#soulsbornes

[prokopetz]

I mean, I guess a Soulsborne where you actually get to play as the incongruously barefoot level-up maiden was the logical next step.

[hyperfixedbrain]

Micolash.. the old grumpy smoker is ready for fall 🍁

[smbhax]

Dark Souls III

[vroenis]

SoulsBornes, Accessibility, Dear Ester & Mood

It's possible I'm here to shitstir. I don't think I am, but this is going to be a uniquely me perspective. I'm not here to speak for anyone else, which seems like a weird thing to say because I'm about to speak to some of the things I feel I'm observing in others, so that doesn't really make sense.

Let's talk about Elden Ring.

At some point I have to stop being concerned with how I might come off to try and diffuse it and just go for it. Let's make that point now. I absolutely 100% appreciate why people want accessibility for Elden Ring and the SoulsBornes before it. I want to talk about why. I also understand much of the pushback against it. I want to talk about that, too. I think there's something greater and more interesting than any of the individual arguments at play here and it can benefit everyone to understand them. Like a real fucken wanker, I think it's something I understand a lot about, but at least I don't think I understand more about it than anyone else, I just think a fair amount of people have maybe ignored it and if they took it into consideration, a lot of things might make sense.

There's some good writing and media about how difficulty options are indeed accessibility options and I agree with this, I don't think there's any dispute about that. There's also a lot of good writing and media that doesn't devolve into auteur theory about how challenge and indeed failure - even frustration, are intrinsic to the core of what a SoulsBorne game is and I agree with that, too. Without getting too bogged down in definitions, because definitions are boring, I want to try and describe the basic tenets of a SoulsBorne game that FromSoft focus on and in turn hope the player focusses on (in no particular order);

Exploration and discovery

Development of player skill and manual dexterity (literally button, controller and mouse inputs etc.)

Focus on learning through observation and repetition

Subversion of expectations built on previously established dynamics

Light on exposition but heavy on narrative (potentially heavier than all games with hours of voiced cut-scenes combined)

A dynamic and partially asynchronous community experience where accounts of events and encounters are shared outside of the game world

And lastly the ace that you all knew was coming... Mood and Atmosphere yes I capitalised them.

While I appreciate there's some stirring about with regards to narrative, I don't believe any significant advocate for accessibility is asking for the way FromSoft's stories are told to be any different. The way narrative is expressed in these games is one of its strongest elements and one of the ones I think people want access to as it is. The main accessibility challenges as I understand them, and forgive me if I haven't read enough as I certainly don't have the same contact level with culture as I once did, are as follows;

Combat is extremely difficult and is a significant barrier to entry

Lack of signposting makes "knowing what to do" or "the right thing to do" obscure. I started saying "seem obscure" then but it definitely is obscure, and that's by design.

I have a few things to say up front that I think SoulsBorne fans need to understand - having the difficulty ramped down will not affect their experience of the game. They can still experience the game fully the way it was intended. Getting angry about other people having a different experience of the game seems antithetical to the existing tenet of SoulsBornes that is all players explore and build their characters differently, thus having unique perceptions and experiences of the game despite sharing many common moments. This couldn't be more true with Elden Ring, so thinking that easing the difficulty would somehow make the collective experience of the game impure in some way... is absurd.

If anything, a more nuanced challenge would be that everything in SoulsBornes is so delicately and finely balanced to craft experiences in a certain way, that re-coding that balance would be difficult. Off the top of my head, I don't think that's true, but then I'm not a developer so I wouldn't know - I'm just thinking of straight percentage scaling across the whole game so things just take fewer hits and do less damage. You'll still get plenty of moments when you just need one more level to kill something in two hits instead of three, just need a few more levels for a weapon or stat to increase damage output or survivability be it thru movement, damage absorption or utility etc., the margins just shift slightly.

There's probably some discussion of tutorialising and I don't think the game needs that, either - even if there was damage scaling for difficulty, it's a core tenet of the game to be attentive and read all item and statistic texts, the same way one needs to pay attention to all dialogue - wonderfully sparse as it is - and narrative related texts strewn about the worlds.

There are two things I think this whole discussion is about, that I think I can pose with two questions;

What is the actual barrier to access?

What is it we want to access?

The Barrier To Access

I do need to stop here and state that I'm not addressing disability. A few games of late have done really great things for accessibility when it comes to physical and mental challenges and that's great. Whether or not FromSoft can or should do this, I don't want to discuss. That definitely does take time and money and I do think all developers should at least consider it, even if it's just an open discussion of what could be done had they they time and money. We can't get better at these things until we improve our understanding of them.

I know many people will offer varying answers so I don't at all wish to speak for everyone. The way I perceive it, the actual real barrier to access for SoulsBornes is time. For fans of the game, nothing is wasted by playing for hours and then dying to a boss - then dying to that boss again and again and again. Each death is a learning experience, in observing movement, in understanding damage both given and taken, in experimenting with what utilities offer solutions to various combat challenges. They're also happy to not "beat" the boss at the first encounter and return when they've levelled-up. A dear friend of mine made a really great point and all SoulsBornes give you an abject lesson in not assuming you're capable of overcoming every challenge you're offered immediately upon first discovering it. This is an expectation that contemporary video games have given many players - you will always be appropriately levelled, you will always be told what to do, everything will be clear.

Let me tell you something. I don't play SoulsBornes... But I HATE the school of design that is oversaturation of instruction and tempering experiences so they're optimised to the nth degree.

Now seems like a good time to make quick mention of the UI/UX discussion (sorry I'm letting the zeitgeist to a lot of heavy lifting here as I'm too lazy to link everything - I'm not a researcher). After it had brewed for about a day, I saw a great take from someone in the community that said both SoulsBornes and Ubisoft games have UI/UX designed to achieve the exact same thing; Time On Screen. SoulsBornes' UI and UX work famously well for their fans, and it's because they're so intelligently keyed into the experience that the game is. I think that really is more intentional design than it is lofty arty-farty auteur bullshit.

Anyway, back to time, many of us don't have the time it requires to progress in SoulsBornes - I definitely am one of them. It's true, some things do take a lot of effort in order to achieve something. Where I wiggle a bit on that is playing and experiencing a video game is not the same as learning a language or skill like cooking - the skills to overcome many of the challenges in SoulsBornes are significantly manual dexterity ones and those actually don't differ to any bland Ubisoft game at all. But again, where I swing back the other way is that much of the cinema I enjoy has been said to be inaccessible to people which of-course I don't understand because I don't feel like there are any barriers to understanding access for me... but then I remember that I've spent a lot of my life watching Weird Cinema™. I can't ignore the fact that it's established a high fluency in non-traditional visual language and of-course, the degree to which a film might be perceived as obscure or have an obfuscated experience, can certainly scale. There are easier films to ease into weirdness. Is that what we're talking about with SoulsBornes?

I slipped up tho and mentioned time with regards to watching films, without noticing it. I invested time in understanding. Movies are perhaps a little easier to experience and develop fluency in considering one might go for three hours at the longest and as short as a couple of minutes for short format pictures. Nevertheless it's kind of analogous, isn't it? We don't have the minimum time it takes to overcome challenges and immerse ourselves in the full experience.

We're drilling towards the second element;

What We're Trying To Access

SoulsBornes and in particular the most recent iteration, Elden Ring, I feel are incredibly enticing because of the sum of their parts - and like a schmuck, you know this is when I'm going to say

Mood.

Again, I know everyone engages with the games in different ways, but it wouldn't be enough if they just had challenging combat. It wouldn't be enough if they just didn't signpost. It wouldn't be enough if it was just about the narrative being drip-fed in a scant handful of cutscenes and a thousand little notes and texts everywhere. I also shouldn't overlook Miyazaki's absolute intention for the community to come together and share their experiences and discoveries - that is incredibly important to the intention of the design.

All of these things combine into a mood, and at this point, I feel the visuals and overall tone take a front seat, so too the significantly reduced dialogue when compared to their contemporaries. I feel like everything about these games is informed by an overall drive to create very specific atmospheres. I appreciate that almost all of the themes of SoulsBornes centre around decline, desolation, regret, anger, guilt etc. but I don't find any of that harrowing at all - again, perhaps a learning from cinema, those things only inform the way the game feels. Even any sense of oppression and gloom are still combining to something greater. I feel it's that tone that people want to access. Lord knows after the last three video games I've tried to play had so much fucking talking, I couldn't bear how much they talked at me, that a game like Elden Ring offers a wonderful and refreshing change of pace. Much of any SoulsBorne is a serene affair. Perhaps the desolated landscapes ever-present in all the games reflects some of our perceptions of our lives, but I don't want to wade too far into "life sad so game sad identifies with me" territory because I definitely don't do that with films... exactly... I have talked about it before but I'll briefly touch on it here.

Moods in the way I've decided to characterise them specifically as pieces of art, are catalysts for us with which to process or affirm our experience thru. That absolutely does not require similar experiences to be shared, they can and often are completely abstract, but we still use art as expressions of our feelings, our experiences, our thoughts. Those elements can be simple and they can be complex and textured. I got highly emotional driving The Need For Speed 2 SE and NFS 3 and they're just driving games. Similarly I'm sure many folks love running around in Elden Ring smashing foes and that doesn't mean at all their take is shallow - it literally doesn't matter - whatever joy, catharsis, recognition and representation, or expression of play a person has, is wonderful and valid and an amazing phenomenon unique to video games.

So if some of us are trying to access the tone of SoulsBornes but can't, what's to be done?

I know a lot of "play something else" is dismissive, but there's a truth to it, and by the by, we should say it with kindness and generosity rather than aloof git-gud bullshit sass. When I think about the tone of SoulsBornes, I often think about Dear Ester. On socials and in some of my writing in the past, I've discussed sometimes just not wanting to put in the labour of combat, and Dear Ester is overflowing with tone and atmosphere and asks very little in the way of manual dexterity. There's a way in which asking for easier combat in Elden Ring might be akin to asking for combat in Dear Ester. I know, I know, you're going to say that the lack of combat in Dear Ester doesn't prevent anyone from playing it, but it's just as interesting a question of why some people can't process it with its almost complete lack of interactivity. The way one plays Dear Ester is extremely different to the way one plays Dark Souls, and both equally have as much to say. Is there a literacy/fluency barrier for Dear Ester? Just because it isn't in the form of manual dexterity, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

The same might be said about my (equal with Howling Dogs) favourite game of all time, Kentucky Route Zero. The act of playing the game is easy, but understanding it? Understanding more than its narrative because it absolutely without a doubt is saying more than its main text? The difficulty just shifts... it's just that fewer people are asking to parse Dear Ester and KRZ because they're so unorthodox.

You can, of-course, watch a stream or VOD/video of Elden Ring and I think there's a lot of the tone that can be garnered from that. It definitely is not the same as navigating the space yourself tho, as even discounting combat and player-death and what they mean, how important they are to the experience, there's a difference between watching someone else's actions in which you are only an observer, and being a participant and being able to make decisions like stopping to take in the atmosphere for as long as you like.

The Point

I don't know whether Miyazaki and FromSoft will ever make the games easier. I also don't know what my life will look like a year from now so maybe I actually will have the time to dedicate to the skill curve of Elden Ring. I have to say mastering combat doesn't interest me so there's a chunk philosophy at the core of SoulsBornes I'm not up for, and that chunk is a meaningful and important part of the games. I totally appreciate that meaning and it's expertly crafted, I just don't want to have to do it. I feel like that's a good thing, tho, as the people who can and do develop those skills, many of which take on their meaning very well, get to enjoy something truly remarkable and wonderful.

As for the mood we're striving for, the thing that forms a catalyst for expressions of our thoughts and emotions, rather than making Elden Ring fit into our needs, my hope is that instead we seek to capture similar moods and expressions in a greater variety of games. SoulsBornes might seem to gain a fanbase and sell because they have difficult combat, but I think it's more than that - I think it's because they're so different. The curious out-selling of Horizon Zero Dawn: Forbidden West (please stop with elongating titles for FUCK'S SAKE) is a keen lesson in there clearly being an audience for games that differ from the norm. I adored the first HZD but I absolutely do not have another game in me. It's more of the same, and similar to all other open world games. Sure, so was the first one but once again I was into it as a mood piece, and the second game really doesn't feel any different. I don't need the same catalyst.

It'll always come back to that for me, to the Mood Catalogue, and while I like to think I thought the idea up like a dickhead, the truth is plenty of people engage in art the same way and many of them consciously in the very ways I talk about it. We seek to add moods with which to express our lives, to see our emotions represented or express our emotions thru experiencing them, to be catalysts for joy, to be catharsis or distraction or celebration - to facilitate our coping, our mourning, our anger and our peace.

I'm not at all saying "if you want something for you, just make your own" as if that's an easy thing to do - but perhaps if HZD is going to be mcfranchised to fuck like everything these days, maybe it can take some cues from Elden Ring. Isn't that what Santa Monica did with God of War? It was a complete tonal shift compared to the previous chapter of the games' moods and succeeded famously for it.

I'm very happy to live my experience of SoulsBornes via my best friend when they play them, via VaatiVidya and other great commentators. What I hope for is more games informed by difference, restraint, and a drive to create atmosphere.

and LESS FUCKING DIALOGUE ACTUALLY FORGET IT THIS IS THE ONLY LESSON PLEASE LESS TALKING DEAR LORD GOD fucken

[prokopetz]

Concept: puzzle-centric walking simulator where you’re playing as an archaeologist in a modern-ish milieu that’s notionally situated a thousand years in the future of a stereotypical Soulsborne-type setting. All that skeleton war bullshit happened centuries ago, so you’re in no personal danger, but every single thing you discover is more fucked up than the last. So far you haven’t encountered a single set of remains that suggests a natural death. It should be logistically impossible for there to be this many skulls, given the region’s known population data. You just found an inscription bashed into solid rock that somehow contains five minutes of unskippable laughter.

[prokopetz]

The Locked Tomb is literally just what a Soulsborne looks like from the perspective of the bad guys, isn’t it?

[hyperfixedbrain]

cunt

[hyperfixedbrain]

Here is Laurence, the man, the cunt, the legend 🔥