From Software Elden Ring - From Software's new game with writing by GRRM

[mediocrepoet]

Dishonored

Patient zero of the stronk sheboon right here. Such a great setting.

Sheboon? Isn't that just a picture of Michael Jackson reimagined as a black cyber ninja?

 

[Silva]

Yeah, that shit was awful. Is that by the original Dishonored authors? Hard to believe

 

[Silverfish]

you over value Japanese garbage because it makes you feel special to watch Japanese children's media

At no point in a LeGuin novel did a father and son reunite from beyond the grave and obliterate their common enemy with a dual kamehameha.

patient zero of the stronk sheboon right here. Such a great setting.

Arkane are based as hell and you clearly never played Death of the Outsider.

Isn't that just a picture of Michael Jackson reimagined as a black cyber ninja?

Apropos as Billie's a smooth criminal.

 

[Silva]

Ok, I never played DotO. Is it good?

 

[Silverfish]

Ok, I never played DotO. Is it good?

It's okay. It's basically D2's little brother.

 

[cvv]

cvv what do you find interesting exactly in Witcher? Honest question. Felt like a run of the mill eurofantasy monster hunting to me.

Not sure if it comes through in the games but the books absolutely do have a unique vibe, a strangely authentic mix of Slavic and Celtic myths and mentality. The first Witcher game captures it the best, the other ones are somewhat americanized to appeal to a global audience more.

 

[Child of Malkav]

Ok, I never played DotO. Is it good?

Good-ish. 3 powers, all new, I liked 2 of them. New district, new maps, 1 revisited from the base game, 1 takes place during the day then the same during the night, 1 final map. Infinite mana that recharges, bonecharms give you passive abilities from the base game like more health, double jump etc. Side contracts, new EM "gun" that's silent, shop and merchandise and upgrades, can be robbed. Main character is unlikeable, Daud dies off screen, the premise is stupid and you can talk to groups of rats. Eh, if you liked D2 you'll probably like this one as well, gameplay wise.

 

[Lyric Suite]

This topic has gone off the rail for the record i didn't say Japanese fantasy writing is better than western fantasy writing (having zero experience with Japanese fantasy outside of FromSoft games i couldn't make such a sweeping claim even if i wanted to). I just said modern western writers aren't suited for a setting like Dark Souls.

I never read anything from Martin other than the first book in his Fire and Ice series but clearly all of his focus was on the characters and subverting certain fantasy tropes. It doesn't read like mythology the way Tolkien does.

Even if we ignore AAA corporate slop for a moment fantasy in modern games doesn't feel the way it did in the 80s or 90s. It's all about the drama. Witcher was the same, wasn't it?

Not even saying that's a bad thing on it's own level. I enjoyed much of the writing in Kingdom Come but i wouldn't let Vavra write lore for a FromSoft game either. It's just two different worlds.

Getting Martin was really nothing more than a cheap marketing ploy.

 

[Hell Swarm]

I never read anything from Martin other than the first book in his Fire and Ice series but clearly all of his focus was on the characters and subverting certain fantasy tropes. It doesn't read like mythology the way Tolkien does.

Martin gets more Tolkien as the books go on. It starts character focused but starts to become overly flowery in describing minor details about the world.

Even if we ignore AAA corporate slop for a moment fantasy in modern games doesn't feel the way it did in the 80s or 90s. It's all about the drama. Witcher was the same, wasn't it?

The drama angle is adding more women to the writing teams and trying to appeal to them. Women's power fantasies are 2 powerful but opposing men fighting over them. They don't want to fight dragons, they want 2 dragon slayers to fight over her instead.

How much damage has From's writing style done to video games? That tweet that passed around mocking From's style was quite accurate. You can throw in a single random name and never expand on it and you have thousands of hours of youtubes commentary on who/what it is. Has it encouraged game writing to become lazier where you don't flesh out the world and use the intentional holes as time saving?

 

[Lyric Suite]

How much damage has From's writing style done to video games?

I'm going to say none?

As far as i can see, FromSoft games have had zero effect on the industry in terms of influence, either in terms of gameplay or story telling. Not that i am in the habit of playing current AAA corporate slop but frankly i don't see any FromSoft influence anywhere in any of them. Hell, i don't even see it in indie games. The only time when there's an influence is in games that are specifically supposed to be clones of Dark Souls and that's pretty much a niche.

 

[Hell Swarm]

As far as i can see, FromSoft games have had zero effect on the industry in terms of influence, either in terms of gameplay or story telling. Not that i am in the habit of playing current AAA corporate slop but frankly i don't see any FromSoft influence anywhere in any of them. Hell, i don't even see it in indie games. The only time when there's an influence is in games that are specifically supposed to be clones of Dark Souls and that's pretty much a niche.

From combat has become the defacto combat style in action RPGs now. It's been widely adopted into modern slop like God of war and Assassin's creed. The slow dodge focused stamina management with high damage failures is every where and it's become increasingly difficult to find a game that isn't like that.

 

[Stonewolf]

Challenge: someone find an interview where GRRM actually names an actual piece of lore he created for the game. No generalizations, an actual NAMED PIECE OF LORE

It is widely known that GRRMs main contribution was putting Middle-Earth in Google Translate couple of times, and The Lands Between came out.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

Martin gets more Tolkien as the books go on. It starts character focused but starts to become overly flowery in describing minor details about the world.

No
From the second book onwards, the series has more lore dumps but it's not by much and absolutely never to the the level of LotR

As far as i can see, FromSoft games have had zero effect on the industry in terms of influence

 

[Silva]

I would like to say Persona 5 is a pretty badass premise and I haven't seen a Jungian take as good as that in videogame. C'mon, raiding peoples' psyches to fight their shadows and change then, by weaponizing cultural masks from all over the world, is liquid awesome. And the Persona 3 premise that there's this "dark hour" between midnight and 1:00 created by some greedy corpo to experiment on people's psyches and now shit got out of control is super badass too.

Base SMT sure, is a much more normal demon apocalypse milieu, I give Hell Swarm that. What's cool about it is just the gloomy atmosphere they manage to pull out.

As far as i can see, FromSoft games have had zero effect on the industry in terms of influence

 

[Remain Nameless]

How much damage has From's writing style done to video games? That tweet that passed around mocking From's style was quite accurate. You can throw in a single random name and never expand on it and you have thousands of hours of youtubes commentary on who/what it is. Has it encouraged game writing to become lazier where you don't flesh out the world and use the intentional holes as time saving?

Is there even any example of this in ER? Aside from Godwyn that dies before the game starts and but you can still find his corpse, and Miquella who will be in the dlc, I think pretty much every character named in dialogue or item descriptions can be encountered in the game in one form or another. Rya's mother is the only very small exception I can think of. The "Forgive me Zanzibart" thing is a shitpost by people that have never played the game.

As far as i can see, FromSoft games have had zero effect on the industry in terms of influence, either in terms of gameplay or story telling. Not that i am in the habit of playing current AAA corporate slop but frankly i don't see any FromSoft influence anywhere in any of them. Hell, i don't even see it in indie games. The only time when there's an influence is in games that are specifically supposed to be clones of Dark Souls and that's pretty much a niche.

From combat has become the defacto combat style in action RPGs now. It's been widely adopted into modern slop like God of war and Assassin's creed. The slow dodge focused stamina management with high damage failures is every where and it's become increasingly difficult to find a game that isn't like that.

Nu-God of War and Assassin's creed don't have "From combat". And the former doesn't have stamina at all.

 

[Silva]

Has it encouraged game writing to become lazier where you don't flesh out the world and use the intentional holes as time saving?

Yes and it's a bless, considering the excessive over-expository writing in games in recent times. Give me From's cryptic (or lazy, whatever) writing over those walls of (bad) text any time of the day. Worst comes, I may simply ignore it and focus on gameplay and ambience.

 

[Hell Swarm]

Is there even any example of this in ER? Aside from Godwyn that dies before the game starts and but you can still find his corpse, and Miquella who will be in the dlc, I think pretty much every character named in dialogue or item descriptions can be encountered in the game in one form or another. Rya's mother is the only very small exception I can think of. The "Forgive me Zanzibart" thing is a shitpost by people that have never played the game.

Where the exiled people go isn't really covered. The weeb armour is as much as a mystery as can be. There's a lot of "There's something vaguely over there" left in Elden Ring. Miquella being in the DLC doesn't stop him originally being a zanzibart case. He's mentioned here and there but has no actual presentation beyond his arm. All of the outer Gods and the shadow queen or whatever her name is. Fia's entire culture is vaguely covered if covered at all. There's probably loads more since it's From and their style leaves stuff open.

Has it encouraged game writing to become lazier where you don't flesh out the world and use the intentional holes as time saving?

Yes and it's a bless, considering the excessive over-expository writing in games in recent times. Give me From's cryptic (or lazy, whatever) writing over those walls of (bad) text any time of the day. Worst comes, I may simply ignore it and focus on gameplay and ambience.

There's happy mediums and walls of text about being a dyke is as bad as Miyazaki writing post-it notes the week before release and day 1 patching in the lore. Attaching lore to equipment your character has no way of understanding is quite lame and does nothing to tell a story. It's nice it doesn't get in the way of game play but there's other ways to tell a complete story and we're in a binary situation of too much bad writing or barely any writing that's still bad.

 

[cvv]

I would like to say Persona 5 is a pretty badass premise and I haven't seen a Jungian take as good as that in videogame.

The problem with Japanese games today is whatever depth and complexity there is it's often dragged down by the infantile style. Characters with child faces and squeaky voices or angsty teens endlessly obsessing about angsty teen stuff.

Not sure where it all went wrong, Japan used to adore true geniuses like Kurosawa, probably the only real match for Kubrick. Rashomon, Seven Samurais, Yojimbo, Kagemusha, Ran, are all genuine works of art. Same for the other Miyazaki and Ghibli or Mamoru Oshii or Takeshi Kitano.

Now Japan worships cretins with delusions of grandeur like Kojimbo. There's barely anything deep, mature, serious anymore (that I know of). It's all anime and lollis and infantile characters with squeaky voices. Or banal teeny diarrhea like FF7. It's telling it was an American studio of all things that honored Kurosawa with a special game mode in Ghost of Tsushima.

FromSoft is the only Japanese developer I know of that's trying to bring back some seriousness and true art to the modern Japanese popculture, totally dominated by anime and wacky decadence.

 

[Nathir]

I would like to say Persona 5 is a pretty badass premise and I haven't seen a Jungian take as good as that in videogame. C'mon, raiding peoples' psyches to fight their shadows and change then, by weaponizing cultural masks from all over the world, is liquid awesome. And the Persona 3 premise that there's this "dark hour" between midnight and 1:00 created by some greedy corpo to experiment on people's psyches and now shit got out of control is super badass too.

Base SMT sure, is a much more normal demon apocalypse milieu, I give Hell Swarm that. What's cool about it is just the gloomy atmosphere they manage to pull out.

As far as i can see, FromSoft games have had zero effect on the industry in terms of influence

Persona 5 has awful characters and awful dialouge, with too many walls of text. Who cares about muh jungian sumthing at that point. Haven't played 3 and 4 but I can tell they are the same just by looking at the character designs and how popular they are among weebs.

 

[Silva]

I would like to say Persona 5 is a pretty badass premise and I haven't seen a Jungian take as good as that in videogame.

The problem with Japanese games today is whatever depth and complexity there is it's often dragged down by the infantile style. Characters with child faces and squeaky voices or angsty teens endlessly obsessing about angsty teen stuff.

Not sure where it all went wrong, Japan used to adore true geniuses like Kurosawa, probably the only real match for Kubrick. Rashomon, Seven Samurais, Yojimbo, Kagemusha, Ran, are all genuine works of art. Same for the other Miyazaki and Ghibli or Mamoru Oshii or Takeshi Kitano.

Now Japan worships cretins with delusions of grandeur like Kojimbo. There's barely anything deep, mature, serious anymore (that I know of). It's all anime and lollis and infantile characters with squeaky voices. Or banal teeny diarrhea like FF7. It's telling it was an American studio of all things that honored Kurosawa with a special game mode in Ghost of Tsushima.

FromSoft is the only Japanese developer I know of that's trying to bring back some seriousness and true art to the modern Japanese popculture, totally dominated by anime and wacky decadence.

As someone who enjoys contemporary japanese art, I would say it's more a matter of this visual fad getting massified and tainting the substance behind, than a case of the works being trash per se. There are a bunch of quality sutff with the aesthetics you criticize (more or less) being released for some time now, from Death Note to Mushishi, to Monster, Jojo, Attack on Titan, Full Metal Alchemist, Mob Psycho, Devilman, etc. It's hard to argue those works are bad or lack quality. The real problem is the bazillion other works which appeal is solely those aesthetics and end up being trash and infantile, yes. (btw I did a Kurosawa marathon recently and while the guy indeed has some brilliant works - Seven Samurai is *chef's kiss* - I found he a tad overrated. The Kobayashi and Mizoguchi works I've seen felt better and more relevant than Kurosawa's for me)

Persona 5 has awful characters and awful dialouge, with too many walls of text. Who cares about muh jungian sumthing at that point.

Indeed, it's among the worst dialogue I've seen in a videogame. OTOH the fact it managed to carry me (and others who also despised the dialogue) all the way through it's 100h playthrough with the power of it's gameplay and aesthetis (music included) alone speaks tons for those elements. The game's sense of style is a thing of beauty and anyone who sees gaming through an art lens would be missing out by ignoring it.

Thinking now, Persona seems an example of what me and cvv talk about of contemporary jap art: a work containing equal parts of greatness and awfulness. Still, I prefer that over the 90% awfulness of most western vidya nowadays. Gimme the next Shin Megami Tensei, Persona, Dark Souls, Nioh, Nier/Automata, Metroid, Zelda or Shadow of the Colossus over... whatever the next Last of Us, God of War, Witcher 3, Arkham City or Horizon Zero Dawn happen to be.

 

[Remain Nameless]

Where the exiled people go isn't really covered. The weeb armour is as much as a mystery as can be. There's a lot of "There's something vaguely over there" left in Elden Ring. Miquella being in the DLC doesn't stop him originally being a zanzibart case. He's mentioned here and there but has no actual presentation beyond his arm. All of the outer Gods and the shadow queen or whatever her name is. Fia's entire culture is vaguely covered if covered at all. There's probably loads more since it's From and their style leaves stuff open.

Has it encouraged game writing to become lazier where you don't flesh out the world and use the intentional holes as time saving?

Yes and it's a bless, considering the excessive over-expository writing in games in recent times. Give me From's cryptic (or lazy, whatever) writing over those walls of (bad) text any time of the day. Worst comes, I may simply ignore it and focus on gameplay and ambience.

There's happy mediums and walls of text about being a dyke is as bad as Miyazaki writing post-it notes the week before release and day 1 patching in the lore. Attaching lore to equipment your character has no way of understanding is quite lame and does nothing to tell a story. It's nice it doesn't get in the way of game play but there's other ways to tell a complete story and we're in a binary situation of too much bad writing or barely any writing that's still bad.

I don't think mentioning faraway lands that can't be visited or distant gods that aren't elaborated upon is necessarily bad or lazy writing, in fact it is pretty much universal among fantasy media in general to create a sense that the world is bigger and more mysterious than it actually is while focusing on the parts or locations that are more important for the story.

Now what is lazy about fromsoft's writing is more about the general presentation and design, still sticking to the old formula of item descriptions and NPCs standing around saying a few new vague lines of dialogue when activating a new trigger, offering quests that are either convoluted and without proper conclusions or very linear and formulaic. In ER it's especially bad since almost every NPC quest ends with their deaths or worse at the end. They possibly planned to do something more elaborate with Melina but for some reason gave up.

 

[His Dudeness]

This topic has gone off the rail for the record i didn't say Japanese fantasy writing is better than western fantasy writing (having zero experience with Japanese fantasy outside of FromSoft games i couldn't make such a sweeping claim even if i wanted to). I just said modern western writers aren't suited for a setting like Dark Souls.

I never read anything from Martin other than the first book in his Fire and Ice series but clearly all of his focus was on the characters and subverting certain fantasy tropes. It doesn't read like mythology the way Tolkien does.

Even if we ignore AAA corporate slop for a moment fantasy in modern games doesn't feel the way it did in the 80s or 90s. It's all about the drama. Witcher was the same, wasn't it?

Not even saying that's a bad thing on it's own level. I enjoyed much of the writing in Kingdom Come but i wouldn't let Vavra write lore for a FromSoft game either. It's just two different worlds.

Getting Martin was really nothing more than a cheap marketing ploy.

Tuf Voyaging and the compilation in honor of Jack Vance for which GRRM contributed with a short story are both great.

A song of ice and fire is probably his most derivative and unimaginative work, which would explain its popularity.

 

[Hell Swarm]

Indeed, it's among the worst dialogue I've seen in a videogame. OTOH the fact it managed to carry me (and others who also despised the dialogue) all the way through it's 100h playthrough with the power of it's gameplay and aesthetis (music included) alone speaks tons for those elements. The game's sense of style is a thing of beauty and anyone who sees gaming through an art lens would be missing out by ignoring it.

Thinking now, Persona seems an example of what me and @cvv talk about of contemporary jap art: a work containing equal parts of greatness and awfulness. Still, I prefer that over the 90% awfulness of most western vidya nowadays. Gimme the next Shin Megami Tensei, Persona, Dark Souls, Nioh, Nier/Automata, Metroid, Zelda or Shadow of the Colossus over... whatever the next Last of Us, God of War, Witcher 3, Arkham City or Horizon Zero Dawn happen to be.

SMT3 + Anime isn't very appealing to me any more. I miss when SMT had an interesting look about it and a unique design style. Now everything is anime, anime and nigger gum flapping in Engrish over anime. I tried to get invested in Persona but they're incredibly padded out stories with very little game play worth mentioning. The dungeon lay outs aren't interesting and there's no depth to exploration. Combat is Pokemon but 4v4 and you get an extra turn if you know the right move to pick. Which ultimately devolves the combat into picking the right move you're told to pick with no freedom to express yourself or fight in different styles. The series became increasingly woke after 3 and 4 has a story about accepting being gay which is unacceptable if a good example of 'Japan is based' being a total cope.

I don't think mentioning faraway lands that can't be visited or distant gods that aren't elaborated upon is necessarily bad or lazy writing, in fact it is pretty much universal among fantasy media in general to create a sense that the world is bigger and more mysterious than it actually is while focusing on the parts or locations that are more important for the story.

Now what is lazy about fromsoft's writing is more about the general presentation and design, still sticking to the old formula of item descriptions and NPCs standing around saying a few new vague lines of dialogue when activating a new trigger, offering quests that are either convoluted and without proper conclusions or very linear and formulaic. In ER it's especially bad since almost every NPC quest ends with their deaths or worse at the end. They possibly planned to do something more elaborate with Melina but for some reason gave up.

It's not necessarily bad writing but the way From present it is. There's an NPC in firelink who says she's from the Sunless lands and praise the moon then that's it. There's no way to know more, or present more because you're a silent protag and you're unable to interact with the world beyond hitting it. You kill demonic creatures the size of a house and the most any one reacts to you is 3 lines of dialog saying thank you for the item you handed them. There's the infamous Dark souls 2's blacksmith problem where his daughters sitting next to him and nothing changes despite it being a story line hinted at in earlier dialog.

 

[Silva]

I don't think mentioning faraway lands that can't be visited or distant gods that aren't elaborated upon is necessarily bad or lazy writing, in fact it is pretty much universal among fantasy media in general to create a sense that the world is bigger and more mysterious than it actually is while focusing on the parts or locations that are more important for the story.

Now what is lazy about fromsoft's writing is more about the general presentation and design, still sticking to the old formula of item descriptions and NPCs standing around saying a few new vague lines of dialogue when activating a new trigger, offering quests that are either convoluted and without proper conclusions or very linear and formulaic. In ER it's especially bad since almost every NPC quest ends with their deaths or worse at the end. They possibly planned to do something more elaborate with Melina but for some reason gave up.

It's not necessarily bad writing but the way From present it is. There's an NPC in firelink who says she's from the Sunless lands and praise the moon then that's it. There's no way to know more, or present more because you're a silent protag and you're unable to interact with the world beyond hitting it. You kill demonic creatures the size of a house and the most any one reacts to you is 3 lines of dialog saying thank you for the item you handed them. There's the infamous Dark souls 2's blacksmith problem where his daughters sitting next to him and nothing changes despite it being a story line hinted at in earlier dialog.

From's style of presenting lore through item descriptions and minimalist NPC dialogues is not bad per se. It was pretty effective in Dark Souls 1 to enhance the vibe of solitude of it's world / Lordran, besides being refreshing given the hobby state as I said before. The problem is when you replicate those features to settings with different themes, as is the case with Elden Ring. Then yes, it feels lazy.

I also found the style fitted Bloodborne cosmicism like a glove, and Sekiro broke away from it to have expositive dialogues, so these games never bothered me. I never played Demons Souls or Armored Core so I don't know how the style fares in those. Probably good in DeS for same reasons as DS1 and BB, but doesn't sound a good fit in AC.

 

[Hell Swarm]

From's style of presenting lore through item descriptions and minimalist NPC dialogues is not bad per se. It was pretty effective in Dark Souls 1 to enhance the vibe of solitude of it's world / Lordran, besides being refreshing given the hobby state as I said before. The problem is when you replicate those features to settings with different themes, as is the case with Elden Ring. Then yes, it feels lazy.

I also found the style fitted Bloodborne cosmicism like a glove, and Sekiro broke away from it to have expositive dialogues, so these games never bothered me. I never played Demons Souls or Armored Core so I don't know how the style fares in those. Probably good in DeS for same reasons as DS1 and BB, but doesn't sound a good fit in AC.

Demon souls doing it doesn't bother me because there is mystical stuff going on that could explain having knowledge you shouldn't but Dark souls is immersion breaking if you think about it. You're an amnesiac losing their memories and identity, having it chipped away with every death and you know all this super obscure lore about lost kingdoms and shit? I don't like information logs you access in a menu but it would have been a better way to present the lore snippets. You can contextualize it outside the game's world when you do it that way.

Bloodborne has issues when your character knows stuff they shouldn't as well. Depends what you consider insight to be and how it would reveal things to you. If it's the power to see the arcane world then it makes no sense your character knows who owned the hat they're wearing less. If it's insight into the world in general then maybe they can read the hat's soul and see who owned it last.

I wonder when From became aware of the Dark souls lore industry and started to intentionally play into it? Dark souls 2 was well under production and a messy development but 3 seems like where the series becomes meta. Solaire pandering in 2 sucked and it's a shame they went further down that path.