rted to this completely different area as well it's like oh Jesus just real quick so someone said are you not gonna talk about the horse then it's like okay so 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 20 15 subjects I've got left listed okay and we are 5 hours and 20 minutes in the horse nice way to get around I hate fighting on it we're on open will for now we'll come back to the horse okay well that's all I'm saying I don't have much to say at all about the horse I have plenty to say about it so anyway the hope of will I I'm pretty much line up entirely with metal and I think the this is gonna be a big old subjectism for me because I just love the way everything looks in this world I yeah really get a good sense of exploring places rather than just repeated assets though I think if I were more cynical or if someone was to show me how much everything is similar maybe I could be changed on that but I was just enjoying my time especially with the vista changes there are some areas that are so impactful to me stylistically that I was just like man I'm just happy to be here I don't care what there is or what enemies there are I'm just happy to be here I like it on that point there are some like really cinematic almost like you'll turn a corner and it seems like they they've just up the render distance for that particular area where you'll see like a big fucking building etched into a mountain or something and you're just like holy fuck this looks actually cinematic as if they pre-recorded but they didn't because you literally just turned the corner yourself for any share I might give the open world which is mostly a personal thing I cannot deny that the way they use their space is very impressive in places they they do really well with the sense of scale because you can tell it's you know you know the view from Firelink Shrine where you put these giant walls rising up all around you it felt like it felt like with that so they want to make the full world but they can't and here they're finally allowed okay we can we can take the scale of Lordran and we can just make that we can make the entire thing I was blown away by how there wasn't really anything I ever saw in the distance that I couldn't just walk over to yeah the divine towers are the most impressive one that for me which has always been yeah that's always been a staple of souls and then they like upped it to the nth degree on this one so Dark Souls 1 gets appreciated for the fact that there are some areas where logistically you should be able to see other areas from there and you can see they've attempted to recreate it as a background and it's like that's really cool nice but it's not actually there it hasn't been loaded this game was like nah we're going full chat on this you see this over there you can jump on this the funny part being Dark Souls 2's like it can't because there are places that are inside the current places that are like any fucking sets at all but it's complete in it's incompleteness the first time the first time I went into the underworld I was like oh no is this some Dark Souls 2 shit where I went down into an elevator and somehow there's like a big world with a night sky under here and then I was like whaaat nope it's not that and it quickly turned into one of my favorite areas just as aesthetically it looks so fucking cool down there knockron it's just like like a death city basically basically oh yeah that was a creepy one I thought what was crazy is when I realized that the shooting star after the raton fight actually just blew a crater into the world that revealed an entire other map underground I was like oh okay this is what I'm doing today then oh that was a really we're kind of drifting into talking about how much stuff there is in this game but I started a stream with the intention to just carry on with uh I was talking to Rani and she was like I need a thing and I was like yeah I guess we can go get that thing and I was like it's gonna be at that crash site and I was like yeah okay I went there and I was just like wait and it's just like welcome to a whole city and you're gonna have to spend the whole stream just doing that and it's just like well side quests in this or little tangential moments or even just a small doorway can lead to enormous pieces of content and you're just like whoa and you can just miss it you can just miss huge amounts of content if you don't explore it this game couldn't give less of a fuck if you didn't play all of it it's just like you do whatever the fuck you want and you're like wow hey thanks man if you ever see a coffin by a cliff it's an elevator trust me okay yeah and not probably a way that reminded me of the DLC city and DS2 I was like please don't be that shit just be good remember that place guys do you remember the Toleman? I never played the DLC in Dark Souls 2 Dark Souls 2 didn't deserve that much attention I'm pretty sure I did is that the one where is it the fume night at the end of it no I think it's the Queen of the Poison or whatever whatever she is well so it's the place funnily enough where Fortia found the safety square did you guys know that I'm pretty sure Dark Souls 2 had the highest metacritic score of every from soft game until Elden Ring came out did you know that higher than Dark Souls 1 and 3 and Sekiro let's talk about how games journalists don't know what the fuck they're talking about oh we already know yeah Demon's Souls had an 89 I'm pretty sure Dark Souls had a 90 and then Dark Souls 2 had 91 Dark Souls 2's biggest achievement is being Dark Souls's son no actually Dark Souls had 89 and then Dark Souls 2 got a 91 and then Dark Souls 3 I think got an 89 second game rides Dark Souls coattails hardcore what's Sekiro again we need to not start talking about the horrors of Dark Souls 2 because it will be for so long Sandage Bomber got the one I'm Bloodborne in better than Dark Souls 2 there you go Bloodborne success I think Bloodborne success is kind of interesting because I will I think I could almost entirely knock that down to the time it was released and being a PS4 exclusive at a time when there are hardly any games on PlayStation so I honestly think that Bloodborne got a lot of people who never would have tried Dark Souls 3 to be like okay well this is the new you might be right about that I will also go as far as saying Bloodborne is just like Eldritch plus Victorian like the first half of Brom Stonkman's books I can have some lifecraft books it's just the style of that game so gorgeous but I mean the biggest thing with that game was that it's shields suck so they took it away and that was like there's two shields in it one was pretty much useless, one was a magic shield it's not proof of fucking anything but passivity Moller in genders passivity you were telling us in chat like you know shield play like a gameplay could fuck Malinia up but I was just like I didn't shut up but also good that there's shield builds because that's fine it's not engendering passivity I still kind of wonder though where Bloodborne would be on my hierarchy of which of the from games I like the most if it ran at like a proper frame rate because it still makes me sad that that one stuck it struggling to sometimes hit 30 it would definitely be higher for me because that's one of my major it's honestly it's my biggest problem with it Bloodborne's great but it kind of runs like traffic Amelia Placy release fucking 5 FPS give us a PC release and we'll talk I follow a Twitter account called Bloodborne on PC and just every day it posts as of March 19th 2022 Bloodborne has not been announced for PC every single day it's not okay the frame rate is not okay not okay some guy made like a like a patch for it himself where he made it Lance McDonald yeah it might be him he made it so you could play at 720 instead of 1080 and that unlocked the frame rate or should get the frame rate up to 60 FPS yeah with a PS4 pro running it at 720 and you need to like jailbreak or have like a dev kit PS4 pro in order to do it but I got a mid like there was part of me that was like should I go through what it takes to do this I never did but yeah he shows on gameplay of the Amelia fight when he makes her bleed and it's just like oh my god that looks so good the game honestly will look so much better if the frame rate was stable damn yeah exactly I was about to say it's all like it's not even just about looks it's just that there's there's so much delay in the game and I think that's because of the frame rate that's what I always say to people though like there's kind of a meme on like the geeks and gamers streams that I'm like obsessed with frame rate I'm just like guys you can't make the argument that you care about gameplay and not graphics and then don't care about frame rate I was about to say how can you not be obsessed with frame rate when you're a game big gamer big game of wids oh you can say game of wards and stream I will have at least game of wids oh my god you said it again I will happily sacrifice like graphics for FPS 100% I do too because I remember in fact I remember in Neo when it came out on the PlayStation 4 it had a graphics mode or performance mode yeah and it was great to have the option a lot of the games are coming out now on like PS5 and Xbox have that option performance and like fidelity which is good that that exists yeah it is good I worry though that as this generation plugs along Lord to be like okay well we're releasing the Last of Us part 3 and it needs to look super real we need to see the testosterone leaking out of Abby's cheeks I remember when Uncharted 4 was god damn that was a while ago actually when Uncharted 4 was coming out there was a talk of aiming for 60 FPS across the board and then when the game eventually came out they went 30 FPS per camp like you know single player and then 60 FPS per console and it's just like yeah the reason why that happens is because graphics cells you need them fancy schmancy graphics and you want to know why that is because when you do television commercials like celestial TV yeah that's always going to be exactly so they say okay we need the commercials because the normies don't understand frame rate but they'll see really realistic looking high fidelity graphics and be like oh that must be a good video it's super interesting to me because Call of Duty was pretty consistently going for higher frame rates on consoles back in the day and I don't know that it's a surprise that Call of Duty ended up being so successful perhaps in part because all of the games heavily prioritized running well over graphics that's it I meant terrestrial sorry I just saw Celestial TV I meant terrestrial TV I'm just welcome to God TV it's me God yeah no frame rate is super important but it does feel like as each generation presses on we just kind of give up I remember that at the end of the PS3 360 yet holy crap like utter dog shit on PS3 one of the points I made in the God of War video that I made I made a video just going over every game in the God of War series is that that is a series that seems like it is designed for the generation after the games release because God of War 1 and 2 play better in the PS3 HD version that came out the performance is much more consistent the controls feel more responsive it's just overall better the PS4 remaster and God of War 2018 played a lot better on PS5 and I mean now it's on PC and you can run it at whatever you want but I was like man it's almost seems like they're making this series so that it looks absolutely incredible but they're pushing the hardware that they're releasing it on like a generation ahead of where it needs to be so that's kind of the problem is for the awkward truth is people care about graphics more than performance they do because if they didn't games wouldn't be made this way they would all prioritize performance over graphics they used to be at time when performance did matter more than graphics PlayStation 2 generation the amount of games that ran at like 60 frames per second it would surprise you how many games were running like Jack and Baxter, Ratchet and Clang Devil May Cry a whole bunch of games were going for better performance over graphics something changed with the PS3 through the generation though I don't know what happened, something changed we pushed hardcore for graphics that were like beyond what the hardware was ever capable of oh it's kind of nuts go back and fire up games from the PS3 360 era on a decent PC now if you get the Steam versions or GOG versions of them they look and play incredibly like you're just like wow I don't remember Spec Ops the line being this awesome I thought it was a good story but no it actually looks pretty good in motion if you're running it on hardware that can handle it lots of N64 catalog runs at 60 was something that became very apparent during the 6th yeah that was the 6th generation PS2 N64 only has one 60 FPS game that's what I I actually didn't think that was the case because it was the gen after that that it was like okay we passed like the very beginnings of 3D we're now into like proper 3D and we can try and push that there was a lot of innovations at that time in terms of hiding loading screens and just really pushing performance but then something changed do you guys remember that Killzone 2 pre-rendered that might have been the thing the thing that did it because everyone was like oh my god that looks like real well it was that it was motor storm and the thing is you look at those now it's still kind of beyond what can be achieved in real time um but it's like shit you put that into people's minds that that's what we're going for in terms of graphics well beyond what even the PS4 can do you just end up in this problem where you have to push so hard for graphics that it's just beyond what the console can do when and the reality is that most people are pretty chill with that because if they weren't it wouldn't happen I think people like graphics I don't necessarily think that people are okay with it I think it's just easier for companies to sell their game if it looks amazing you can't really go and say like oh this game plays at 120 FPS perfectly that doesn't really sell as well as showing like a really high graphic picture I think that's still indicative of a bottom up problem that it is easier to convince people to buy a game because of how good it looks without any consideration for how well it plays I would also go as far as saying there are plenty of Bloodborne players that'll like ask a good game and go like whatever the FPS and they'll be like huh what does that matter human beings can only see in 30 FPS well I'm not sure if you guys remember but Miyazaki actually when he was talking about Bloodborne I think he tried to defend the 30 FPS option saying that it was like better for action fuck I don't want to miss I just remember that there was a quote from about Bloodborne Bloodborne framerate let me see if I can find it for Miyazaki well so I guess the thing is it was like a decision that he gets to make ah oh ok so he hopes that you will be kind with Bloodborne's framerate ok that's not the case so obviously whatever we can do within the technical limitations while making sure we deliver the best thing we possibly can for Bloodborne and I understand that there are many voices saying why aren't you running at 60 FPS and I get it but at the same time we're not here to make excuses why we can't do it this is where we are the reality is it's running and it's the best of what can offer for Bloodborne today let me see if I can find the oh here it is so um oh no it wasn't him it was a producer Bloodborne producer said said oh god holy shit so he said there was some miscommunication in particular QA in which the subtle nuance was misunderstood um oh no no no the original story so this is what was said we got there we got there sorry it's just uh the producer said from the beginning quote we weren't targeting 60 FPS because it's not first person shooting it's an action game that was the original quote he doesn't say that I don't know that there was any game except maybe South Park the stick of truth and the fraction but hold that has ever benefited from having a lower frame rate I don't know that it's I don't know what that means for it that it's better that you've got less information coming to you I think you could even probably make the argument the South Park games if they were running at 60 they might actually end up looking better than the show stick of truth is running at 60 it's just the animations aren't yeah right right it's still 60 but they just kept it down to low animations on the animation assets to make it look like the show something that I found really frustrating about the discussion I remember a lot I don't know if it happens anymore because of performance options and stuff but um the PlayStation 4 and the PlayStation 3 like the PlayStation 2 were more than capable of running games at 60 FPS just at lower graphics that's it like there is no there is there is no console that is going to become incapable of achieving something um you know like post PS2 you can you can achieve a level of fidelity that will give you 60 FPS the question is whether you feel like it whether you want to make that decision for a game it's the priorities of the fidelity targets and I think that Nintendo's first party games for the most part are pretty decent with this the sad exception being Breath of the Wild which like I think has the bloodborne problem of this game is really good but man does it run like crap but when you have things like Mario Kart and Smash Brothers even Mario Odyssey they all run at 60 even though they're on the Switch which is less powerful than my phone so like yeah it's about your priorities Nintendo tends to prioritize a higher frame rate for the sake of like uh gameplay it's super important uh and it is important because when people say that I can't see it it's like well that's not true but even if that was true you can you can feel the difference yeah you're getting twice the amount of visual information to react to the input lag is half as long so no matter what it will make the gameplay better whether you're perceiving it or not and you know I suppose the important point to address would be well why don't we always push for then like 120 but at that point it's just about feasibility most people's tv's only display 60 at 60 hertz for frustrating you know my answer to that would be why indeed let's do it let's go for 120 uh go for 120 I guess it's just because like there's very few films or television shows that are that are more than 24 frames per second so yeah well and I mean for live action that's the it's always the debate because we might get you know for something to watch it doesn't matter because I'm not interacting with it when I watch it it's fine when I'm playing it you definitely feel it like it's definitely something you feel when you play games on PC it's like I want to play on Charmed 4 holy shit also when you see live action footage above 24 frames a second it looks it looks fake like it kind of ends up looking like a reality show it's well I think it's because reality shows do uh do just play it at higher rates and sports often do as well but there's there's just an element that it pulls you out of say like a cinematic experience anyone ever see the the Hobbit in uh in the high frame rate modes in the in the theaters I don't think they ever release them with that but what I found with that is it made any dialogue scene look ridiculous but then when like in the second one when you'd see Smog he'd look really good because it kind of removes a layer of uncanny valley and one layer of uncanny valley between you and live action actors I think makes things look more cinematic and a little more dreamy a little more like a movie but when then you see a computer animated character there and they have that little bit of unrealism to it so if you remove that layer of uncanny valley from that and up the frame rate on it computer animated characters can end up looking more real than they did at a lower frame rate and that's kind of why I think video games tend to look a lot better in um higher frame rate modes than not so there's something interesting in chat someone said I worked on Need for Speed for PlayStation 1 we shipped at 30 fps but we all played Dotoner and loved 60 fps yeah I imagine that a lot of the time the decision is like beyond marketing publishers well yeah broader objectives that need to be achieved like with uh with Battlefield graphics is always a big push with like Naughty Dog games it's always a big push in fact pretty much all of Sony's first party games make a big push for graphics Nintendo I guess has an advantage in that their games are never trying to be cutting edge so like there was no expectation there of delivering um but I mean I do want we will end this tangent shortly but just one more thought I had was I wonder how long it's gonna be before it just becomes increasingly unfeasible for developers to push graphics further you know like I gotta be so costly my yeah my thought is soon because of costs and I think things like the launch of Battlefield 2042 is a good indicator that maybe the ultra AAA super big budget Hollywood blockbuster games are hitting a bit of a ceiling as far as how much money they're costing versus how much they're making back because the thing is is that we can do a lot better with like video game graphics are not close to what you can achieve with like pre-rendered CGI stuff but it's not about that it's a matter of feasibility how many people do you need to make all of this stuff how long is it gonna take yeah who knows sorry that was a long tangent well that's just alien to this show long tangent bad I suppose can we round off the open will discussion if that's possible it's it is definitely jam packed with shit to do and not in the annoying sense where you gotta do time trial races or collect flags collect all that stupid like busy work that's clearly in there to break your experience part it's like now the game is still grounded in the story and the world and everything like that and all of the side paths usually lead to sweet loot or a boss fight or both and it's just kind of fun to find all the cool shit that you can use as a tangible reward later for all kinds of crazy experiences so rather than just you know concept art so it's good as an open world game I like it it's refreshing are we just an open world or open world versus the the prior the approach they've had in their other games which funnily enough there are differences in each of the souls games for how they've done it but this one feels like the broadest departure compared to the rest well if you had to make me choose between the two I would go with the older format to be honest with you like I like this open world but not more than like the Dark Souls 3 type of world because one thing that I know we've discussed a bit before is that if you know the game like you know where things are and where to find them or you know you have access to Google you can get super empowered immediately as you start your playthrough I think about the video I made like a 30 minute video on how to become uber powerful before the first boss or something I made a video on gaming with geeks showing people how to from the tutorial like from once you exit into Limgrave how to get the sword of night in flame and go to a place where you could level yourself up to the stats to use it within 90 minutes less than two hours you can have what was at least one of the most powerful weapons in the game I actually got it for x-ray girl, my wife she's never played a from soft game before and still summons me during boss fights but we have a good time because in the older games the areas were usually you know blocked off by behind bosses and stuff so you couldn't really go and get whatever weapon you wanted and then go on farm or find the upgrade materials that you needed the same way you can in elder ring because again like getting a really OP upgrade material was usually tied to being behind a pretty strong boss most of the time so it's easier to get overpowered in this game than it is in the other ones I think my piece actually the easiest to get powerful as a mage early on because you can just go to not to Caleb to the rotten swamp which I think you can go to almost immediately if you just right there and you can get to meteorite staff which is super powerful you can't upgrade that thing but it's already powerful and basically right next to it is the rock fling spell which is arguably the best spell in the game so if you ask me because Stagger is crazy it's got a lot of damage incredible range from what I saw you play through that that seemed like the move that thing is just a Stagger machine like dragons, 3d cast Stagger no problem you can get that pretty early on but yeah later on you want something else obviously but for like early to early late game even you can use that thing no problem because that incredible sorcery scaling like over 200 I think if I'm not mistaken so it's like incredibly good so I feel as though the open world is really neat in that I can run around anywhere and basically be entertained with whatever I'm finding and get a good sense of oh I shouldn't be here yet or hey this seems like kind of a place I should be however I think this is where I'm going with this conversation has the effect of allowing me to snowball through the entire game we mentioned this a couple of times I just want to be more specific with this basically like you can build a momentum and that is if you are like over leveled for let's say Murgit kill him then his souls push you up oh echoes no fuck roots the juice pushes you you're already too much for him and it pushes you past that and then everything in the area following him you're just going to make it through with mostly not dying and that means you basically eat everything like rune wise and that just can keep going and going and going to the point where as Theo was describing I do think that that's more of a consequence of having it be open world sometimes you can spend some time running around and then you go back to playing like dark souls designed dungeons or castles playing in them meanwhile and dark souls one seems to me to be just the best example of this like it feels so much more handcrafted to the point where that as a problem is mitigated to a significant degree you can still cause it to happen but it seems much less likely to happen you kind of have to really push through they very they do a really good job of controlling what you have access to and when is the big thing that makes it distinct not to mention when it's much more crafted experience like that it feels like a lot of the places feel more special in terms of like enemy design, aesthetic and bosses especially because I feel like this game having as many bosses as it was was like let the experience down later they started to become like lollipops you go through an area and you're like here's your boss, what is it? it's this guy, you remember him? I just had that one I don't want to I can't relate my experience to your guys so I don't want to spend too long on it but that was basically my experience of interacting with the open world was I'd see a path that I have a narrative reason to go down and then I'd feel a compulsion to just run off in some other direction because I don't know maybe there's stuff that way and I'd stumble into catacombs or ruins full of haphazardly placed enemies that were like easy to get past and had no real thought into how they were positioned relative to one another then maybe I'd go down through an inspired level design to find a boss that's terrible and dies in like two or three hits and that was that was all of it that was everything I did it seems like that is kind of the story with the catacombs and stuff but I think you actually hit the nail on the head earlier, Theo, when you compared them to the chalice dungeons from Bloodborne that's basically what a lot of the catacombs are I guess they're more of a design though sorry because the chalice dungeons were procedural right, like they weren't and they were tile based so it looked like a lot of swappables kept showing up I was actually saying this Theo the other day but it felt like the catacombs were procedurally generated and then taken by the dev to look at and be like this is good enough or we need to move this here and this here otherwise it's broken I guess to round off from my perspective it just I never felt like my time was being respected unless I was doing critical path content or something constructed in that way and then it felt like I was just playing Dark Souls 3 which is level design level wise worse than Dark Souls 1 and I get sad again I think it's honestly hard for them to make strong level design when you've got this much game eventually and it does seem like places were designed and then they were placed in the big map that some guy was working on with some other people and it's like alright we got Stormvale is done, it's like alright put it here, that should probably work out just fine and it's like that really works that's great, everything's like I've done my castle what one's yours, it's like Castle Wombo and you're like oh fuck I need to change it at 9 and it's like okay there it goes alright what are we going to put in this some fucking Ulcerage Respirator in there another one I guess I'd want to be sympathetic in that with this much space to cover having like rigorously designed content throughout all of it that is rewarding to engage with as opposed to gives you rewards is like that's an incredibly difficult thing to do but that's why I think the ambition of filling all of that space might be misguided in the first place I don't know so you're kind of with me in the sense that you think the game would benefit from being a little smaller either smaller or unironically emptier actually that might be kind of what I was going to bring up is that I I think that if you focus in on stuff like the catacombs and mines and the things that seem similar to each other it's easy to forget that a lot of the stuff like just the way the land and the mountains and the rocks and stuff are formed where there's just like little structures or bombed out villages or not bombed out but you know like dragon burnt or whatever and I actually think that the just outside in the game is is pretty cool a lot of the times and there is some interesting stuff to engage in outside as opposed to like this just open space until I find my next dungeon to go into you know maybe me being too poisoned against the game but I never felt the same degree of atmosphere and atmospheric storytelling that Dark Souls was able to pull off where the way the place looks and I guess an easy comparison is Blight Town Blight Town that area is like that area is a master class in visual storytelling but the enormous huge structures that have this shanty town built around them which then creates a really engaging level in and of itself I never really never really got that in this game except maybe with Narkron maybe some of the legacy dungeons but even then they're just ah, it was missing something it felt I don't know how to put it I think it's a super controversial thing to say but you know imagine take half of the dungeons out of this game and use that time to be spent on refining the current ones in older games so for example I really enjoyed the capital because that felt like you got all those shortcuts and it was like one of the only places where it's like oh man I could really use like a grace right now because I'm running out of resources I need a safe spot or a shortcut please oh yeah Caleb does quite well in terms of visual storytelling as well intel stuff happened there it was like a scarred landscape basically yeah the rest of the world I found really I don't want to use the word holo because I sound like a fucking video essayist I think yeah someone was just highlighting as well you might encounter a problem if you start emptying the world in that some of these caves are literally very tiny caves at the side of a mountain very easy to miss as openings to dungeons and then it's like so wait are we saying we should implement some kind of system that's like you know I've got the dungeon horn when I blow it it takes me to any dungeon I haven't been to it's like a dungeon or the thing I it's not the same kind of experience at all so the comparison isn't fully apt but I guess just as a display that the sort of thing is possible I want to point at shadow of the colossus oh yeah that is a very empty open world in a sense yeah that's not a criticism that game is not full of stuff it doesn't need to be full of stuff to do what it's trying to do with its space and I don't know that Elden Ring needs to be full of stuff for its space to have the effect that it needs I feel like they should have just had less space honestly like I like the amount of stuff going on but maybe they should have done like less space I'm hesitant to say that because they use the scale to good effect you know well yeah sure but maybe just lessen the scale a little bit and you'd still have a good game sure but I'm trying to piece together what they were trying to do I guess and how I think would be a better way of representing what they were aiming for of course this is me not being cynical and saying they wanted to make an open world game because that shit sells like hotcakes this dude sounds like this isn't this this is Theo who was on EFAP jeez who's this dude in me this dude feels like he just wants Dark Souls ones like well I am mad it's not Dark Souls actually yes you're right I was gonna say if anyone pushed back on that I'd be like well I mean wouldn't that make sense if you thought Dark Souls one was superior not just superior I think it is something special in and of its own right I think that there is a lot about Dark Souls one that makes it good outside of it just being hard action game or whatever and I think that all of that has been lost as fromsoft have gone forward and that's why I'm annoyed yeah I think it's impossible not to compare these games to their predecessors because it's all being built on itself and they're making decisions to change certain ideas when I think all of us can agree there are some ideas like ooh you shouldn't have changed that one that one was a neat one the easy one is why'd they change the healing system again they change it every single time and they'll never be as good as Dark Souls one for a quick I don't mind the healing system so Dark Souls well yeah let's just do a quick version right Dark Souls one's healing system was we're going to build these landscapes and enemies based around the fact that we assume everyone's pretty much going to have 5 but they might have 10 estus if they sacrifice some humanities and then the pro players will have unlocked 20 to that point you know it's nothing to worry about that's just something they're using to benefit themselves so most places will be balanced around the fact that you can make a certain amount of mistakes which are tied to how much you can heal that's how Dark Souls one ran it was really fucking cool really simple and it just creates a very balanced way of dictating difficulty DS2 fucked everything it gave you loads of health it has no idea what it's doing it's a spazzing out game it's just like all health lead Dark Souls 3 was like we're kind of going with a different idea now we're going to give you you can find resources in the world that can increase the amount you get and to the point where I'm pretty sure most people who played Dark Souls up to that point were like man this is a lot of health you're giving me a lot of health Bloodborne has his own mistakes but there's things I like and things I don't like about that health system the fact that having to farm it is a big problem yeah that should have just been removed there's just no reason for that to be there why is it a minimum amount I don't understand exactly or even past a certain point like if they say okay if you get past Vick or Emilia you fill up to 20 blood vials after every rest oh yeah yeah and a big thing as well is the vials in that game they just get upgraded automatically if you level health by the nature of the fact that their percentage heals which I don't even know that they recognized how significant that is in terms of changing how difficult the game is I don't know because in this game I remember I got a lot of flasks at one point but I hadn't gone past plus six and I realized like man it takes like four of these to heal my health out of full when it got absurd and I was just like yeah I need to actually get the quality upgrades sort of Bloodborne doesn't have that problem even at max quality I'm still using two flasks to heal from almost dead which I think is a little on the strange side I don't know if that's okay that might be okay because of the amount of flasks you have this is the thing maybe but I guess if you're also using magic then like your those same charges are going towards your mana also true yeah so this game it's like a variation on DS3's systems so that's the quick vision do you want to open with what you hate about it Theo presumably about what specifically? healing healing I it's hard to start really because it just lets you get so overpowered and there's no reason for it to ever have changed from how it was in Dark Souls 1 like by the end of this game you end up with it's not as bad as DS3 so I guess credit there but you end up with such an insane estus flask by the end of these last few games it's much easier to just trade and steam roll your way through whatever challenging endgame content there is unless it has something like life steal going on which is interesting right because we combo that up with the other things we've highlighted about the lack of balance so if my mimic for any reason should not be able to tank something or if it dies I'm like well I've still got all of this so I should be alright like I remember I did actually it was mostly a subconscious thing but I did have to handicap myself a bit when fighting Malakith so I didn't just blast him because I had so much damage and so much healing by that point in the game because I had snowballed and gotten overpowered and I had a well upgraded estus flask um yeah and this one's just a little bit complicated I suppose um the criticism is coming in with balance but I know a lot of people would just be like isn't this going to depend on how good you are pretty much yeah yeah it is every balance factor in a from game can be chalked up to well if you're good enough you don't need to worry about that my criticism of the ashes is that you don't even need to fucking swing your sword sometimes so at that point at least with healing it's like alright but what if you're really bad it's just like well I guess that just comes into talking about the challenging nature of the games as a whole right like if you can you can only land one hit per 10 hours if you have 10 trillion estus flask I guess you can make it but nobody would play that game like if that was the if that was the parameters of it it's like so what's the right decision then it's like well we know that DS2 is definitely not the fucking way 100 heals plus your estus plus all those other items you can find it's like that is a fucking bloated mess so definitely not that I just like the reference to the thing after my second playthrough where I just go all the healing items in my inventory can you never get past using lifegems because you restock them with leftover souls yeah it's so easy it's not even a risk reward or offset with you know you spend it on your levels or your health you know it's none of that sorry anyway but um yeah I I think the healing is probably a bit much in this game but it's lower down on my list of complaints I would say how do we put in the reallocation of flasks in this regard because of my mage build I had to sacrifice a bunch of my health for fp that's that's an opinion I've been cooking and I wonder if fp is the way to go or if the memory system yeah because I really shouldn't be allocating them that way maybe it should be that health estus and then pots for restoring mana or just their own things yeah it seems like an interesting trade off at one like at first glance but then you realise that certain builds just use their fp more there's almost this implication that melee builds need more health restore because that's just the nature of what we expect is going to happen with our players I guess which is like okay I guess so I don't know what if they just made it so that there were separate there were separate charges for each one so you didn't really have to worry about oh man like I have four charges for my healing and four charges for my fp why I think putting it on the player to decide the allocation makes it trickier but if they just made it so that the golden seeds could then be invested to add an additional charge and that's when you had to made the decision as opposed to being at your point of grace and deciding for any given encounter okay I'm going to lean more towards healing or lean more towards recovering mana or just make the mana something that slowly recharges so that's that's why I wonder about going back to the memory system because something I ran into in my first playthrough where I was using magic I wasn't using really ranged magic I was just using the carry and spells that give you basically extra sword move sets in your offhand because I found that a lot of fun to pair with my katana by the way the magic in this game is pretty cool yeah I like my magic play through the concern I ran into later on was I had this one really good spell called a doula's moonblade and it did a shit fucking zillion damage compared to anything else I could do with my fp when you close enough it hits twice yeah you fire upwards to an ergery avatar or something and it hits him like three times and does a 4k damage so the reason that's a problem to me is I start the thought started occurring to me why do I spend my fp on anything else and I think that's problem I don't know if that's necessarily a balance problem inherently with the things because the bigger spells should have the more powerful effect right but it should also conversely cost well I would probably argue that you need to be close for this and normally as a major pretty squishy so there's like a risk reward kind of deal because I tended to not use that one because I had to get close and then I got killed so I opted for the rock spell but then I had the problem you just said with the rock spell because the rock fling is just so fucking good I just that that just became my main mainstay for most of the things and I didn't really run into that because I wasn't so much a mage character I was just using magic my main go to was still I'm using moon veil I'm running at people and I'm hitting them with a weapon because I just went full mage on my first playthrough yeah fair enough which was weird to me because normally first play for me as always but this was like what I'm gonna mix it up this time yeah same I got tempted to try out the magic because I'd heard from people it was a bit cooler in this game and I was happy to see they were right I enjoyed playing the magic but yeah I was very concerned towards the end of my playthrough that all of my FP probably should just go to moon veil weapon R2s or to a doula's moonblade because carrying slices nice and all but it doesn't its benefits don't do anything for me in PvE really because properties aren't real so funny about that to me is like oh yes I wouldn't want to spend my FP on an ash and someone could be like ah so there is a balance there isn't there and be like well you know are there any that cost health it's like oh just one which one is that the best one the best one in the game ah I don't know did you get a flask charge I gave you infinite magic for 10 seconds I did get that one it was very helpful combined with the kamehameha spell while I was fighting millenia because that gave me a nice little push for getting a bunch of health off of her I needed that for the rest of summoning throughout the game so I respected and lost all my FP and I was just like well I'll just use that every time I summon yeah you can do some some crazy combo with the azure combat spell and the FP thingy it's like damn I guess to round out the thought that's the thing that makes me wonder if maybe the memory system would be better so that my usage of a doula moonblade is not infringing on my usage of carrying slicer hmm in the same vein just balancing it seems like mages are going to be more likely to think that the healing system is pretty fair yeah while mealy builds will just be like I didn't even allocate one I didn't need it maybe depends on what you're building I kept myself at one mana flask the entire way through and I actually kind of balanced out towards the end game because my flask wasn't too overpowered because I stopped exploring so I wasn't just able to fully face tank my way through everything I ran into and I was having to double chug for a lot of attacks um we kind of partially covered it so I was thinking of just rounding it out as well through having talked about other things but I had a subject of will design but I guess that would entail like what do you think of the world of and I was about to name it and I don't even know what the name of it is what is the world of the land oh there you go what do you think of the lands between visually fucking great I'm just looking around right now and it's like I will screenshot that and put that on my desktop and when I look the other direction yeah I will put that on my desktop too visually some zones great some zones meh I guess design wise I might lean towards not so great any map with falling snow is like super pretty and then I realize any map with falling snow is also where the design of enemies fall apart it's kind of seems to me like every map that has snow falling in it usually you can expect to have enemies in like with a lot of health are that are in clumps or they range attack you from all directions I hated the parts of that area that are in blizzards I fucking hate that shit yeah sorry in a game a small drop can kill me I need to not have that happening okay I so nearly had a moment where I was like ah the game is doing something kind of neat when you know the fog swept in and then Borealis the ice dragon showed up and then the ice dragon called the freezing fog landed shouted at me and the fog went away and it was just a normal dragon fight yeah same thoughts I did it offline and I was like oh so the blizzards being caused by this no he died inside dude I was so ready for the game to give me something kind of interesting and then it didn't it backpedaled out chicken doubt one of the dragons used to sword on me that was in terms of world design any sense of well interconnectedness is kind of a rough one to talk about considering you know the zones are so huge and they're just open fields a lot of time as opposed to anything else you can celebrate on that I completely disregard this even talking about it because it's kind of pointless in the open world as well it is all available to walk to but yeah with that I'm more focused on the small areas like the capital or ODL things that I can't think the names of was like oh yeah those are kind of neat can we have more of those on the map like more of those or no but yeah I would like to have more of those well dark soulsy areas where you go around get your little shortcuts and stuff and you have like the hellic tree area which you can just completely miss on your play through which is a huge area which has that really big that is a really interesting element of this like one of the biggest payoffs for me and I'm assuming similar for you guys was the connecting filing shrine to be the chapel undead parish when you first come fucking down that elevator dude that's why that's part why I adore that game so much what a way to implement a payoff it's a mechanical understanding of how the world reconnects to itself because it's all there it's not nonsense levels that just teleport you like I said another dump it's like holy shit I'm back home and now I can get to the latest place I was at directly from my home that's so fucking cool and also I can get all these healing things down there because this is about a fault 10 this is great and you connect all these different shortcuts in all different areas because like it's been compared to a flower dark souls one where as you progress through the game the shortcuts are longer and the areas connect to fewer places but that initial set because the game is small it's like the perfect size to be able to do those sorts of payoffs doesn't a lot in this game there's like five times I was like oh that's yeah that's a shortcut okay and the shortcuts are the dark souls three shortcuts they exist for the sake of your convenience and to get you to where you want to go after you've done a zone which is fine it's okay I guess but it feels like that one in dark souls one and there's a couple of them were almost crafted for that moment of realizing that and it's just like oh yeah it will design the world in this game feels uh I'm gonna say linear because you start in limb grave you can go to Caleb can probably don't uh but a lead being the main exception then it's you know a path up to Learnea Learnea doesn't connect to Caleb uh then Learnea takes you to Altus and Learnea takes you to Altus and then Altus takes you to mountaintops and yeah then you're in the endgame you teleport to Landel again and do the final boss with Gale there off to the left you could probably argue the weeping peninsula is the actual beginner area is the misbegotten warrior, misbegotten warrior Leon and whatever his name is he's a lot easier than Margit is the boss of um keep forgetting the name of that castle something about that me um I'm not sure how I feel about that cooling it linear as a result of that yeah I don't either it's funny too because you just mentioned you can go to Caleb but it's like a big path it's like well yeah there's a little chest in the rat cave that'll bring you straight there whether you like it or not sure but then you go back you could once you get out of that cave you go right away I agree it's a good moment though my concern is it's in the way the world is built I mean the physical geographic masses is none of them really connect to each other other than to one other which is informed by the game's progression generally I just got a notification that says Disney's laying the perfect groundwork for its buffy reboot no they just not go away but you that hits particularly close to hope for you Mahler it's this disgusting rat creature that's poking its tendrils into all these nice things in our nice room of nice things get out it's just like hasn't just even gone through enough let him rest they're coming for it it's a stupid creature okay wish we go next um graphics? very pretty tying into how many locations in the world that I thought were pretty damn mckiesh maxi I think these graphics are more than acceptable and that the style makes up for any shortcomings for the most part in the graphics I don't have a huge amount of say I think I'll pass this over to anybody else who has more stuff to say there's no peach fuzz on millenius cheek so 2 out of 10 push ya man I'm kidding I think it's a beautiful game but it's beautiful because of its art direction and I think that that tends to tends to be the kind of good looking video game that sticks around longer than oh my god this is so awesome looking for this current point in history that's just for me just randomly standing around like just now this is like god damn this looks great yeah I mean this is the thing I've got I don't know man there's a lot of gorgeousness in this game yeah lots of little details I mean blight's dick looks beautiful oh nobody else is okay no no okay um yeah I like how it looks a lot I think we're all good yeah I mean I don't have anything to say really I'm not supposed to say it's a pretty ass game I mean I guess this people say the graphics are bad maybe I don't know I was thinking in my head like what do things people say about this like I don't think there's many folks saying the graphics are very good right that's not really the people who are saying the graphics are bad tend to be the community at least at what I've seen on twitter and facebook of playstation fanboys who are upset that this game is kind of stolen a bit of horizon forbidden west thunder the reference I was making with the peach fuzz cause I was there I was lost yeah sorry about that well yeah I just love the meme of the guy being like what is she a guy or something like that cause it's a beard and it's like oh my god dude what not exactly it but when I'm playing an open world action game the last thing I'm thinking it was like well can I see the peach fuzz on my character's cheeks or not cause if not terrible big poop well you know what let's go to crafting it shouldn't take too long oh crafting oh really you'd be forgiven my take will be I'd be a fan of the idea that you collect these little cookbooks and then you would further unlock a lot of little things you can take advantage of them so thus exploring gives you more access to more things to do with I didn't fucking craft anything and to be honest with you there was a couple things I was looking to craft throughout the whole game and I never seemed to pick up the right fucking cookbooks and I to be honest I think that they should have been default stuff like slow down or cure poison just like if you want to put that in a fucking book and I miss that book dude not cool I think it's pretty damaging it seems to expect that you have found certain cookbooks in terms of your related cure certain things I was thinking is this a solution to make it so that the cookbook pages don't have definitive locations instead they're all like they all have the same location in that all of them are everywhere but you pick the first one up wherever it may be and it'll be page one and then whenever you pick up the next one it'll be page two and then they can craft it so that the things that you're going to desperately need they're the first couple things you pick up by the time you get to page 100 you unlock something that's pretty fucking cool let's say is that better or worse because I know people like to have locations so that they can just pick up the direct one they need as long as you lose that but um I don't know man the fact that they had a crafting system it all surprised me and then the fact that I realized halfway through was like I'm not using that ever what the hell it just worked a lot of useful shit crafting is a reward for exploring craft rewarding you with what you need you need so much to make most things too like and you honestly to make arrows which is should be a pretty simple thing to craft you have to be killing just the NPC animals that aren't enemies like you have to be taking out like sheep and stuff to get them on firepapers I can't put on my weapon because it's magic oh my god Bloodborne wins for this one just having the cost insight insight can be valuable for other things you can store insight boosts and get them from bosses and then you just stock up on firepapers and boltpapers and uh I love you Bloodborne some stuff you're a very cool game I love you Bloodborne for everything except your frame rate I love you Bloodborne can you please come to PCI I would love you forever you'll find a home here seriously we all will I think it does actually get damaging though when the game is expecting or seems to be expecting you to have ways to deal with certain things either through crafting or through spells like the lake of rot being my main example it's it's a big lake of scarlet rot that does more damage than the normal scarlet rot it seems to me that that zone is designed expecting that you will have either a shitload of the boluses that cure it or the ability to make them that's what I realized I don't have those ones I had all of them except that one I had neither of those things I had I had a faith spell that cured rotten poison so it was like okay easy okay easy ooh someone said this is the worst e-fap they've ever heard at least we've got it out of the way now oh it's one well it goes up from here it's just good to know we got the one that's the worst like we don't it always feels like there is no clear identifiable metric by which we can judge how good these episodes are people would just say it's the worst one if they disagree with the spell now not to say that we've never been wrong but you got to qualify it a little bit so who said that and specifically what is wrong with this episode the answer is the cyborg guy just keep it to yourself I'm assuming it's because of the fact that we're making fun of the crafting system and they don't like that well I mean it's not a great crafting system I haven't seen anyone complimenting the crafting system I'm surprised this is a bit hard for people to take most people don't acknowledge this that's the fun part of this episode my dude I'm all for it anyone saying that it's the worst efep has not seen the debates the debates are loved what do you mean I guess on the note of the cook books if I might make a comparison real quick notice how in Dark Souls 1 you can very easily end up just stumbling into dark root garden thinking this is the next zone I'm in and you get a lot of these weird purple moss clump things there that might be helpful in a future zone notice how this is nowhere present in Elden Ring's design because they have this cookbook I think and they expect that you'll probably just find that or you'll have the flame cleanse me spell neither of which is necessarily the most likely thing ever because it's an item in an open world it's a single item in a location I think we shouldn't really underestimate how easy a single item out in the open world's overworld is to miss you just run past that shit easily this place is giant so the game is not as good making sure you have the things necessary to handle where you're going next as Dark Souls 1 was which is a side effect of the open world stuff that's also that's also kind of what makes it so that you'll often have to outpace status anomalies with just over healing them like oh I got bleed damage okay I guess I'm using two flasks now okay it looks like Scarlet Rod I remember every four seconds to drink a flask and it kind of sucks for me every trip through the lake of wrought was a one-way trip Thunder said I crafted mainly food for Torrent stuff that gets rid of Scarlet Raw and I think bone darts and stuff oh yeah I only made horse food that's all I made I made it tried it out decided fuck it it's just awesome when I give a shit about and you be like what do you mean it's like well one time the few times I can give it to Torrent is when I'm exploring for a long while and Torrent's taking some damage that I can heal five berries down his throat or just be like no just die and I'll resurrect you with an estus just die and maybe we could transition it's talking about the horse now you can 150 hours in this game and I'm asking this question you can heal Torrent you can make horse food you can like respawn him with an estus I didn't know there was another option for healer Torrent also gets health back when you chuck estus on horseback oh okay but there are these berries that you can craft with extremely common flowers and then like it's really easy to make and then I just bound them to my pouch up and then that was it I never knew that I know it's a thing but I never used it because I just I tried to use it and just gave up I was like I don't need to it's fine I crafted it and I was like wow I can just craft whatever papers I need and then I never used them yeah I guess it is why is it grease in this game it has changed all the names dude this is fucking me it frees here he would appreciate it but some of you may I don't know if you know this reference doxels players especially when they're introduced to this a lot of the time you're like oh man this is a good item should I use it here it's like well no if I use it here I might not be able to use it later and you eventually just hoard everything and end the game with 500 of them and yeah like they had the idea of you you've collected all these different greases and you still just don't want to use them it's just like what if I need them for a later fight and then they had Grantskeeper Willie from Simpsons you say you use your grease for the first time it just shows him saying my retirement grease oh no I can't remember what he says grease bad bits I think oh what was it when he started punching him it's like oh that really hurts it's like oh it's okay I'll strangle you for a while yeah the point being there were things to hold precious a little bit because for me at least I was like I might have so few materials to be able to make a lot of them I should be careful with them yeah make sure you hold on to that retirement grease you know the future is certain never use an elixir in a Final Fantasy game unless it's the final boss see it's everything it's so useful ammo at the end of a Resident Evil game too I tried to understand the system and I tried to use it but I just found I slipped into not caring that I could even craft at all I just poorly integrated I want to say not gonna push back on that I'm not gonna do it not enormously poorly it's just kind of esoteric and pointless so let's talk about Tarn yeah okay how did you like to double jump so I don't know if this is like an alien experience for a lot of people but if you watch my play through when I discover that I can double jump on the horse I'm like laughing my ass off this is stupid as shit what in the world am I fucking doing this is my horse why can it double jump I have to like pass this out a little for people I'm like I don't know man it just seems out of the fucking blue that my horse can double jump that was so funny to me it feels like a Mario game what's happening do you have a problem with double jump as a thing for a horsey I think it's absurd what about a lot of video games in general stupid that the double jump can't be used in a gate fall damage though oh yeah I remember I was playing and I saw a clip and I'm like I want to go down there I'll just jump with the double jump for my horsey and then we go flat it's a mechanic it's straightforward it functions you know why it's there I just thought it was hilarious and I think I'd find it as hilarious as your character being able to double jump it just doesn't come into my realm of how this world works at all and there's a couple of things that I like that in Dark Souls and I honestly think of them as just really funny moments like the big fat guy doing his big roll that's so like what that's the thing that he does what you're like no yeah fine okay there's just some things here and there he's doing his little roll his rolls are really funny as well big Dark Souls rolls he's like that's good even like ripping someone's own head off and pulling a sword out of his mouth I was like what are we what makes sense yeah the people would be like there are magic things in this game I'm like yeah I know you just think that this is silly magic everyone would have a different line for this I think the horse double jump it just took me off guard completely I thought it was hilarious I could grumble about you know grounded aesthetic or whatever but that's like long gone so this is the thing if someone was like so you wouldn't have it I'm just saying it was funny for me that's all mechanically it worked relatively well the problem I have with the horse is the something that's a feature which is it's awkward control it's supposed to have awkward control it's a horse and it's just like yeah but like you demand a lot of platforming from me on my horse yeah maybe if you're gonna make it control weirdly there's a good level of bosses that kind of ask you to hop on the horse and fighting on the horse is a pain in the ass considering a little torchman can just kind of stick the fucking torch to the horse's nose and the horse loads dude it doesn't help with the sound effects it's like okay okay okay yeah I get it your horse exploded is he dead? No! he's fine just hop back on I'd question the idea there's a lot of bosses that like mandate horse usage what would you be I guess which ones I don't feel any mandated it but several may have been made with that in mind I imagine a lot were but I found pretty much everything that didn't force the idea to use the horse was a lot easier to fight on foot and a lot less clumsy by the way on screen right now the guy on screen right now you're about to see a good crucible man about to fly off the yeah yeah yeah go go go I'm so jealous I tried to make those guys do that so many times and never worked see you at the party Richter a little bit a little bit yeah nice what were we talking about? the horse not fun horse combat is it's not the worst horse combat I've played but unfortunately it's horse combat so I feel like it's designed deliberately to have a level of awkwardness to offset the efficiency of speed and I'm just like yeah I just it's not that fun though all that means you're doing is I'm just not going to interact with enemies I run past at all pretty much all you do a pass hit pass hit pass hit so it's much more straight forward instead of awkwardly shlubbling around and trying to get and then someone with a torch goes god that shit was in Bloodborne too fucking torch people I hate them away away away there was a Twitter post the other day that was like Bloodborne was very radical in having you fight such a varied amount of bosses including like anything from eldritch monsters to rats to English people truly bold truly bold most fearsome enemy type English people hoodlums disgusting what else can you be what can be said about the horse the horse kind of fucks any idea of encounter design in the open world but I don't know if there ever was an idea of encounter design enemies are just sort of around and you can deal with them if you want I guess it does I'm bombed that you can't get other mounts yeah I guess yeah or edit some appearance you think that'll be a little bonus but something like that like that big ass what's that that there's this big ass like line with an eye patch on I thought that'd be a riding mount on the cover there's like the way the arts are lying in stone veil I guess so I thought that was a mount on the cover I'm like yeah I want to unlock that mount oh it's awesome nope I was just going to mention yeah and I think that does take away from the game a little bit when it's like you're running around just goes welcome great dragon argon ore of filibond and then it's fucking lightning strikes I always disappeared I ran past him yeah I'm good whatever it's a little awkward and it's like what's the solution to that and I'm like I don't know there's a bunch of fortifications here leading up to stone veil or leading up to castle morn or whatever leading up to red main castle I am it's going to be a challenge now I'm just going to ride past whatever and you know a lot of great enemy even boss fights like one of the magma worms is one that's in the open world this is more than one actually and like I remember seeing it when I was playing offline I was like oh shit I should probably kill that online so like he had his grand entrance lava spewed everywhere he's like duh duh duh music goodbye and yeah I'm not sure how they can account for that but it can create a bit of an awkward experience that could affect the overall immersion nice they put the they put the academy key like behind a dragon you're like I shouldn't fight the dragons like nah actually you just go on top and just grab the key and fuck off I think I did that I thought about second play first like oh I'm here now I might as well grab the key real quick I'm just not fond of fighting dragons it's like the dragons in this game suck fucking awful I liked fighting that one is that a hot take no I think mine is the hot take for liking fighting the dragons because I'm the only one who seemed to enjoy it I just used a massive sword that might like the dragons I don't know I didn't find them particularly if you don't like the dragons and lose any faith I might have had left in them oh my god I mean like aside from I guess a monster hunter game I can't think of a lot of games where we're fighting dragons and Skyrim it's pretty much just like okay so use a bow and just constantly shoot arrows at it and that's it yeah I think I'll say that Wyvern's chat they are fucking dragon in their name like well yeah that's just gonna I remember fighting my child about this before to be fair I haven't played dragons dogma I see a bunch of people saying dragons in dogma I don't know why but everyone feels the need to definitively be like make sure you don't call the dragon a wyvern a wyvern a dragon I'm just sitting here like look flying dragon grail what is what is meant to be the difference between so a wyvern has two legs they're both they're both winged like reptiles that breathe fire and so you're realizing for any of the the substance of what we're talking about the encounters with those creatures that's what matters but there's people getting hung up on whether or not it's the correct fucking labeling I don't I don't know why is it because I'm a legendary dragon so sounds like dragon well according to wikipedia don't a lot of the dragons I guess do they get on all fours or I guess they have legs and and hands don't they I'm not sure if I doesn't matter the difference is present I'm just waiting for the part where it's like can we go back to what we were talking about whether or not they're called fucking dragons they're slow and clumsy and they don't really do anything and focus is just out pretty much because of the way they fly around the camera just spins around being like I don't know what are you looking at I found that focusing on its legs helped target my sword and just switching the leg if they were gonna do that stomp strike do you remember coming from insane or not when you get to Ludwig's second phase and you focus on him the camera like goes out further than normal yes that's a thing I fucking wish they did more effort it's like that's evidence right there that they are aware that focus can get fucked sometimes and then they were like let's try and account for that this time it's like let's not most of the time it's like hey count for it more every game must be three steps forward two steps back, five to the side another one back, maybe two more forward because they cannot consistently learn lessons it's really fucking weird what's that one Ubisoft Melee based PvP game for Honor was it for Honor they did, I loved how the camera would phase into the world rather than have the camera ram into it and fuck up it phased into the world but you can still see your character so even if you are backed against the wall you can see your character perfectly I really wish that fromsoft would eventually do that I'm reminded of a fun instance of a bad camera in this game where you guys know the big gargoyle outside of the beast deal sanctuary yes, the boss I was fighting him just a couple of days ago and he fought on the stairs which is of course horrible, I hate it when he fights on the stairs enemies in these games still don't know how to handle elevation but more importantly sometimes when I was like next to him on the stairs my camera would clip back to the staircase to my side but there was foliage on it so the foliage would just obscure my entire screen so I couldn't see anything because for some reason that stuff needs to be able to persist in front of the camera that was really good there are ways around these things and Fromm just refused to do anything about it especially considering they've shown evidence that they're interested in doing something about it sometimes because that Ludwig's second phase is so good and it would be much worse if not for that zoom out of the camera and his music is fucking the best in the game there's a lot of better action games that know that the camera needs to do some work on its own to be able to see what the fuck is happening and so you're not wrestling with it we just say then we just did the camera segment it's the same fucking thing in all of the games it's a problem but it's also fine you know what I mean it's fine it bugs me when people complain about camera too much in reference to the idea as though this is the only one that has this problem it's like a lot of games have this problem camera's tough to nail it I honestly think it's a way bigger problem than God of War like the newest one I just recently played it on the highest difficulty and especially on that difficulty not knowing that there's an enemy behind you about to attack is a serious problem to the point that the target focus is essentially useless at that difficulty mode you need to be spinning the camera around tiny little arrows but like on give me God of War difficulty they attack so fast and hit so hard that you can't really rely on that so what you have to end up doing is kind of kiting yourself into a corner and then being able to see all the enemies that are currently attacking you and I mean I got through the game but it was a constant struggle against the camera and I find that the field of view in the from software games tends to be more comfortable than that at the very least like I said most of the time I think it works as intended and it's kind of okay but sometimes it just fucks you up and I don't know about you guys just jammed in enemies or into a wall and the camera is actually the reason you die sometimes because you're like yes I'm stuck but if I could just see where I am where they are and maybe I can make a move but it's just like the camera's fucked it's gone up, it's gone down, it has no idea where anything is anymore it's buried in the gargoyle I can't see what it do so many better action games have better cameras not all of them are perfect cameras very few of them do because camera is incredibly hard to nail but we can do a lot better than this from Soft Neo got it half right it doesn't like phase through the wait did I just disconnect the hotel oh Fortier has fallen asleep oh yeah I heard the disconnect anyway Neo had it half right so if you do like buildings and like houses and stuff the camera would clip through the house but not so much in like solid mountains and stuff so I got it half right I mean it's almost hard to compare but I'd compare to good action games like Devil May Cry Bayonetta where the camera is doing a lot of work on its own without needing to be micromanaged by me to keep enemies on the screen got a word 2 and 3 did that you didn't even have camera controls in that game and it was great yeah I think I've always felt the 3 was the one that like finally figured everything out about God of War 1 and 2 so anyway that's it for camera and because Das vaguely alluded to it in Bloodborne I'm gonna open with saying I fucking adore Bloodborne soundtrack this game's soundtrack's pretty neat yeah that's alright it's okay I guess I love the menu theme my love for Bloodborne soundtrack is like an anger I love it that much oh no I have problems with this game's soundtrack but I won't god damn it Theo I've just written in the one word Theo's like yeah you know what the music perfect spot on a lot of the music's really good I was too harsh on it my first impression because I was over exposed to the bad tracks because they're the ones that constantly playing okay so is it the the tree tree sentinel's music dragon music oh dragon music and the the asylum demon I mean the tree monster uh yeah is that the same track the dragons and the asylum demon share the same fucking track no they're different tracks the uh the problem I have with a lot of the game's music is it feels like someone took Dark Souls 3's entire soundtrack and fed it into an algorithm and then had that algorithm make new songs and this is what we got it's the most incredibly generic epic music that you ever did here a lot of the more designed boss themes specific to particular bosses are really well done Malekiths is fantastic uh Godrix is great in the first phase, Melania's is pretty good in the first phase I actually really like the Godskin lads music yeah I was about to say how's this for a double I just sort of fucking cobbletry I was like I got stuck on Godskin Apostle for a little while like 3rd or 4th stream I think and I remember once I completed it I was like oh thank God one of the bosses got stuck on had a really good track and in my head I was like that's a bit bad to say isn't it uh yeah I um I wasn't as impacted by the soundtrack in this game as I would very much like to be though there were plenty of soundtrack parts that I was like oh my ears they're orgasm the theme is great the themes I don't like the main theme well I do I do it's just that you know you can get it's easy to get tired of because you've heard it too many times it feels like I said it feels very generically epic to me in a way that I find uninspiring what do you think of the uh Dark Souls 3 main theme by comparison it's okay I see now I actually really like Dark Souls 3 better watch your fucking mouth Theo well the thing is it's a bit much for me I uh I kind of adore the soundtrack to Dark Souls 3 I think it's there's a lot of really good tracks Loretta Lothric is awesome I like Soul of Cinder and I like both phases of Soul of Cinder not just the second half Abyss Watchers is cool as fuck Abyss Watchers I really like I like the first phase of Dragon Slayer Armor it's really cool the second stage I don't like the proof monster ruins it well it does and uh I really like um Vort's music is embarrassing for him because it's one of the most insanely grandiose tracks you have in one of the videos I adore Vort's track Vort of the Boreal Valley is amazing I love that watch something that is interesting about the Fromsoft game this is coming someone who hasn't even played a lot of these ones but uh Demon's Souls has a very uh understated soundtrack by comparisons um like I think the clear Flame Lurker's theme in Demon's Souls is really understated but in the Demon's Souls remake it's this big epic bombastic song and I like it but Flame Lurker is super you know it's dialed down um and it just sort of I guess is that like would you say that your issue with the music in this game is that a lot of it is very loud and dramatic right with not much variety it feels unstructured kind of like you're like yeah I would go in the opposite direction I'd say it's too formulaic well I think um I think it's contrast is interesting when you think about soundtracks because um is the reason why Gwyn's theme is probably so impactful is because you don't expect the final boss of this game to have a really melancholic piano um you would expect something more yeah and and like and uh Sif is uh there's kind of a sadness to that one it's like oh I don't like this that's what I really I think it's fucking great but it makes you sad but what I really like to melody soundtrack for it's got a lot of that it's got a lot of quieter tracks and it's got a lot more melancholy to it it feels like it has a lot more character to it and well even when it's being more aggressive and you know up toned it's nowhere near as dramatic with how it takes itself I say as if I know anything about music well I that's that was what I was about to call I I think it is difficult to say what a soundtrack is in its totality because is it really good enough to say that there was a lack of variety in a soundtrack what you know is that is that necessarily a bad thing that a lot of the music is falling into uh I guess a broad archetype uh or is it better when a soundtrack in its whole has more variety um I I don't know I'm not sure how you and also the problem is that context of where it's placed yeah and again makes a big difference to that's how I would try and connect it back is how the track is used within the game and what each track represents and thereby if there's lots of similar tracks that means the game is playing a lot of similar notes the same like over and over again which is I think I would accuse this game of yeah there's not a lot of hummable melodies in this game it's all sounds like a fucking a mud well I guess uh it's it's it's hard to I think uh I think one of the strengths that a lot of video game music had uh especially back in the 8 bit and 16 bit uh era was that the lack of instruments meant that there needed to be strong melodies are like pretty clearly identifiable and a lot of the like most iconic songs of that time because they really needed to lean in on those melodies now we don't really have those limitations but it feels like a lot of video games still lean into strong melodies and I think you can see that in um I think you can see that in even like the grand orchestra music that you have in like Dark Souls 3 that there are strong melodies for a lot of them yeah I mean if you want if you want if you want a memorable soundtrack those melodies do got to have to stick you you need to be able to hum that shit well I think a big part of it is that because video games often repeats the music over and over and over again that music needs to be good you you need you don't want to get bored of that music because you're going to be hearing it a lot part of why I'm always happy to fight Ludwig even in his first phase I get the track like yeah and that that's quite an accomplishment isn't it when you're so excited so I mean Lady Maria holy shit they're so so good also yeah it is I was literally humming to the god skin soundtrack by the way or whatever you want to call it a track that's maybe the maybe my favorite one in the game probably not as good as Malekitz for me but it's really good when I listen to it I went and listened to a bunch of Elden Ring music the other day because there was a conversation about it in the discord and yeah I gave that sound the game I gave the game soundtrack a much worse rather than it really deserved because I was overexposed to the tracks I hate is well so yeah I guess I guess I don't know how you would might be worthwhile to qualify for chat by the way I'm not really talking about Elden Ring soundtrack because I don't know it much I know the main theme and I like the ambient music in the first area that you go to I guess that might be a difference though this game has ambient music more so than how do you guys feel about that choice I found Bloodborne to have a fair amount of ambient music in fact Bloodborne I found it quiet when I say ambient music I mean we're not counting boss areas and we're not counting like a safe zone when you're out in the open world when the music is just playing or like when the music plays when you have an encounter which I don't think the other games have right I think Sekiro has ambient music Sekiro has ambient and combo music it does yes but I I don't think I think it's just the time era or the theme the yeah the style I guess like when you get into like that really Japanese or samurai type style I guess I just personally really do not like that type of music have you played Ghost of Tsushima yes a little bit Ghost of Tsushima has a banger soundtrack and it leaves yeah I think I think it's on the way of the ghost it's fucking awesome that's a real strong melody as well throughout the whole game yeah because like Sekiro and Sifu both are very similar in the regards of like their songs they seem really simple with very minimal instruments and they don't and the the songs aren't very strong it's just kind of weird and distorted flutes and shit I don't really like that I really like is it called the wind flute the wind it is right the wind flute that's like the sort of recognizable jet I need to double check if that's what it's called I know that that's I really like the way that I don't yeah I think yes I think it is or am I mixing up with something else no they're just giving me flutes I need the wind flute this what's it oh there we go there it is I can't pronounce that that's uh but I really love the sound that that instrument makes and that's kind of one of the ones that you associate a lot with I guess like feudal Japanese kind of yeah yeah it's not my thing I didn't so for that I didn't really dig Sekiro's soundtrack but we're not talking about Sekiro are we well you is I am sorry so uh I guess the reference the guy that you find in the bridge what's his name again yeah I like the music for him in the first phase is that similar to what it is throughout the game or yeah most of the music is along that style or the dragon flute no I guess the thing is is that I don't hmm I'm not yeah I guess I can't say anything I haven't played I haven't played enough of this game to get it rough on the soundtrack it's a position for me of too much of the same thing I'm okay with grandiose bombastic tracks where they are warranted but I feel like this game has them everywhere and oftentimes they feel kind of mismatched to what I run into like the tree sentinel is kind of just a guy when his soundtrack goes harder than O&S I guess the thing is I'm thinking about Metal Gear Rising because the context as well because Metal Gear Rising has dynamic music where depending on which stage you're in the battle the music will change the vocals kick in well yeah the vocals will kick in usually when you like about to initiate you know the quick time event and the battle but that's an interesting one because I mean all of the music is loud and aggressive and in your face but it still feels like so good the soundtrack yeah it's one of the best gaming has to offer I feel probably what's funny too is like I think didn't the artist say that he'd never tried that type of music before really yeah I think I heard somewhere that that was the first time he never attempted that kind of music damn that game does so many cool things with it soundtrack from different stylings of each track to the lyrics giving insight into different characters motivations and stories it's like more games need to do that as well as just the dynamic stuff going on in it well I mean the Dark Souls games I guess kind of have it in that there are multiple phases for the boss battles and the music changes but there's not yeah but it's great to classify that as dynamic I've noticed on that note I've noticed in this game there seems to be a lot less phase transition music and a lot more the music cuts and then the second phase music starts playing just from listening to tracks like market the fellow men for example he doesn't have there is no transition from phase one to phase two in terms of the track as it is on YouTube it's just there's the phase one music then there's the phase two music is that it I wonder if there's like an issue of technical because I mean if you've done it before you figure that you'd be able to do it again yeah I guess it is you know that you need to try and musically justify the transition find a way to make it work and that can be a bit complicated but I mean if they've done it before I figure that they can is it the same composer as the other games yeah this game is mainly Yuka Kitamoto who's been in charge of games from like Dark Souls 3 you can tell as an extremely similar sound to Dark Souls 3 well it says that there are five composers who worked on Elden Ring yeah this game big old team some of them what's the guy's name he made my yeah showing me as our first time working as a composer in on this game and made some of the best tracks for it responsible for Godric the grafted and he's responsible for Malakit's theme it's like insane work for first time as a composer on a project it's really yeah right uh so it sounds like the general sentiment is that that you all generally seem to like it but you don't think that it's as strong as like Bloodborne or not even close really it doesn't come close to Dark Souls 1 3 or Bloodborne to me but I do like it one has so much character dude that none of the others ever really it had that really somber quietness about it at times and none of the others ever recaptured that um I mean Bloodborne has some chill well not chill but like when Bloodborne's getting quiet it tends to be unsettling the whole idea of that is just scary I love the soundtrack for that yeah it's Hail the Nightmare the one playing in the Hippogyne Jail and it being fucking diagetic as well that's it sums up for me I really love that uh that little like viola or cello melody that plays in the Hunter's Dream oh that's very cozy yeah well I was about to ask what is everybody's favorite track from the whole Soulsborne series Gem and the First Hunter it's gotta be it's gotta go to um it's gotta go to um shit pass for a minute not yet Norris I have a long list of honorable mentions but it's pretty easily Gem and the First Hunter might be Ludwig's track for me that's the one yeah that's the one Ludwig's second half it's right there I like Hard Day's Night that's a solid song metal I'm just really bad at remembering songs and video games oh you're a bad person but I really like Vord's theme I really love that one Vord's theme is great I love it intense as fuck yeah I know like the second half I love how it just matches the second phase where I'm grumpy man but then all of a sudden the whole rush and then the music just kicks in there's huge fucking pounding drums and the grass going fucking crazy it's like this is Vort man he's shit by the way what a screenshot right there yeah poor man one HP the sliver problem I uh is anybody's favorite the filing shrine from Dark Souls 1 that's excellent I love it so much I mean I love Gwyn's theme a lot like I said I have a very long list of honorable mentions I love Lauren and Lothric that's their names right am I mixing them up that one's really great the transition oh this sounds good when you get a phase transition just right it's some of the most like Ludwig's is so powerful for that reason as well because the phase transition is so well executed and that's actually something Sekiro does quite wrong um mostly Sekiro I can't think of any other games someone said come on guys module is the a couple a couple of people in chat have said nameless song now nameless song is that that made me like deeply emotional when I beat the game for the first time and that played the song sounds similar to the one from Demon Souls right the uh the credits the demon souls I haven't heard demon souls credits song in a long time I uh yeah it's just reminding me of that one Demon Souls credit one is really great yes it does have the vocals no father gas coin is pretty cool I like it how many times does Theo need to say there would be a lot of honorable mentions though a lot of honorable mentions I guess we're going through the mole now yeah I mean like I don't know would you say that Bloodborne has the best soundtrack of all there it's my favorite I don't know if it's the best well I guess the problem is what are we saying when we say best that's the problem I don't I don't have enough arguments for the music number of tracks like the number of tracks that you like the one that you like the most wins I guess so just say favorite right yeah I mean sure I mean if you've got more tracks that you like than the games and the most let's say it's your favorite my Bloodborne with Dark Souls one just coming behind it overall I probably like more tracks in Dark Souls one and maybe three than Bloodborne but Bloodborne has higher highs yeah well often a first phase I think it's fantastic I really like the second phase as well I like the second phase too I like it it go it really is especially because you can't hear over the fucking screaming I like the second phase a lot because it goes really above and beyond a lot of what the game has been doing in terms of bombast and it gives off this very strong impression yeah it's this is really strong impression of good god this thing needs to die now matches really well with a player's position when they're in that point because usually if you're not like a Dark Souls god you get to orphan phase two and suddenly you're chugging through blood vials you're getting tagged as he flies all over your fucking screen because this thing is he's so far beyond I still haven't been in that fight oh no you just do it so far beyond your control at that point and it's an incredible experience with the music going as crazy as it does yeah I think soundtrack is not as great I would say it's the weakest of the whole series I just I wasn't as impacted by it that's the best I can say I wouldn't want to claim anything stronger than that they do some really good things in terms of fitting a track to a boss for example Godfrey not Godfrey, Godric's track has a lot of really random dramatic flourishes in among this it uses the same sinister waltz kind of thing that Ludwig's track had going in the first and second the second phase not the first phase and then with Godric's track it's like he's just making it up as he goes along there's just random musical flourishes just here and there scattered like whatever cause he's just doing whatever he wants which is very fitting to the boss I think narratively and I really like it when soundtracks are made to fit like that I guess I just want it said is like loads of people will adore this one more than any other and they'll be like confused just like for me I'm just like I mean I don't really do anything to explain more I mean it's wrong I don't know that you can talk somebody into or out of a perspective on on like music and the impact on them like nobody can come up to me but like well no you see this is the reason why like filing shrine is actually terribly composed first of all I wouldn't believe that but second of all even if you could prove it mathematically it's like well I still like it a lot you can't retroactively change someone's experience when it comes to listening to a song filing is so somber but sad and just peaceful it is a weird mix of peaceful and sad and yeah it's like a home such as it is kind of thing a home this sucks I'm sad well I think that is the great thing about that track is it does actually make you feel a little bit safe like at least a little bit it's kind of like resident evil's savory music it's fucking uncanny that you were thinking about that because I was literally thinking about it and having it play in my head as you were talking about that weird sort of neutral unsettling but safe at the same time music done done done resident evil is really great for that because it feels it's sad but it's like but you are safe here you know safe and it's just like you're yeah it's like you're safe the song alright resident evil with the best save room uh I can't remember enough of them I've seen quite many resident evil games two is pretty fucking good the one rags was humming in my head is the only one I don't know if I just play it in my head whenever I get to a save room in other resident evil games or what but I like the second thing you said I can't remember any other save rooms doon doon doon like instantly it's like a refricks I really liked the resident evil 2 one because there's sort of two I really liked RE2 is pretty yeah I'd say that's my favorite RE2 it's so good yeah it's really fantastic I'm almost certain that resident evil village had a soundtrack it definitely had one I think but I can't remember any of it might need to confirm later yeah we'll find out get science on it um well what is next it's a bit of a broad topic I suppose but it's something to address as with all of their games the RPG side of everything what are we thinking there is a lot of shit you can do yeah well there was a funny thing about that some people I guess square it as a criticism but it's just something to be discussed they're like this is just doxels a doxels 3 in an open world it's like that's why I'm here yeah I know there was some asshole on discord that said like you guys got suckered into buying the doxels 3 again it's like um no why I'm here let's be honest for a second if they released a doxels 3 expansion that was as big as doxels 3 again and they charged 60 dollars or whatever I think we would just be like wait I'm in I probably would have liked that more than this Theo you always find a way to dampen any statement between me I'm sorry the thought occurred to me and it was really outrageous well we we've talked about this it's like no these are tight night shots they're somber smithing stones no these aren't stones they're runes it's flasks of crimson tears you're like what I think even did anyone ever see the interview with George R R Martin where he's talking about this game and it almost sounds like he doesn't really know anything about it because people are asking we're talking about a video game in that interview he's like oh yeah it's a sequel to a game called Dark Souls this one's called The Elden Ring so like he actually said it's a sequel I don't even know what he did in the game so I guess it's just like a back and forth relationship it sounds like his work on it was done like four years ago he said he helped with the world building so my guess is he, Miyazaki and a translator went out for coffee and talked for a few hours that's probably it and then George R R Martin said he was going to do it and then didn't and Miyazaki finished it and Miyazaki eventually just wrote it for him actually this contribution was like make it about a ring and it's like does that have a dump for it it's like no a fantasy series sinnering around whenever the enemies die they're felled alright like a tree like a lumberjack and make a big snake man who says took out the eye and a stupid voice took out the eye there are some dragons in there too people love dragons make them shit though we have a lot of dragons no just one copy pasted I would go as far as saying that whatever commentary you have for the RPG system it's going to be very similar to what you have to say in this game probably yeah mega similar I don't know that we need weapons to go up to plus 25 but I certainly made that the case though yeah why not bigger, better, more plus 15 was fine I thought but maybe it's a way to keep new or old weapons more viable longer not sure but you don't need to go to 25 you don't need to do a lot of things because there's a problem right because to upgrade normal weapons that don't upgrade using somber stones you need vastly more quantities of normal smithing for reference the somber ones they go to a plus 10 on the weapons these are plus 25 and the plus and you need about 12 stones per I think it was three levels and the somber ones they need one they need one of each type and I don't really know why that's the case feels weirdly punishing maybe it's to encourage I guess with so much content in this game it gives you another reason to keep looking for them eventually you can buy a lot of somber stones even too so it's like actually I was expecting once I figured out the weapon leveling system knowing that the legendary weapons are only upgraded with the somber stones I kind of figured though those would be items that you can only find but you get bell bearings for the somber ones too and once you get the bell bearings for the standard ones it kind of trivializes the like well we need to up these by 25 levels because all it means is if you want to totally switch to a new weapon and get it up to level 24 you can do that by buying the shards that you need or not shards but you know the stones that you need for it it's only the the ancient dragon stones will be for the level 25 upgrade and those ones I believe you have to get by killing one of the ancient dragons it's like slabs in the old games getting this is a big deal you got the big upgrade material but the fact that it takes normal non somber stone weapons so long to scale up compared to somber stone weapons has a knock-on effect of making them feel a lot weaker in moment to moment gameplay because I don't know if anyone else had the same experience but I found it a lot easier actually to scrounge together the materials to upgrade my somber stone weapons and each upgrade mattered a lot more like a plus 4 Bloodhounds Fang versus my plus 4 Ruchigatana the plus 4 Bloodhounds Fang is like miles ahead yeah so it feels like I don't know why it is this way yeah I was I really wanted to start using Ashes of War on a great sword and so I thought okay well we got this great sword that's got bleed on it so I don't have to keep on using the beast fang right but then when I got the other bleed sword to level 20 Beast Fang level 9 was still like leagues above it damn dude I was just wondering when my Ruchigatana would catch up if ever and I just found the somber stone katana and then you know it was over um yeah the general statement I guess would just be that you can pursue many different stats and it seems to be it has like a general sense of a strong balance as far as I'm concerned seems to work pretty well like there's a lot of different options you can go for obviously it can always be stronger I just think that all of the souls born things have problems with how exactly it can work and how you can exploit it but I'm not sure else we should say about it basically I'm wondering what other commentary I can offer because I noticed this game is kind of like Bloodborne early game in the sense that you don't really get much out of putting points into damage stats because your weapon scalings scale up with upgrade level so your scalings kind of suck when you first get the weapons you want to use uh so there's no real point in investing into damage stats and because the damage in this game is so high you're pretty much just better off pumping health and you don't need stamina you do not need to love the stamina in this game I think the only time I really needed stamina was when I got to millenia I did a test with a friend and it's fucking bonkers I started Dark Souls 1 again recently because I wanted to cleanse the pallet and that game I started as the Banditman with the Simitar you can with your starting stamina and your starting equipment on you can roll four times or swing four times the last swing or roll coming out with like a tiny sliver of stamina in this game, in Elden Ring with your starting stamina you can swing an Ultra Greatsword six times and you're good I'll say this I love that running when you're not in combat does not consume stamina oh with the distances you have to travel that's a good one yeah it is a good one I think the DS3 was the one that started that big change for how stamina worked or was it DS2? I think it was DS3 stamina has been trending down and important for every single one Dark Souls 1 is seriously important Dark Souls 1 becomes a very deliberate game especially with your choices when your stamina is that limited I am especially with how quickly it regenerates as well because in this game it regenerates a shitload faster as well I am this close to saying this game may as well not actually have stamina it was funny because I think Dark Souls 1 trained people to level stamina and I remember in Dark Souls 3 when I was playing it online I was like why aren't you leveling stamina and I was like I still really need to and in this game I didn't even consider it really I did level a fair amount of endurance I think part of that was so I could carry my shield in addition to my great sword and not bad roll to be fair that was the only time I considered it was a quick load it wasn't stamina I was about to say you level endurance when you want a quick load because I got like this big big chunky armor the goat one and then it's like a fucked up endurance if you also want to equip a weapon later on at that point it was like stat and stamina just doesn't even stamina should be much more important I don't know why it's not because they want to do action combat ooh and they need you to be able to actually move and I don't know then maybe they should have it tied to if they want to strike that balance where you don't like need it I guess then maybe the compromises you need it for like heavy attacks or you need it for particular like if there was two different you know how the Witcher 3 had two dodges right you had the short one and then you had the long roll maybe something like that but there's gotta be a way to strike that balance I'm sure there is I do feel like if they're going to keep going in this direction their time with the stamina mechanic is probably done because in this game in 90% of cases the limiting factor on my ability to do things was not my stamina it was what the enemy was doing I'm never going to be able to exhaust my stamina unless I get a really lucky sequence of boss attacks or I'm just flailing an enemy way too hard what about blocking though because blocking hits your stamina and like I mean that's kind of the factor of how many hits you can tank before getting knocked off balance I'm not sure what the answer is you'd have to jury rig something together yeah maybe blocking could deplete your stamina and then after that it starts depleting health well I mean actually I answered my own question by saying Sekiro has no stamina bar and Sekiro it's your posture so you have a posture bar that fills and if you're just doing standard blocks every single hit will add to your posture bar and when it's full you get knocked off balance but if you're deflecting so if you're timing your blocks with the actual hits landing on your sword then you deflect basically like parry the enemy just several tiny parries as opposed to the single big ones that you do in the Souls games instead of adding to your posture bar it adds to your enemies posture bar and one thing I really liked about Sekiro that you can actually hurt your enemy by being good at defense and that I thought was a pretty cool mechanic people are seeing someone say that great sworders still rely on stamina I'm using a great sword in my second playthrough no they're not don't run out of stamina yeah no not really for attacking I used a great sword in my playthrough I suppose with mentioning it's like we all will hit zero on stamina are you really noticing that as opposed to simply happening because DS1 you have to be aware of your stamina in this game I was really having to be concerned about it I have enough stamina right now with all the endurance I had to level for this armor I can swing my hell bird two handed full combo twice before I run out of stamina Jesus Christ yeah because like I said I've been playing a little bit of Dark Souls 1 again as a comparison and Jesus Christ you really have to be aware of your stamina because it runs out really quick and it's not coming back that fast as compared to the newer games also your dodge roll only goes in four directions and that's really off-putting yeah could have fixed that with the remaster but then they decided yeah they did that was the only thing they changed for the gameplay the blue point steam and souls remake that they made it omnidirectional rolling and I was like yeah that's a good change I wish I could play that I also wish I cared about PS5 yeah I don't use mine very often to be honest I wouldn't recommend the financial investment yeah it needs more games why is game not other game God I mean for a second there I was like are you saying that about our commentary for how Dark Souls does not have the mechanic but the funny thing is they said it right after we were saying like four directions not cool omnidirection cool why is this game not the other game well yeah yeah the four directions in Dark Souls 1 I think is only complimented in the fact that Dark Souls 1 compared to the rest of them has enemies that are much more predictable because that was before a lot more of the attitudes of making them fast and unpredictable would come in four directions is not as hampering at this point at the same time I would prefer omnidirectional still annoying I would still change it yeah um alright sorry sorry I'm playing right now I had to take care of an invader named DS2 is bad hahaha he is not wrong I am ashamed that I had to kill him um there's two options here we've kind of covered them briefly I don't know if there's anything else that wish to be said about encounter and level design sorry say it again encounter and level design basically how they've constructed the game for you to complete it uh how much thought do you believe has gone into it versus not and do you think there are any problems or praises I think I just wanted you to give you this whole big area and just like go wild I don't think there was any world that has enemies in terms of how the player is going to approach them I don't think there was any really yeah I mean any world that is easy to distract me in like a good way that makes me want to see like what's in there is uh it's good in my book well definitely I liked it any is not correct uh sorry because there are cases where there's clearly an effort put into the level design things like storm veil I don't think storm veil is like a fantastic level I think it's probably pretty good maybe a bit less than pretty good they're about it's about on the level of a DS3 level I suppose I was much more excited by entering castles than I was entering catacombs or whatever because I was like at least the castle the castle will likely have started as someone trying to design a real castle and then match it to be mechanically satisfying in some way and so I was always like here we go with catacombs it's just like alright gotta find the lever wherever that may be and then the capital sewers made me want to kill myself going around in tubes and pipes like oh please don't I'm better than this I only went into the sewers at all because I thought that that's where you had to go to fight the final boss because it seems like you get you get done a firm zula you respawn and then the first thing ahead of you is a big hole into the sewer so I'm like alright down we go and then got through the entire dungeon it was like wait I just I just leave now well you do got to go down to the sewers to take care of the poop man quest storm veil had a pretty neat thing going on in the it was approachable from two directions because of the do you want to take the front gate or you know clamber around the side thing yeah that was reasonably interesting but would I be right in saying the level is pretty like tiny feels pretty tiny thinking about it storm veil storm veil yeah some sort of a very I mean the capital is much bigger but I guess it is actually much bigger so you know yeah which you know using scale appropriately so maybe storm veil should be small but I didn't find as much to be impressed by with when I was approaching each thing in the world I was more so just like alright who's next alright what's next as opposed to oh they want me to try and okay oh this that oh this is a challenge or oh this is going to take advantage of what I've learned recently the bubble but not really which I can forgive to some degree because of how enormous this fucking game is that somebody said small but complex I like that I don't know if I would call storm veil all that complex it's small certainly and it's a pretty good level but I don't think it's complex also question is if I go into the forge of giants and I head toward the end game yeah yeah still a bit to go still a bit to go are you worried about locking yourself off from something I don't want to like go straight to the end boss just yet no there are two areas there's a couple areas where I thought I was going in bossing and I don't want to go there yet you've got two more areas with one being significantly bigger than the other and the other one being a variation of something you visited before okay so I'm I tried to say that with as few spoilers as possible I'm in the hallowed tree it looked kind of and gave me up here so I wasn't sure no you have you got to the bottom of the hallowed tree I think so I had to kill another pain in the ass tree worm guy and scarlet rod that was great how do you feel about how do you feel about redheads redheads yeah are you talking about Millicent no you know when it happens you'll know Millicent went bye-bye so I don't know what you're talking about but I've already helped Millicent out how do you guys feel about the Raya Lucario Academy I really don't like the fact that the whole big network of rooftops and everything with all the marionet soldiers and gargoyles and everything is sort of an area that you don't even have to go to at all and I've played that area three times and I keep on forgetting that to get to the boss you just have to go right instead of left once you get to that courtyard after the first boss that's actually another enemy I fucking hate is those weird dudes with like a million bows and arrows and when they spaz out and go I hate them why did you do this to me because if the enemy fails then it's difficult that's Bloodborne's fault by the way yeah we learned that one from Bloodborne and they haven't been able to let go of it at least in Bloodborne they were like your character is really fast and the gameplay is really fast so we need some enemies that are real fast you know like I see how that happened but then you just put it in everything and the things that are flailing at you are literal beasts like they're huge monsters you know we can get something out of this I like the marionet guys okay that's an opinion that's fine it is fine and one had killed them finally had about some other opinions on the academy though you just best not miss I enjoy the way it loops back in on itself with the rooftop segment but the enemies in it are and the encounters in it they decided you know Shrine of Amarna Shrine of Amarna was cool let's do that it looked cool that is it yeah as well as the oh boy there are three different magic cast guys who are just going to spam spells at you meanwhile the floor may fall out from under you because your torch was moving down oh god don't anyone attempting to defend Shrine of Amarna I feel sorry for them that's fine Hbomber guy was desperate when defending that place to the point where he was like some people say it's hard when you don't have people to help you through it and it's like well I guess it sucks for anybody who doesn't have friends Hbomber guys enter the chat is it just DS2 this is the thing by the way I'm just going to say it now in case it was any confusion this game is leagues ahead of DS2 it's like a different realm of existence okay oh god yeah I think it did pull some things from DS2 but luckily it's probably going to agree they have three things that it pulled from it power stancing repeated enemies that are out in the open world and I guess yeah, maybe getting the third one might be kind of tricky and oh, disgracing the boss health bar oh, disgracing the boss health bar well I fucking hate the logic that it's got DS2's DNA DS2 and this have Dark Souls DNA which has demon souls it's a vindication of Dark Souls 2 which is another interesting thought if anything it's a condemnation of Dark Souls 2 because it tried to do things that that game did but implement the better and it still managed to fail in certain regards look look most of this game is DS3 I'm sorry, that's just the truth it's not DS2 or 1 or demon souls it's DS3 this game the thing is, you'd be like where does most of DS3 come from you're like DS1 not 2 and then where does most of DS1 come from demon souls, then where does demon souls come from you're just like Mario you know it's all the same Mario um what do you guys think about the scaling of that optional area the Hallig tree thingy um, I hate this place I kind of hate it a little bit I just want to say, I hate the Hallig tree I kind of hate the Hallig tree honestly, as stupid as it sounds putting a jump button in this game is a game changer for the platforming it is it changes a lot of how you approach everything in this game it really does my problem isn't with the platforming it's just that this place is DS2 written all the fuck over it's full of the worst enemies in the game I was gonna say, oh god there's so many poo enemies in that fucking area and it's all running through it right now dude, who the hell thought, hey how about this upgrade to the ulcerated tree spirit put him in a scarlet rot lake it's like what the fuck why would you I was so happy I didn't have to fight that thing I died grabbing the item that was in the middle of that rot my pride was challenged hey man, Mr. Hens you want to fight two of him at once how about six? yeah I was gonna say, if you run through that area you run to evade one of them spawns another one you are fucking kidding me right now or three of the crystal lines at a time that you gotta break their armor before you can the crystal dudes are annoying as hell yeah I hate them the best thing about that zone is skip the speedrunner found where you can throw yourself down an elevator shaft to land on the button killing yourself to bring the elevator back up to skip that time wow that's thinking outside the box you skip the entire zone damn that fucking I want to do that now yeah you gotta get the jump like perfect yeah you have to nail the aim also the enemies in here there's like triple the damage from everything else everything just becomes super tanky it's definitely that kind of area we are like oh I see I see what we are doing also we have another recycled boss here I only just noticed this Loretta you fight her what's the fucking rena's class carry a manor yeah yeah that's another one where you fight a ghost version of her and I was kind of thinking oh well probably fight her later and I got to that one is baffling yeah I really don't like that they made godfrey a spirit and then he's the second last boss of the game oh this area I like the fight trying to fight um double big boy knights with one of those tree avatar things yeah there were ways to cheese this but I was desperately trying to engage with this on a level that I thought the game wanted me to and my god it was absolute cancer he's doing it and I'm not even near him look and the funny thing is the mimic managed to survive that with half health it's fucking insane absurd yeah look at this absolute carnage of just this is what I mean so this is what encounter design I think is definitely being commented on this is just stuff this stuff everywhere it feels to me like the game does this a lot where there's just stuff around and you'll fight the stuff and in doing so you'll pull more stuff and then there's stuff everywhere by the way it was my big criticism of DS2's encounter design yeah that's exactly when I say DS2 all over the place this is new maruna right here the spam bush now that I'm in the hellic tree I regret my choice to make a tank build because it's worthless now it's absolutely worthless worthless now all the tankiness I had this whole game just like yeah you died in three hits the good news is if you have two larval tears you can completely respect and then spec back I have probably like five or so how do you have like ten I had some first playthrough I had so many of them it's like oh what do I actually need to respect like oh I have okay I can respect lots of time I accidentally put some points into stamina early on might as well respect real quick all in back for some reason a billion damage with that those ends with the big head yeah super tanky and when they ram you they take away half your health it's like what is happening your ends how about the little ass to you I don't know why the weird spew attack hits as hard as it does oh it's so fucking quick the fucking big lobsters with the spew attack I can just shoot across the map speaking of fucking do you remember the railgun archers in Seofra river the weird minor talk oh I hated them what were they thinking oh my god what the fuck happened when they made those I hate the normal versions of those enemies as well because they just don't stop that was a huge mistake and I'm so glad that was like the only place they were at holy shit there is more of them somewhere in Leonea I wish for all of you to see this okay so I did a jumping attack onto him and I was like it'll land and then I will walk around him on the edge of the man unfortunately for me that's not quite how it goes and boom I'm knocked down but hey that's not so bad I've survived and ultimately where I am is actually safe compared to where I was oh fucking vomit falls to the ground pain pain look at him like take this with you um but yeah those enemies you're talking about they drove me nuts there's the most fear I felt in the entire game because I was actually like trying to keep my 10,000 runes at the time I think um so for the sake of people out there who wondering what we have to say about it I feel like we must mention story who here knows what happened in this game I had a ring you win and um guys you win I have a very good question fellas what's the Elden Ring it's a magical thing and when it broke everybody got fucked in the face what does it do it's the name of an elderly stripper what do you think the Elden Ring does powerful it is the one ring that would rule them the Elden Ring is a MacGuffin it's several shards of the MacGuffin is it not hilarious that I have no fucking clue what the answers are to these questions and I don't even care I'm just like whatever I'm kind of to that point as well somebody was asking me it's like so what's the story and I'm like oh shit was I just not paying attention I think there's more first tools have gained had we read every flavour text of every fucking item but I just don't care to and it is funny because we'd be like oh have you not played the game for very long it's like a hundred hours but yeah the real who did some explaining of some lore things to me because I just came to him with questions from time to time and I had some interest in some of the lore stuff from that because there's some kind of neat concepts going on but the story oh geez there's some NPCs and their story quests I can recall what happened Millicent was pretty cool follow up question poor fucking blide and all of his friends what's an Elden Lord it's like an old person I think it is the person that holds the Elden Ring and I actually I'm pretty sure that is that he puts it on his Elden finger I have no clue man I don't know why it's meaningful either here's one we'll find out in like a month Vati video put some videos we'll get a nice smooth base I talk into the game code and I uncovered this story what no questions like what do you think of the characters fucking characters everyone really likes the blue girl I hate her because everyone likes her Theo, you shouldn't have said that people are just gonna believe that your kid takes on everything I hate it because everyone likes it I ended the game as the concert of a four armed waifu and I'm not sorry that can't be true of me entirely more because I like arcane I knew you'd say that and I'm pretty sure you don't like how mainstream it is yes oh shit oh no exposed immediately you're very much a person of I like my things and no one else can like them stay away oh my god that was getting really angry at Theo it's just a stupid fucking boss it doesn't stop attacking which one are you talking about it's a knight of the hellic tree you like her spamming the magic swords that you know zone you out but then she doesn't really do anything on her own so you just have to sit around it's just been dodging like forever and can't do shit it's just so annoying I mean that what else do we have to say about the story I can try and tie it into something that I guess affected my experience with the game if that'll get us anywhere so for me I quite value having direction in games that may have come across in my experience of interacting with the open world I don't do well in terms of mindlessly just sort of wandering in a direction on the promises that there might be something that way I like to have a reason to go in the directions I go in a game that's provided to me or at least it can be justified within the narrative ideally in this game that means just following the critical path or wherever the grace leads so I got to market and you know you might think you can go somewhere else but I couldn't it was so hard for me to think of a justification for going and exploring the other 60% of Limegrave because I was like why would I, markets here this is where I'm supposed to go maybe I'm too much of an NPC or whatever but the idea of just not mattering at all to why I do any of the things I do in the game kind of bums me out I think that it does within the world it's just that it didn't to most of us because like all the front software games really with the possible exception of Sekiro the story is just not really it's not on the front burner like it's there if you want to dive into it if you want to read a bunch of item descriptions if you want to talk to more NPCs more NPCs but I mean realistically it's a video game that you're playing for the gameplay for the most part or I find most of their games tend to be it's got lore and gameplay less story and plot and characters I would actually fight that a little bit I would argue Dark Souls 1 is pretty clear with what's going on with that it's very explicit it's really explicit I think it's understandable in terms of what going for in that game and what meaning you can pull out of it even in the surface level Vegas sense in this game I don't know what the Elden Ring is come on yeah okay I don't know what anything I'm doing is or means or the context of any of it from a guidance standpoint though as far as like how the plot directs the player to do the thing in Dark Souls 1 it's kind of just the Oscars like hey yeah I gotta go ring that bell you want to take care of that for me and then you're off to ask it's a pretty pretty simple trajectory go and ring escape from the asylum go and ring the bell to find the fate of the undead okay there's two bells go and ring them you ring both the bells Frampt tells you your fate is to succeed Lord Gwynn cool let's go and do that it's essentially obfuscated from me what that actually means I just know cool I'm gonna succeed Gwynn but I mean they don't tell you where the bells are and you don't really have to do one and he says he says he tells the bell tower and then he tells you the ones at the bottom of Blighttown at the ruins of the depths of Blighttown yeah so you like Ubisoft g