@magnetphonics: IF you play on console (possibly with a controller on PC) then your pad will wildly vibrate along with those noises which is a lot less subtle but makes it kind of hard to miss.
@facelessvixen: if it’s the same quality as Blood and Wine then I’d be willing to pay $20 since Blood and Wine was an excellent expansion as it added an entire new landmass to the existing game not to mention several new armor sets etc.
@undeadpool: Agreed. Being locked into a broken build halfway through the game because you didn’t get how the stats worked at the start sucks. Not everyone has the time and energy to just start a 15 hour game over again. Should be a standard quality of life feature.
If it’s a free update I’ll check it out. If it’s like a $20 expansion then I’ll probably wait for a sale or something but wouldn’t mind jumping into some more Cyberpunk since I heard they added a lot of small improvements since launch.
@undeadpool: I think in the very end you answer your own question when you say that "Sometimes choice can be overwhelming, especially when certain enemies and bosses are meant to be tackled in a certain way." Choice can be overwhelming for sure, but at the end of the day when you hit a brick wall and have determined that with your current abilities and loadout you just can't progress further there is always a plan B to try. When put up against a wall even the most hesitant player will typically try an alternate approach before putting the game down for good. When you reach a boss in Sekiro and your reflexes and hand eye coordination are just not enough then thats the end of the road. I know way more people that gave up in Sekiro because of their inability to play that game on it's terms than folks who were paralyzed by build choices in Elden Ring.
What follows will be open spoiler territory so if you haven’t reached this point in the game stop reading.
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I’ve been making my way through Immortality recently and it was a rather bumpy journey for me. Out of Barlows catalogue I loved Her Story as it’s narrative really gripped me and I loved the performance of the lead actress. Similarly the interface was simple yet extremely effective allowing you to easily track keywords you’ve explored and narrow down leads. Immortality is a huge step up from Her Story both mechanically and narratively featuring much more footage and freedom in how you explore it. Once again I found myself trying to uncover a mystery through archival footage but one that wasn’t as cut and dry in its focus. The ability to skip through three distinct time periods proved to be vastly more disorienting than Her Story’s singular timeline and your tools are a lot less predictable. Visually highlighting objects in a scene doesn’t yield a comprehensive list of search results but rather throws you randomly into any of the three time periods where the algorithm located a similar object. Results are often mixed and highly unpredictable. Sometimes clicking a gun in one scene will take you to a gun in another but subsequently clicking that gun will return you back to the original scene you arrived from, closing a loop and forcing you to find an alternative way of locating more scenes. I found this to be slightly more trial and error based approach than I would have liked in my efforts to cyber sleuth my way to the heart of this mystery. Which brings me to the actual mystery.
Upon discovering a great many scenes from Marissa’s films and uncovering some of the reasons behind them never being released I had reached the end point of the game - or at least the game had decided this for me. This happened in the most unfortunate way as I was winding down for the night when the sequence leading to the credits began. I’ve been switching off between PC and Console when playing Immortality so while back at the grid of clips I started pressing Esc to Save and Quit back to desktop and make sure the cloud save synced. As I pressed the Esc key several times nothing was happening because unknown to me at the time the tile flipping animation locks out all inputs until you begin scrolling up or dow. I initially thought my game had encountered a bug and was stuck as I couldn’t bring up the menu and clicking frames similarly did nothing. I had a moment of panic that I would lose progress and was on the verge of forcefully shutting down the game when I finally scrolled up and the tiles started to switch over. The final chilling message played out and credits rolled to a great pop rendition of “Two of Everything.”
I wasn’t really ready for the end and had many more questions than answers. Immortality is incredibly unique and very impressive, but ultimately I felt strangely empty as I stewed in my doubts watching the credits play out. I had a great time “playing” it even if at times I thought my journey was a little more meandering than I would like, but this impromptu ending triggered by what I can only imagine is a % based count of frames uncovered felt abrupt and premature leaving me with mixed feelings.
Considering that everyone’s journey to this end point will be unique (which is obviously not a real end as you can continue uncovering more clips afterwards) I’m curious how everyone experienced it and what were your feelings as the credits rolled?
I would say it's the second least approachable Souls game right after Serkiro due to it's very limited build options (comparatively to all other Souls entries) and it's reliance on aggressive in your face combat that does not work for everyone. It certainly has the most unique aesthetic of all these games with it's Cthulhu-Victorian vibes that we simply don't see very often. Everything else in the From catalogue is either dark fantasy or Sekiro's somewhat unique take on the feudal-Japan look which we have also seen many times over in various forms.
Elden Ring is probably their most approachable game to date as it presents the player with so many options and so many "crutches" to lean on it is incredibly hard to back yourself into a corner.
The question whether its real or not is not nearly as interesting as how it came to be in the first place. Lance who knows his way around fiddling with the insides of games has said that while it's pretty obvious this isn't something you can just find on a typical retail disc of Nier Automata, also stated he has no idea how it was made. The simple act of panning the camera is currently not something any modder knows how to do and a lot of it has to do with Automata running on a proprietary engine.
So yah, the whole thing is obviously staged, but it's fascinating how.
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