Pazy

Dark Souls 2 is easily my favourite Dark Souls game. I love how distinct the enviroments are, it feels so alien and sudden that I think it really contributes to the tone. It may have a few too many bosses but I really like most of them and I generally love the "duel" fights versus a humanoid enemy or two.

Personally, I do find that most multiplayer games end up with too much of a focus on meta or otherwise "playing optimally". In a single player game I can just play what I want but a lot of multiplayer games end up forcing you to match up with strangers so you have to play with those people who want to play differently from yourself.

Destiny 2 is a game I had to stop playing because quests would force me to use matchmaking to enter the Strike content and Id generally end up with a negative experience of watching someone else play the content for me or be complained at because Im not contributing as much as they are. FF14 has option for soloing dungeons but I want to play with just 1 or 2 friends in the current expansion so I have to take mandatory matchmaking, which means we were matched up with two other players we didnt need (and they didnt need us) and then we got to be frustrated as a group since our playstyles didnt match up.

Though thats more of an issue with some games forcing people to play together without the option of even trying to play it just yourself or just with your one friend in content with a 3 or 4 player capacity. There often isnt an option to avoid people who are playing drastically different from yourself. It means I find myself being pushed out of games where a large enough group of people have decided to play "meta" or "optimally" for whatever reason.

Sadly I found myself in a similar place though a lot earlier having given up about 30-40 hours in.

I generally dont like open world games for a lot of reasons and Elden Ring didnt do anything to change that. I still found the world to have a lot of filler and repeated content, I still found it up to chance as to whether I stumbled into something interesting or dull and it made "Ive not done enough side quests to level up" a realistic idea in my mind when facing new challenges.

It was all a negative effect for me where I was missing the tight nature of the earlier games level design and the bespoke challenges you face in certain ways since it was all now seperated by an variable amount of side content with an incredibly useful horse. It made it substantially harder for me to figure out if I was just bad at a certain boss fight or I had stumbled into it too early without having done enough side content grinding. Even just having the horse in the open world I found took away from what I liked about Souls, I wanted to face that specific challenge with everything I could muster versus the designers specific. I remember a particular moment where I was hunting for a key and it looked like I was going to face a crystal dragon but I was able to ride up, get the key and go away before the dragon had a chance to start attacking. I could have elected to fight it but the fight was already over, I had my reward and the game didnt feel like making me fight it which is a lot of what I liked about previous games.

I also just didnt find any of the bosses particularly interesting or unique so far, it felt like a lot of things I have already seen in previous games so I never found myself that excited to continue on and see what new things might be around. They really liked their chain combos, AoE around themselves and wind ups for most of the bosses.

Im guessing this general design will continue for future FROM Souls games which is understandable and probably the correct choice given the reaction and sales but I think Im out at this point. Its not for me anymore and thats fine.

I honestly dont think the Souls community is really worse than any other and its a lot about what individuals you happened to have encountered. For example, my experiences with the FF14 community have been pretty terrible with a lot of people explaining at length why I am wrong for not liking particular changes and that the devs know best so I shouldn't have a different opinion. It just lead to me never wanting to interact with other people who were playing the game.

They have some costume and mount rewards for playing certain amounts and hitting certain levels: http://tera.enmasse.com/news/posts/open-beta-stress-tests
I was fairly excited myself since I like the combat enough to think about levelling just to get the sweet mount but that even on an Xbox One X the framerate is fairly bad even just out in the world with constant stutters so its not worth it for me.

I grabbed Blackguards, I heard a lot of good things and kept almost getting it. Thanks duder!

These are the same problems I keep coming back to with FF14. I played a little in 1.0 but really got into it during the ARR alpha's and beta's and I was there through most of ARR, about half of HW and I've subbed for about 2 months of Stormblood and a lot of it is just the amount of content and how replayable it is. After waiting 3+ months for the first patch of Stormblood we got a single dungeon that looks super pretty but is the exact same mechanics and linear design its always been and a 24-man that, again, looks amazing has *mostly* repeated mechanics and a linear design. ARR at least covered up the similar design by just having more content, 3 dungeons at a time with a smart system of reusing assets for one of the dungeons and then new assets for the other but more and more FF14 is giving me about 6 hours of fun every 3 months and no real reason to play inbetween.

Its too bad because when it works its super cool, I love the characters and the world, I love how my White Mage plays and I had so much fun repeating the content in ARR and looking forward to the next. Sadly it seems like they just got safe with it. They found their exact pattern of what content to put out with each patch and have just repeated the cycle for 4 years now with very minor attempts at something on the side like Chocobo Racing and Diadum but overall its just beginning to feel hollow and contrived, an exact cookie-cuttter pattern repeated each time with very little heart. For the rest of Stormblood I expect to sub for the new patches just for the story but I really should just wait till its over and not reward them for this design.

The Dunne stuff was kind of disappointing. Perhaps im just reading into it but it seems like he wasen't allowed to do most of his unique character stuff and just ended up being another wrestler-man going exactly 50/50 against the heel champ who has to cheat to win (which implies he is worse than him). Would it have been that bad for Enzo if Dunne had just came in, done his bruiserweight stuff, surprised him and beat him clean? I dont think it would have hurt him any and would have put even more light on the UK championship.

I'm incredibly excited for Origins. Immediately the Egyptian setting appeals to me as a kid who spent years with various Egyptology books and then adding in this "Discovery Mode" idea so I can just explore safely and get more indepth information sounds exactly directed at me. When it comes to the AC series itself I've been getting back into it recently, while its not the most challenging or indepth I still find it really fun, there tends to be a lot of choices to mess around with (and since the game tends to be easy they are all viable) and once you get used to each game you feel incredibly powerful like you own the battlefield. Its a good bit of variety mixed in with the more challenging and long term games I play. Gameplay-wise Origins seems to be doing enough to differentiate itself from previous AC games though maybe not enough from other open world RPG's like Witcher.

In fact, I'm so excited for this that I ended up importing the prequel novel from the US. Its only out in the UK in ebook form but I dont enjoy reading ebooks. So far its written decently well and has some good little character moments, its fits really well next to the games itself.

Something seems very off with that. Im totally in for comic relief orc's on the 'artistic' side but on a purely technicaly level that just sound kind of lazy and unfinished, like they took his blind reading of the script recording accidentally using a webcam mic and then just pasted it into the game without any audio mixing. Hopefully thats just the video though or if its not they can patch it, I'm all in for one or more of the orcs to be jokey guys.