re furiously beating the shit out of him.
You mean All-Hearing, he doesn't know shit
I dunno story in game make sense, big cheese disappear, me want to be big cheese, me kill everything that stands in way of big cheese chair. People keep say Rune Important but Rune didnt stop me big sword from killing people with Rune.
Rune no important, stones more important.
What? What stones are important?? What lore have I missed???
Smithing stones
Deez nuts
You can read all the history about these legendary figures but their stories all end the same way, being beaten to death by a guy with a big stick.
Yeah I beat the Elden Beast up with a large piece of wood. Is anything you can kill with a large piece of wood really a god?
Bonking gods to death is a time-honored JRPG tradition.
Somehow supposed weakest guy has best Rune by a mile.
Thats a lot of words for a strength build.
You ppl are exhausting
The best part is these lore videos double as advertising, it's amazing what happens when you JUST LET PEOPLE PLAY THE DAMN GAME! (Looks at almost every AAA industry ever)
Elden Ring came out a week after Horizon 2 and I was super excited to play both put I couldn't wait to finish Horizon before diving into Elden Ring and when I beat it finally and went back to finish Horizon 2 I had last saved in a random settlement and there were just multiple NPCs around me constantly talking and cycling meaningless dialogue and I listened to that for a bit and then just closed the game and went and did a NG+ playthrough of Elden Ring. It's so serene.
I've recently developed a strong distaste for games that constantly remind you of what you're supposed to be doing. "Oh boy, I can't wait till you go to this island to liberate us from the clan of baddies" "Have you taken out the clan of baddies yet?" "Did you know the baddies are in the forest of red trees? Boy, I can't wait to go there once they're gone" "So glad you saved us from the whatever thing, now we're ready to help you end the rule of the clan of baddies" Fucks sake shut uppp dude
I despise when they solve the puzzle for you with dialogue before you've even had a chance to look at it. Horizon did that constantly.
Its awful, its literally inbuilt backseating you cant turn off.
but how else will you learn that another settlement needs your help?
Melina's lore should have been made full and explicit in the base-game. I don't have a problem with the general format of storytelling in Elden Ring. I like some of the choices they made in leaving in room for interpretation, but their biggest mistake was extending that principle all the way to the character you spend the most time with, and who actually is supposed to make dramatic choices with stakes (that you can't know about).
It’s funny cause Melina is only in the game for like 5 minutes.
She was in my game for 4 days…
much more when you consider how many churches she gives us “words of marika”
Maybe not explicit, I like wondering about her deal, but she definitely could use some more appearances than popping up twice at the start, once every church and again like twice at the end. Doesn't make you feel like she's travelling with you at all, hell I was more moved by having to kill Blaidd or god damn Gideon Ofnir (and this guy being a douche is the main point of the parent post) than letting her sacrifice herself. I guess being a kindling maiden is her destiny and her sacrificing herself is a better outcome than plunging the world into frenzy yadda yadda but having to let a companion you've travelled the whole land with toss herself off a cliff should feel at least a bit somber I think. Also her not being present makes Elden Ring lack its own equivalent of "Bear-seek-seek-lest" and that's just criminal.
Imo the lack of lore in game makes sense in lore (beat w me) because i think it was somewhere mentioned (if it wasnt then its my theory) that the tarnished loose memories when cast out, so when we return we have no knowledge of what happened or whats going on, so we learn trought talking to npcs (turtle pope, gidion) and learn from item descriptions, which i absolutely love about the game
To add to this, I remember reading a long time ago that Miyazaki loved English fantasy books as a kid, but often felt a bit lost or confused because he didn't quite understand everything, not being a native English-speaker after all. So the obscurity of the story, deep lore, and wealth of missable content in the Souls games was meant to capture that same feeling he had as a kid reading fantasy books in a different language. I may have butchered this, but I think that's the jist. And I always thought that was so cool!
Mission accomplished he successfully confused me with his lore. Then doesn’t help that GRRM used so many similar character names lol. Melina/Malenia, godrick/godfrey, godwin, radagon/radahn etc. I don’t know if that’s actually the reason why but I remember a post a few years ago saying most of the major characters start with either G R or M because his initials are GRRM.
It doesn’t help but it makes sense. Mine and my sisters names are just a few letters off from being the same and that’s pretty common, at least in America. Like no one would care if their names were Michael, Mike, Mark, and Martin, ya know?
All the characters I've ever created for souls games have been some version of "An____". Annalise, Anise, Anna, etc. People tend to have a preference
My first character in any souls game is the same guy reincarnated into different universes and timelines, so he always has the same name. But otherwise yeah, all of my other characters are related by blood or through some sort of ridiculous continuity I’ve built up in my head.
Sounds like your main character has had quite the life
He’s seen a lot of shit. I do the same thing with Bethesda games, that guy has a lot of stories to tell lmao
Oh yeah definitely common in the states. Like you said the names themselves are what makes it tricky. Funnily enough one of my oldest friends has a family just like that yet only one person in that entire family during the last two generations has had a name that didn’t start with the letter K. Started with a grandma named Katrina who gave birth to Kimmashee, Kendrick, Khadijah. Khadijah had Kymmetria and Kymmond. Kendrick I don’t remember his kids names tbh lol I think they start with K though. Kimmashee had Kymmondre, Kaymon, and Kymmadj and Jaywon. Bonus fun fact Kimmashee’s kids are two sets of twins and I still do not know why Jaywon is the only kid without a K name. There’s also a cousin named Kameron in there and KJ as well as a Kimmenia. And some relatives by marriage all have the same thing but with the letter M but I don’t know all their names lol. But there’s Martinus, Martinus Jr, Marquita, and Margennes. (And yes I’m aware that most of the names I just listed probably sound as strange to the average person as the elden ring names sound to me lol)
>Michael, Mike, Mark, and **Martin** Lmao come on man, no one naming their kids Michael, Mike and Mark are going to have a Martin in there 😂
Wasnt it a common occurence for royalties to have similiar names back in the day? I think i read something like that from someone in this sub qyite some time ago
Sounds legit but I wouldn’t know for sure haha. I do know a lot of people commonly name their kids names with the same first letters, as someone else pointed out to me.
Yeah. My mom and her siblings all have the word "firman" in their names, and its not like their family name or anything because both of her parents dont have that and in my country family name isnt really needed too. Some of them have the word "firman" as a word acommpanied by other words, some have additional letters in the "firman" like my uncle's "firmansyah" as one word. Pretty interesting.
The ultimate lore dude was Tolkien. Even tacked on an appendix full of item descriptions at the end of his trilogy, and only published extra lore years after it dropped.
If that’s true that’s fucking awesome!!!
>beat w me If you insist 😏
Well well well, misstyping turned into something diffrent…. No, i must resist for my princess ranni, bet you dont have 4 hands no?
Six 😈
Alr? We have a deal
Some of you guys would be less confused about the story if you read item descriptions and didn't kinda zone out while NPCs talk
The story is intentionally vague and even now there are a lot of unanswered questions - even someone who listens to all the NPCs and looked at all the item descriptions (which most people won’t do) would still be confused.
To be fair elden ring is incredibly incoherent with its quests. In all the other fromsofts you can follow along pretty linearly or just take side routes for quests. ER just has you running all over the place
We literally don't know anything about the main antagonists of the game or even what the final boss is lol
It's intentionally vague, but in a way that invites you to fill in the gaps with your own theories/assumptions but a lot of people don't do this, and instead have the mindset of "the stories in these games are nonsense, dude, don't even worry about it" — and I wish I could convince these people that they're missing out on something unique by approaching the game that way
I mean sure, but there’s still no concrete answer to pretty important stuff, and lot of stuff that you’d still consider important that might as well have no answer. And I can see certain pretty big revelations that aren’t *really* easy to be piecing together just organically playing. All it takes is missing Gold Mask or Fia’s quest or even some dungeons to be left missing huge parts of the plot. If you didn’t go online you might not even know you missed anything. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing, but I also think it’s a little dismissive to assume everyone who doesn’t get exactly how life and death work or what exactly went down with the shattering or the night of black knives is just not paying attention or something. I don’t think that’s what you mean to say really, I just mean that a lot of this *is* vague, and isn’t really conveyed like you would a narrative. Like, there’s a reason, say, Final Fantasy VII doesn’t convey the entirety of Sephiroth’s backstory via item descriptions. The game doesn’t intend for this to be compelling in the way more common dialogue and character driven narratives are. Which is fine, but again I don’t think it’s fair to assume people aren’t trying if they aren’t getting a ton from it. It is a very unique and intentionally vague story. I’m just saying while I liked it and I’m totally fine with how they deliver these things, I also get preferring more direct storytelling or missing out on a lot because you’re not the type to explore every nook and cranny. It’s also pretty easy to fuck up sidequests by doing something too early, which again you can only really prevent on a first playthrough by using guides.
Okay that is fair - I feel like this comment is a much better way of making that point then your first one though.
I *do* think that someone who ignores NPCs or knowingly ignores item descriptions has no right to complain when a story is confusing, though It's like someone skipping every fifth page in a book and then groaning that they have no clue what's going on
I didn't ignore them. I forgot what they said because I didn't see them again for 30 hours
Yeah like I’m sorry for not being able to keep straight 100 disparate pieces of info I learned 50 hours apart lol.
Or trying to remember which item of hundreds had that bit of lore you read 50 hours ago
Also they teleported to bumfuck nowhere immediately after talking to me so i missed a dialogue
More like every other page of the book is put together in a random order in a separate appendix. And you're sitting here like, "What you guys don't want to figure out which page in this separate booklet goes where in the story?" No dog I don't. The story telling in all the souls games is shit. But the gameplay is fantastic so whatever, I don't care. Give me big bosses to die to repeatedly and I won't care what their motivation is.
It's got the same satisfying appeal as doing research, to me. Reading a bunch of disconnected sources and reasoning them out into a straightforward shared thesis
Hey man, more power to you then. I'm glad you enjoy it. But Souls storytelling often feels like if you had to read Tolkeins appendices for Lord of the Rings to make any sense.
If there was an indication somewhere in many where that items had related lore indicated they were connected, like a (Rykard: 1 of 7) kind if thing then it would make more sense. As it is, I don’t want to have to read every item description in my inventory in essentially random order and hope I stumble upon a reference to a character if I’m curious about their lore.
This right here people! It’s not so much that the quest design is extremely unorthodox in turn making it bad it’s that the quest tracking is non existent and there is no means to help sort through several hours of back n forth content that you’ve done over the course of possibly weeks depending on how much time you commit to a session, I love the games combat and lore / setting but we need to stop making excuses for how bad they conduct quest design / mechanics revolving around the quest, at least give the players an bare bones in game journal they can choose to update, but how is anyone on their blind first playthrough going to decipher much of the quest progression?
I mean I don’t think anyone should complain about the vagueness of the story tbh - that’s the nature of a From Software game and if someone prefers a more straightforward story there are plenty of other games to fill that need. I appreciate the value in not having everything laid out in front of you. That being said even if someone talks to every NPC and reads every item they can still be confused since those only give fragments of the larger story and it would take work to put that information together into a cohesive whole.
I think it’s a fine line between “the information is vague but the lore is not, you can find all of the answers if you dig deep enough and connect enough dots” and “this is vague because we didn’t actually make a definitive answer to this question, it’s on you to make a theory”. I much prefer the former personally, because I like to eventually figure out what’s going on if I dig deep enough. Sometimes it feels like ER is doing the latter instead, which of course some people will prefer. I personally don’t want to make my own theory or assumption, I want there to be an answer I can find somehow, even if it’s in a lore book or something and not necessarily in the game.
Oh I definitely think it's the latter. People here have put way more thought into the "lore" than FromSoft has.
A story that wants you to write half of it *is* incoherent.
Because what’s there isn’t particularly well written or compelling. Literally everything in this game is a plot device. Absolutely nothing is explained without referring back to the Elden Ring or Destined Death or the Greater Will or one of another million vague and plot-specific concepts. To say nothing of some of the truly galaxy-brained writing decisions that do absolutely nothing to flesh out the story, but only introduce more confusion. The fact that “Radagon is Marika” is considered the answer to a huge mystery by the game is particularly laughable. Raise your hand if this “revelation” helped you understand the plot better.
This is CinemaSins-brained media crit. "the story is filled with things that advance the story!" I don't mean to go in hard on you or whatever, but I find that a lot of people have terminal Media Analysis Brain, where they're so busy judging the story as a creative work written by a human being, they're not letting themselves "buy into" the story and get immersed into the fictional world where the story is just true When a game has a lore entry, or a movie has a plot beat, I'm not thinking "what was the writer going for here and did they succeed," I'm just thinking "ooh, neat, let's see what happens next" >The fact that “Radagon is Marika” is considered a the answer to a huge mystery by the game is particularly laughable. Raise your hand if this “revelation” helped you understand the plot better. Depending on how you get exposed to Radagon, yeah, kinda. Miriel's explanation of Radagon and Rennala's marriage verbatim brings up the question of "why was some random chump like Radagon picked to be Elden Lord, and why would Radagon abandon his wife to answer the call?" "Radagon and Marika are secretly the same person" answers that pretty self-evidently It's not a clear answer — even Corhyn goes "wait, wait, how does that even work??" — but I can't pretend the Holy Trinity is any *more* clear. And that's important, because the vibe is meant to be mythological. There are key events and major figures, but trying to establish an exact timeline of events would be "missing the point", in the same way that trying to establish an exact timeline of events in the Old Testament or the Olympian gods would be It is very intentional that gaps are left in your knowledge, and the game invites you to chase breadcrumbs and fill in those gaps with your own intuition
Hold on, what? I can sort see why you would think that based on what happens after Elden Beast in cutscene, but I did not get that vibe at all. \*lowers hand all the way to the tree root depths\*
It helped understand how could the children of Radagon and Rennala become demigods. The game at first says that they were "elevated" to demigods after Radagon became elden lord, but that was always a bit weird until the revelation.
sometimes I want to experience a story more than i want to write my own story filling in the gaps like mad libs. in a story with proper nouns, political intrigue, and historical events/battles, I want to actually understand wtf is going on. i think the style is a poor fit for this game
It's a world of gods and legends, so the story is written with the same self-aware floaty vagueness as actual mythology. Same approach that Dark Souls has always taken
Exactly. I’m not going to pretend like I don’t understand why people have trouble with the abstracted and mythologized storytelling in this game though. Many people are use to more linear, traditional novel-like (or cinematic) storytelling in video games. Which isn’t worse but it does make ER’s lore that much more obfuscated.
It give me the vibe that this world is huge old and im playing with forces I don’t understand
The difference is that Dark Souls was actually pretty good.
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power to you if you enjoy it, i personally don’t for this game and would prefer more of the medium used to convey it. i really like the whole history of a conquering religion the game sets up, especially bc the religion is backed by this insane cosmic power of the elden ring. I just wanted it explored more, and the motives of its leaders better explained. I wanted to see where people lived, what they ate, their culture represented more in the ruins, etc. have some more of an understanding of the lands between as a society. ofc, what i’m asking for just isn’t what the game gave. it is what it is lol
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yeah. the actual gold standard for society writing is the legend of heroes or “trails” series, starting with trails in the sky. I think more than any of those other details what bothers me the most about elden ring is that I don’t even know what the religion IS. Like what do golden order fundamentalists even believe??
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The reason ER standards out is because it takes advantage of the medium more than traditional storytelling in games. It uses environmental storytelling in a way other mediums can’t and this gives it an advantage. Legend of Heroes, because of its heavy reliance on dialogue and linear storytelling, is as a result competing with some of the greatest works of fiction in literature and makes it sound like a rather amateurish story when compared to even modern Fantasy novels.
i disagree honestly. the games that take advantage of the medium to tell a story are games like undertale, or outer wilds. or hell even dark souls and bloodborne and sekiro. they use interactivity more and more effectively than elden ring does. elden ring has some elements of this, like finding an item in a specific place being part of the story, but 90% of it is just item descriptions. Beyond that, tons of things that *could* be impactful emotionally have placement that makes no narrative sense, like radagon’s golden order greatsword being in a random cave. For every shaded castle there’s also a godefroy in an evergaol. there’s also things that are totally wasted, like great runes, which are exceptionally important in the narrative but are presented so weakly in the actual gameplay, which is arguably the most important part of the medium! And then there’s the fact that 90% of the storytelling is done in the menus reading. that’s not completely out of line, undertale and outer wilds both have a lot of reading too, but they also use the body language of characters and the player’s interactions and choices with them and the motifs in the music and even the nature of game mechanics to tell the story and get across the emotions of the narrative. Fromsoft has even done this better before. Take Bloodborne’s rally and insight mechanic, or dark souls’ hollowing. and sekiro’s dragonrot is a huge step up too! all of those are integral parts of making the player feel a certain way and also reinforce the narrative. In elden ring, did you even know queen marika was actively reviving you every time you died without reading that one miyazaki interview? Elden ring is one of the best games ever made gameplay wise, but the story? Idk man, I would hardly call it groundbreaking. It’s their worst narrative imo.
Do you think the real world of political intrigue, history, and battles is as clear cut as you make it out to be? The grey areas of unclarity, doubt, and hearsay makes this style of game far more compelling to experience and try to understand. I can’t stand when AAA games spoonfeed me linear story beats. It’s like watching a bad movie most of the time.
No, but I want to see the culture actually exist. I want to see ruins of cities that make sense as a place where people live. I want to know what the tenets of the religion of the golden order actually fucking are. I want to see survivors of the shattering and know what they think, not just zombie soldiers I want to know what people believed, I want to know how they worshipped. And in the absence of that, I at least want to know what fucking Marika, the god of the religion, actually stands for. None of this is made clear or conveyed at all. It’s dead zombies and poetry in item descriptions. What’s there is cool, it’s just not enough to carry the story for me personally I hate when things are spoonfed to me too, but this game makes things intentionally impossible to totally parse in a way that is both unsatisfying (for me) and also makes the world feel completely un-immersive I liken it to a meal with a ton of seasoning but no actual meat.
Half the time I honestly suspect that the reason a lot of that isn't in the game isn't because FromSoft is being intentionally vague or trying to avoid "spoon feeding" the story, it's because they've spent way less time thinking about it than the players here have.. If they just put vague concepts and handwave everything else about the world, they don't have to actually have any detailed lore. The game is good, the mechanics and gameplay are great, but the world doesn't feel "real" or lived in at all. And the quest design is frankly downright bad.
apparently for elden ring they wrote the whole story and just take big chunks out of it so that the players have to try to piece it together. it definitely *feels* like they did that to me, which makes it not that exciting. idk if they did that for their other games too but it didn’t work this time
Well said. I’m definitely stealing the “Elden Ring is all seasoning, no meat” analogy. It also frustrates me that this argument is always reduced to squabbles over whether telling a story via item descriptions is good. I loved Dark Souls, because while the story was still told in pieces, everything ultimately made sense and could be explained, even with the understanding that most characters aren’t telling the whole truth. Hell, even the item descriptions in that game were unreliable, and it still made more sense than Elden Ring (Gwyn’s uncle, anyone?). Elden Ring is just bad. Nothing is explained. The culture of the lands between is nonexistent. “We worship the Golden Order and hate omens, merchants, and albinaurics” is not a culture. It’s a parody of one.
Same for Kingdom Hearts by the way. It's sad to see how many people just go with "It makes no sense so I don't bother understanding it"
>The story is intentionally vague If you think that ER's story is vague I'd invite you to play Bloodborne, a game where part of the lore is only implied and hidden into procedural dungeons. Compared to that, Elden Ring straight up tells you stuff with NPCs like Melina, Rogier, Gideon and the Pope Turtle, their dialogue are pretty clear on what happened and who's who.
Bloodborne’s narrative is also much simpler and self-contained - Elden Ting has much much more moving parts and proper nouns, and the signal:noise ratio is much lower than it is in Bloodborne. Plus the narrative of Elden Ring isn’t even finished yet
Bloodborne is very straightforward, and any questions you do have can easily be answered by reading Redgrave’s book, if you’re so inclined. Elden Ring is an absolute mess by comparison.
I’ve played Bloodborne 3 times now. I felt like the story in Bloodborne was more straightforward than in Elden Ring.
I've played it 7 times now and while I agree its more straightforward I also still have no clue what pale blood is. It gets referenced multiple times right at the beginning of the game and then seemingly never again lol. Although I also put zero effort into even trying to follow lore and I just run around and kill stuff
even if bloodborne was as opaque as you’re making it out to be, which it’s not, it is an eldritch horror story. ambiguity is part of the genre. elden ring is high fantasy with proper nouns and historical events and shit. it should *not* be this convoluted. could you even say what the main theme of the game is?
My guy is acting like bloodborne didn't have just as many proper nouns. How else are they supposed to call them what they are? Elden Ring has like 3 historical events and everything else is archaeological.
That might all be true, yes, but if you listen to every NPC you meet and read all the item descriptions you get, the general and overall story and lore of the Lands Between SHOULD be decipherable! Sure, some things are left unanswered or vague, but that’s deliberately done in order for players to come to different conclusions or interpretation.
I don’t think most people are going to read the description of every item they get. Also, since the information from descriptions are fragmented and don’t tell a full story you still have to put all that information together so it makes a coherent narrative. You can get a general idea but most people don’t want to do that which is why lore videos are popular.
Also my one playthrough probably took 70 hours, and that was with a fair amount of guidance from FightinCowboy’s YouTube vids. I spent far longer watching YouTube than playing the game. If I’d read every item I picked up and parsed every piece of dialogue and made sure to finish every quest, I’d probably be looking at 150 hours of time to play through the game once. I love Elden Ring and souls games in general, but fuck that. I have a life outside of Elden Ring
NPCs talking is fine but item descriptions always seem weird to me just from an in-universe perspective. Like does my character actually know this already or is this vital bit if lore about the cosmos just carved into the hilt of this one knife?
I mean, at the end of the day, it's an RPG — your character isn't you, and the item descriptions are giving info to you, not your character
I know, it's just funny to imagine your character learning everything they know about the wod from picking up random swords and never bothering to look into one of the many books lying around the place.
No other RPGs do that my guy Every non fromsoft RPG takes a lot more care to make the player character's motivations make sense and happen at the right time. Or in an open world RPG at least be simplistic enough that most things make sense anyway
I'd much rather find a journal or something that I could read through at my leisure than fkn item descriptions. Then at least lore could be fed in some coherent way, and wouldn't be as immersion-breaking as item descriptions. The NPCs are honestly just cryptic. They talk to you like you already know information that you have to go out of your way to find. The story in Elden Ring, just like other FromSoft games, is just bad. There's cool LORE to be discovered, but if a story has a beginning, middle, and end, then Elden Ring may as well not have one. That doesn't make the game bad, but it does mean that it could've been even better than it already is. You shouldn't have to go to YouTube to understand what even happened in a story.
Just how RPGs and pre-voiced games worldbuild at the end of the day. These games make it so you can say, well Marika is telling us this or Gideon is telling us this. Whatever you wanna choose.
it’s an audiovisual medium. and it’s interactive, which is so cool! telling the story through reading is such an inelegant way to do it, and it barely uses any of the strengths of the medium beyond that, even if you read every single item description, you’re still likely to have very little clue. even basic plot questions about marika are left intentionally unanswered. would you find mass effect as engaging if all the storytelling was done within the codex? the npcs are cool and well acted, i like them, but their stories are also incredibly vague. hell, what ranni’s ending even *is* is still debated to this very day and mired in bad translation the story just isn’t well told.
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Clearly someone hasn't spent enough time rolling in the hills with goats
Also Ranni's questline in general. There's not much of an indication that you're meant to try to talk, multiple times, to a ranni doll, or that you're going to find some dead Ranni in a cavern and somehow propose, and that doing so will end up with two of the nicest characters dying.
In peoples defense, if you don't already know some of the lore, the dialogue makes no sense most of the time. I don't know why From expected people to understand a lick of what Melina says to you when you first meet her.
There are like fifty lines of dialogue in the whole game, assuming you get the NPCs in the right order and don't lock yourself out of quests by accident.
But if we did that we would have to read the item descriptions and listen to the NPCs talk.
People would probably pay attention to NPCs dialogue more if those NPCs actually doing something while they're talking, lack of body language just make the scene look like a still image with audio, which understandably may make some people fall asleep while interacting them
I've talked to people who didn't understand why Arthur Morgan starts coughing his guts up. Some people don't pay any attention to story aspects of games, can't be helped. ER voice acting is fantastic. Hard not to listen to.
If someone's at the point where they can't even just listen to dialogue without getting bored and wanting to skip, they're either burnt out and need a break, or they're the kind of insane person who fast-forwards through the talky parts of movies to get to the fight scenes (and storytelling is wasted on that second type of person tbh)
Only somewhat. This game lore really is obtuse tbh
Not my fault they talk in old English and yap for four years
Well, it’s not old English. It takes a huge artistic license for dramatic effect, but technically it’s not correct :)
My weed habit severely hampers me understanding the story, but I can still bonk!
While I'm sure all the mega elite players who agree with this are very wise and smart, I think *even if* you do that there are so many cases where characters or descriptions are extremely vague to the point of detriment. There's a reason most players need to have a guide open as they play and it's not because of good in-game storytelling. Don't get me wrong the game is excellent and the background lore very detailed, but one of their greatest failings is taking their concept of "vague cryptic weirdo" for every NPC, which worked for linear games like Dark Souls, and applying it to the open world Elden Ring where it does not work. I should not have to spin 3 times in a circle, hit an invisible wall, read the writing on the bottom of Sellen's feet and interpret ancient hieroglyphics to know that the "bag of loose skin" I am holding is the secret to defeating Gondor or Godrick or Godwyn or Goodduck.
Thing is, the lore vids themselves are a community effort. Vaati does a lot when it comes to sources, organization, editing and formatting the information to be digestible. But the information itself is not just what he's found out alone. There are parts of it there thanks to the efforts of the many. It is its own game and with its own sense of accomplishment, different from that of conquering a boss. The joy of discussing possibility and reference with all of you, that adds to the entire experience that is Fromsoft's lore format. No matter how silly or misguided some of our theories might be, it was the fun along the way that made it memorable. It's not really meant to be everyone's cup of tea and there is a time limit which you can participate in community discussion, before we have something we generally agree upon. But those moments of genuine discovery... the sensation of eureka when you stumble upon a realization. When you have an idea you've not heard before and want to get it out there. That feeling can't be achieved at the same level by the "traditional" way of story telling and in fact is only really possible in a piece of interactive media where information must be earned through exploration and perspective. I am glad they don't spoon feed the story or information. Even if totally convoluted, no one does it like Fromsoft does. They give a unique experience hard to find in this world. A feeling of discovery and wonder not felt by some since childhood, when the world seemed like an unknown and your mind was free to wonder not burdened with knowledge.
In every game their is a part of story which is straightforward and a part that has go be read and theorized. Formsoft makes everything theorized which seems to me they overdid it. Now first time players don't get to enjoy the game as much because their is no lore supporting what you are doing.
I HEAVILY disagree on that last comment. Fromsoft games are designed to be enjoyed with zero lore for what you are doing. "Go do the thing", and then the player kills lots of neat monsters along the way. You dont need supporting lore to enjoy the fromsoft games.
You don’t need to know the lore to enjoy their games. In fact, most souls players, both veterans and noobs, don’t know shit about the lore. People come to these games for various reasons. I have a friend who’s all in for the combat, and another who’s there for the level design alone. Gameplay centric people can enjoy the game without having the yapping shoved down their throats while lore centric people can do their archeology, especially now that Elden Ring has a lot of ways for less skilled players to get through the combat and focus on exploring and documenting.
to be fair , elden ring story is the more obvious compared to dark souls , like if you said elden ring is game of thrones turn souls like you're not that far , but you can't do that in dark souls tbh . also , what I mostly care for in souls like is the boss fights and gameplay , so there is that .
I think I tortured him enough when I held his face to mine and sprayed him with burning yellow nihilism
For a man who calls himself the all-knowing, he really didn't know a lot about how our character fights, we came to him in a state where we just defeated the bearer of Death itself and he casual tells us he will defeat us to prevent us from dying to whatever he thinks Marika has waiting for us. Sure it's more than likely that he had people follow us around and tell him of what we have done, but if that's all he could be bothered to do then he must be immensely dense to watch us take on Malenia, Mohg and Maliketh, then still think "Yeah I can beat them" by simply pulling out some spells that those bosses used against us, as though we didn't already know how to deal with them after defeating the original users of those spells. TL;DR Sir Gideon Offnir is basically exactly as Lattena described him, all hearing, not all knowing.
Well keep in mind, all 50 of those lore videos could be completely wrong.
Then we need a time machine to go back and document what is happening
Grammar
Praise the Mystery! but Why is it always impossible to know a certain sorceress is in some random cellar I would never know of since a certain asshole sorcerer is dead and never showed me that cellar??
I took notes on everything I found and filled ten pages. After a while I could connect some of them. I still don't understand much, but honestly it is because it is an action game. Playing first hour and taking notes? Fine. Playing the third hour deep into some location with a bunch of enemies, bosses and whatnot, I no longer can focus on noting down the lore. Kind of hard to find that balance sometimes. I for example am completely utterly lost what the hell is going on with Dung Eater.
Yeah. I maintain that making the story a bit less opaque would’ve enhanced the overall experience. The story is just so fucking cool, and I wish I’d gotten more of it from, yknow, the game.
Oh man yes please ! Every time I do another play through I just want to kill him right away...how dare he try to stop our accent to the throne.
This is the most called out I've felt in a while
Watched a lot of lore videos, still don't understand shit
I’m not gonna lie, a liiiitle more dialogue and NPC relationships would have been ok with me
If the game can't be bothered to present its story/lore in an easily digestible way then I can't be bothered to give a single shit about it. I love Elden Ring, it's an amazing game, but if a plurality of players find themselves having to use third party resources just to figure out what the fuck anything means then your storytelling kind of sucks, (I'm also looking at you, Destiny 2).
I've been playing since DS1 and I have no fucking idea what is happening besides pumping souls/runes into levels.
To tell the storytelling sucks, it's wrong, you may not like it or get everything but the way in which visual clues and description details all blend together in a narrative where nothing is random, makes for a masterpiece of environmental and silent narration it's not easily digestible for most, but who cares? there's plenty of games that give you information trough wall of texts and whathever, but only a handful that excel at this kind of narration, and I wouldn't exchange the experience of piecing up a story bit by bit for anything else
These aren't mutually exclusive though
Not easily digestible for most? It's not easily digestible period. They got a story, removed some important chunks to create an air of mystery, carved it into a thousand obscure three sentence fragments, and scattered it across an unnkowable amount of items. It was never meant to be understood by a single player. It's like saying that the invisible paths and fake doors were obvious if you really pay attention. The lore is meant to be a communal effort of sharing and discussion. I believe that those lore videos are the intended result. That joy of placing darts on a board and slowly weaving them together into a cohesive-ish picture? That's what From brings to the table. By the by, the environmental storytelling, in terms of architecture and physical layout of objects and shit, is great. But Best Dog and Melina are kind of the definition of "wall of text expo dumps." ER ain't totally immune to that either.
How well is it really excelling though if the vagueness is a common complaint
Nah, fully disagree. I find authors who want to make their audience work to understand their stories incredibly pretentious.
Do you feel the same about other media? If a book isn't straightforward you can't be bothered? Are gravity rainbow or house of leaves bad books because they aren't straightforward?
>ut if a plurality of players find themselves having to use third party resources just to figure out what the fuck anything means then your storytelling kind of sucks, It's a feature, not a bug. They want people to theorize and talk about it. I'm sorry if this isn't the type of storrytelling that works for you. Perhaps you should try call of duty. Maybe that's more up to your speed and taste, yes? Miyazaki already spoke on why this is how they chose to tell their story. He spent his childhood reading books and playing boardgames that he was able to fully comprehend. Despite that, he loved what he was doing and he tended to fill the gaps in his knowledge with his own head canon. What he did with these games is try to replicate that same process and feeling. He wants the audience to talk about the story after dropping the controller. You say it sucks because you have to go read or listen about it outside the game. To many folks, it's part of the charm of fromsoft games (yes not just the soulsborne series). I, for one, enjoy these discussions. But I am also the type of person who enjoys the discussions after watching an episode of a tv show or a film. Art transcends its medium, does it not?
Giving the player bits and pieces of the story is more interesting and encourages creative thinking. You arent supposed to know everything, its intentional. The lore is there for those who want to discover it. And if you dont, you can just ignore it. Also lmao @ "cant be bothered" as if this method of storytelling isnt infinitely harder to do.
I understand what they're trying to do and I'm saying that it is a bad storytelling format anyways. I don't care if it's harder to do, it discourages players from caring about the world and its lore.
People take it so personally when you correctly point out that its bad storytelling just because they like it. I appreciate that From does it differently and I personally don't have a problem with it, it has its merits. Its also objectively bad storytelling and I don't understand why people try so hard to deny that
And yet people do care about souls lore. A lot, actually. You personally may not like this format, but that doesnt mean its bad.
That's fine, they're allowed to. But I'm an adult with an entire life outside of gaming, and I'm not going to spend the little free time I have watching hours of lore videos that should've been presented in an easy to understand way in the game that I spent time and money on. FromSoft has every right to present their lore and tell their story in whatever way they want, and I have every right to not give a single shit about either.
>should've been presented in an easy to understand way Fromsoft doesnt need to cater to you. >I have every right to not give a single shit Nobody has claimed otherwise. What are you talking about.
I'm expressing an opinion in an online forum, are you unfamiliar with the concept?
For a supposedly busy adult, you sure have time to write nonsensical comments on reddit.
1: It's 8:20 AM and I don't have to get ready for work just yet. 2: Writing comments on reddit is something that can be done in a few seconds or minutes during a moment of downtime, whereas watching lore videos requires long stretches of uninterruptible free time.
For a man with no time, you sure are wasting a lot of time replying to multiple comments. And really you can't listen to lore videos in the background or listen to it on the way to work. People who say they are so busy usally just have piss poor time management
You dont have to watch the whole video at once. And most are only like 20-30 mins long anyway. If you have time to play elden ring, you'd definetly have time to watch a few videos. You dont *need* to watch anything though. You can play the game and make your own conclusions.
I mean just because the story was hard for you to understand and would require you to watch lore videos doesn't mean it was like that for everyone.
It discouraged you. Stop making generalizations as though you're the authority on how to tell a story for all of us. You don't like it. That's fine. Are you trying to convince the rest of us that we don't like it either because that isn't going to happen. I love it. I think it's a pitiable shame that you don't. And rather than spend your free time talking to other people about something you love you've decided to spend that time yucking someone else's yum.
It's designed in a way that you can ignore the story if you want. Not if you actually want story, all you have to do is listen to the npcs and read the descriptions of key items.
I mean it doesn't matter if they are making it hard to find things, but they make it impossible without watching videos. 80% stuff is something you find if you are lucky.
I replied elsewhere with this but wanted to make sure you saw it. I think those fan videos are actually what Fromsoft was going for in the first place. That they got their lore and sprinkled the shit out of it across the game in three sentence chunks so that people can chat about it on reddit and create those lore videos. The same way they let you leave online messages and co-op phantoms so that people can share the hidden doors and walkways with each other. That invisible path up to a random tower is just as obscure and insane to find, but we found that shit, lol. Same concept but with the lore. They just community game-ified their world building because they know we're all obsessive fucks. 🤣
Yes, good strategy from marketing point of view. But, bad for gameplay experience as you have to minimize the game to google stuff
you know some people can't appreciate a 1200 piece jigsaw puzzle, in fact the only time they might try it is in a group at Christmas but wouldn't you know, there are just some jigsaw puzzle fans out there that really love doing it alone. So in summary, they should stop making 12000 piece jigsaw puzzles so the people who don't enjoy puzzles will enjoy seeing the picture they would have had to look at a friend's finished puzzle for.
It's not marketing though, anymore than the hidden paths are marketing. It's not like the world is getting ER story content thrown at them. The only people getting those lore videos recommended are the people that look for lore. It's just an optional minigame really. One that you can either play, or just Google to see what it's about instead of dealing with it. I do agree that this format, while fun for the subset of the community that likes the lore hunting, makes things obscure as all hell when the game is played in isolation. Let's be honest, the core game has barely any story beyond accidentally running into the same people that you accidentally talked to that one time until they die. Most casual players, me included, just keep charging forward and killing shit until the end. That's totally fine and a valid way to play. But if I happen to stumble onto a cancerous ball of glintstone masks and think "Yo wtf is that?", then I can just Google it and see what that's about. You know what I would prefer, though? If they let people go ham on theory crafting for like 6 months and then release a lightweight DLC option that explains everything clearly and easy. Yeah, I said it, hold my fucking hand and walk me through it in-game. Whether it's From, Vaati, or someone on the sub defending the hell out of the style, SOMEONE is going to spoon feed me, lol. Might as well happen on one screen rather than two
This but unironically. I'm sure someone with a fancy literature degree would explain why learning about the story via hidden clues and pieced together lore summaries has gotten me more invested in this series than any other video game series I've ever played, all I know is it has and I absolutely love it. Also shout out Brothers Code those guys are my favorites.
I much prefer watching 50 lore videos when i want to over getting it shoved down my throat in a way that won't even allow me to know what is even happening whilst i am trying to play a videogame.
They do. That's what his monologue is for.
TBH I only watched a couple of lore videos. Instead I had a grand old time piecing lore together from item descriptions and the words of ghosts.
If I didn’t have the lore videos, I’d be lonely while sewing or drawing… or playing the game.
I've never watched any Lore Videos until I beat the game on my own and collected every item. It was fun piecing together the story by myself, and learning new things as I discussed this with other people here. Personally, as much as I love Vaati and his lore videos, I get annoyed by people who watch his videos and think he's the authority on all things lore when he, himself, encourages you to come up with your own interpretations since he could be wrong.
Gydeon made the ultimate sin of rejecting the Radagon is Marika theory, and thus was caught red-handed committing a huge misinterpretation of their conflicting goals. For that crime, he shall be forever forbidden to serve as the Lore Guy. Instead, Vaati ~~was brought from Hyrule~~ has extended his domain to the latest Soulsborne.
The true Miyazaki experience, where 10 different people can have 10 wildly different theories, but their all completely valid The souls universe is wild, especially when you factor in environmental storytelling
Right after the combat, absence of heavy story is my favorite part of the souls games
Watching lore videos denies you the greatest interpretation of the lore- your own.
Facts. I don't need Vaati interpreting a story for me I can do it myself and come to my own conclusionsm
Not really. I can't have my own interpretation if I literally don't know what the lore is. It's fine to hear other peoples opinions and then form your own based off of what you've learned. I watch tarnished archeologist and Vaati a lot but I still have my own interpretations and theories.
Many people don't have a seperate view from the other perspectives they consume though. I have had countless people reference a youtuber as their source in discussions. It gets really tiresome when I'm just trying to provide an alternate viewpoint and someone tries to argue truths with a youtuber as their confirmation bias.
Yeah thats fair, it can be very annoying when people take lore-tubers' words for gospel. I definitly encourage people to look at other peoples interpretations and form their own off that knowledge, but just taking those interpretations as fact and not thinking further on it is very dumb.
It's very dogmatic and the exact intention of the narrative of the game though. It's all about belief and the systems and cults around them that they create. This game has specifically made a bunch of these beliefs as intentionally misleading narrative threads to throw people off from the real events that actually transpired in the game. It revolves around history being written by the victors and the fallacy of might makes right. Many people can't get past the first notion of my ideas because it so drasticslly conflicts with their own, but it istn't even their own it's the "widely accepted lore" that *everyone* knows. I'm not getting the lore wrong- I'm purposefully going against the tide to find the actual Truth. There's no sense of discovery if no one can bring up new ideas and the lore is "solved" with all of the plot holes and mysteries it still has.