Lurker > Deutschenlied

We're too important to be treated like shit.

I'm sure the same people that cry about how universal healthcare is slavery will be screaming about heartless workers caring more about getting paid than helping others.

600-700

Avirosb posted...

Yeah, but is it sexy???
AFAIK one of the BG3 characters don't have a nose and I think that's the closest they ever get to anime.

The BG3 characters do seem rather attractive. I can only speak in clinical terms as I personally don't find anyone sexy.

YellowSUV posted...

Welcome to America! Insane violence is totally fine, but sexiness is forbidden.

Cyberpunk and BG3 are totally not Western games and totally did not let you customize your nude body so you can see it in romance scenes. And they totally were harshly criticized were doing so.

People that cry about how censored and prudish the West is don't want to see a some attractive characters and romance in their video games. That already exists. They want games to beat off to.

https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/38483610/colts-matt-gay-1st-nfl-history-make-4-fgs-50-yards-longer

"When I'm not thinking about anything, and I'm just back there kicking, it means I'm fluid," Gay said.

Torgo posted...

Imagine if leftists got this mad every time capitalism showed in a game...

Imagine if Atheists got this mad every time there was a religious reference in a game...

Imagine if LGBTQ people got this mad whenever a straight cis relationship was in a game...

Don't you get it? We have to accept those things because they are "normal" and we are "snowflakes" if we get mad. But they're allowed to pee their pants over anything that is different to them.

YellowSUV posted...

the nice looking 6 color flag instead of the ugly corporate abomination that didn't exist in 2009

oh boy

Anteaterking posted...

I think people underestimate how much the selling factors of a game's design can be diluted by "easy mode", which is fine except for the people who play a game on easy mode and then review it and criticize those elements.

Like if you have an intricate battle system with a lot of depth to it that requires strategizing going into every fight...but in easy mode you can kind of just do whatever. Or a game that prides itself in how divergent the story gets based on narrative decisions you make, but the ability to easily reverse your choice through idk save scumming or w/e can take away from that divergent story.

This is without getting into like ... "the game wants you to feel like it's hard".

But what would those easy modes be hurting? How does it affect any of us and our enjoyment? Is the availability of an easy mode just too tempting for the average gamer?

It's like everyone has forgotten that they're playing video games. None of it matters. It's just a personal stimulation of the senses. Everyone gets something different out of it.

KajeI posted...

Through overexposure I've come to know the difference between bitching because mad and/or bad and constructive criticism.

It was constructive criticism, but a lot of Souls fans always have to get protective. It's a weird human thing sometimes where people believe that giving to more people requires taking it all from less.

If you're not a true diehard with the right credentials, then you're a sabotaging troll and things inevitably get to the point where it's implied FromSoft is the only studio that makes artistic works that respect and challenge the player, and every other game is kind of a joke in comparison.

VirtuousWrath posted...

Ah, so you're just a bad faith troll. Kay.

What about Asherlee has been bad faith?

PraetorXyn posted...

You mean options like power leveling, summoning help, meta builds, exploits, etc.? Yeah, weve been pointing them out this entire topic and youve ignored them all.

No, the higher difficulties in almost every other game are meaningless and unrewarding, because thats what balancing a game around arbitrary difficulty settings does. It has been explained at length how number tweaking doesnt make for a rewarding challenge, but youve consistently ignored that as well. That doesnt mean most other games arent rewarding experiences theyre just rewarding for reasons besides difficulty, which largely is not the case for SoulsBorneRing games.

Why do grown adults care if everyone is getting a rewarding experience from a game? That has no bearing on your experience and the way you play it. Stop treating video games like they're serious business. I thought we didn't like how games treat our limited adult time anyway.

I have ignored those things because I'm not talking about those things.

KajeI posted...

Friendly reminder Souls games can be beaten by someone that literally does not touch most of the enemies or bosses because of summoning. I can't think of any other "hard" games that people bitch about the "lack of difficulty options" where completely random strangers can hard carry you for literally 95% or more of the game without any further input from you other than bringing them in. Well I can, but they're all within the genre, so...

It's like complaining that the test is too hard and there should be an easier version of it for you to do instead when you can make it a group project and then do absolutely nothing except show up and still get the full grade, while also ignoring all the other tools and prep work you can bring in to the test to get a passing grade.

At what point does personal accountability enter into the equation?

-

Vaguely related, when Furi first came out there were a few reviewers that got mad because the normal difficulty was too hard for them, but the easy difficulty was an absolute joke even for them so they were mad they had no satisfaction and they felt the devs were patronizing them (and Furi's easy mode isn't just basic numbers tweaks, the patterns change and entire phases are cut out, so a substantial amount of dev time was spent making and tuning it). IIRC they literally said that the easy mode made them enjoy playing even less.

There's no winning with some people.

"Actually you can just stand in the corner and have other people fight for you" is different than playing a game, but at a level that meets your skill level.

Stop treating FromSoft games as special. They're just plain old video games like any other. Everything else doesn't suck because you guys like them the most. Why would you not be critical of things you like?

So I guess every other game is some easy nonsense than any baby can beat and not even worth the file space they take up. Why do they even bother releasing when they're just commercial, lowest-common-denominator vapidness?

But also actually Souls games are some of the easiest around!

It's pretty disgusting.

Forget Souls games for a minute. It's simply not true that the only things separating players and their ability to play any game at a certain level are commitment and practice.

I'm not trying to tell anyone what assistance they need to complete a video game, just that options can be a big help for anyone who could need them. That transcends any game.

And it seems silly to imply that basically every other game is dumb and meaningless and unrewarding.

PraetorXyn posted...

This more concisely states what I was trying to say.

Hes incorrectly conflating two different things. Hes using disability accessibility to garner sympathy then pivoting to everyone should be able to curbstomp every game just because if they want to.

Oh my god. Just because some people might "abuse" an easy mode to curbstomp everything doesn't mean it shouldn't exist for others. Stop putting Souls games on a pedestal. They're video games like any other.

By this argument, no games should have options because someone is going to go out there and use them to avoid challenge.

IceCreamOnStero posted...

Because niche experiences are valuable, and niche experiences are inherently incongruent with an "appeal to everyone" mentality. Its not because people are too dumb or whatever, its simply the nature of preferences.

Not appeal to everyone, but everyone interested in a game's genre, world, story, game mechanics who may not be able to complete a certain difficulty.

MorganTJ posted...

Summoning and magic builds let you play through the game easier - even a spear and shield lets you attack and defend at the same time, which is how I played my first Souls game. There doesn't need to be a difficulty slider.

Also if you don't think the game is "cool" or "artistic", why would you even want to play it? If you think the fanbase is actually full of awful people, why do you want to play a game with a significant multiplayer aspect with them.

Because I like them? Bloodborne is one of my favorite games of all time. Why am I not allowed to criticize things while participating in them? I probably wouldn't even use an easy mode. A fanbase being insufferable hasn't stopped me with anything before. I'm literally a diehard NASCAR fan despite being me. I've never really liked "gamers". There's a lot of cringy, embarrassing nonsense.

NatsuSama posted...

This question is not remotely a serious question because the alternative of not voting at all is actively doing nothing to fix the problem of how the US government actually works in the real world.

Throwing your hands up in the air doing nothing does not magically stop candidates who want to ban all abortions, and any other policies you claim to hate from winning seats in government that allows them to pass laws to make things worse. Or at the very least stall and obstruct any opposition progress to reverse damages they have done.

Anyone asking the question you just asked is a prime example how Roe v Wade was overturned.

But I didn't ask "Why vote?" I asked what do we do when voting isn't enough. And I don't think there's a good answer, which is really horrible for the people who will suffer and die while we wait for voting to fix things. We waste even more years spending entire cycles going "Right now we just need to win so things don't get worse."

PraetorXyn posted...

Because youve consistently come at this from an Accessibility standpoint, which the way you mean it means disability. You and others cited audiobooks, braille, etc as examples of Accessibility for the blind for instance.

Accessibility is closed captions for the deaf, high contrast and larger font sizes for people with different visual issues, braille / text to speech for the blind, or that one FF16 item, which is obviously meant for disabled people with poor motor skills, nerve damage, etc., to be able to cakewalk the game.

If they have working hands and such and just arent good, thats not an Accessibility issue. Thats akin to saying complex literature like Book of the New Sun or movies in the vein of Memento and Inception need to be dumbed down so everyone can understand them.

There's no reason why Souls games can't accommodate those people.

And I definitely think difficulty options are a part of accessibility. Not everyone has equal physical ability, but every other game manages to give people some options to tailor a game to their ability and needs.

You guys need to stop bringing an intelligence "You just don't comprehend it" angle into it. Souls games are just video games like every other. They're not too cool and artistic and intelligent to be above reproach. Genre and "artistic vision" are completely irrelevant to what I'm talking about. People still aren't going to play games that don't pique their individual interests.

Fluttershy posted...

There is no reason you can't provide a more accessible format that retains all the spirit of the original experience.

you can just level up a lot and then win that way.

there you go. there's your easy mode.

like, i feel like what you're asking is for there to be a menu choice where you no longer actually have to interact with the core systems of the game. so i think the spirit of the intended experience is just out the window with what you want.

Every other game does it. Souls games are the only actual artistic series that provide an authentic, intended experience?

I never even play games on easy mode unless I'm just replaying a section to quickly get an achievement or something. I generally have to tweak things harder over a playthrough. I do turn off all button tap QTEs when possible, though.
[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

But what if someone has limited eyesight but can understand Ulysses? They shouldn't be able to experience it? The book would lose its meaning in audio or with bigger words on the pages?

I guess there's just a big disconnect because I see zero reason why it would compromise a standard Souls experience or why anyone, as a fan, wouldn't want as many people to play your favorite games as possible.

It seems rather shitty to imply that the barrier to people completing Souls games is intellectual.

PraetorXyn posted...

Ill preface what I want to say here by stating that I was born with 20/200 vision, and I read ebooks with gigantic font, low margins and line spacing, white text on a black background, and occasionally do audiobooks at 1.25x for re-reads.

Theres literally no reason to play a Souls game for a disabled person without the motor control to play it normally. They basically dont have a story to speak of, unless you heavily dive into the environmental storytelling to put the pieces together, which even most normal people cant be arsed to do, so you can just watch / listen to a video essay explaining the story for that. The gameplay loop is the entire reason to play them.

If an option is added that basically just turns on God Mode, whats the point of playing it? Lets set aside that this wouldnt really solve anything, as most of the harder bits in Souls games are environmental anyway (like the Tomb of Giants even with God Mode and a method to generate light, most people are going to die a lot). The Souls games arent exactly known for visual spectacle either. So whats the appeal even supposed to be for someone that severely disabled?

Because they might want to play it? Who says they need to be severely disabled?

And Souls fanboys like to act like every other game for the last 15 years is some unrewarding, low IQ bullshit that plays itself for you.

Why do people want to be so pretentious and discriminatory against people who need aids to complete a piece of media? It's really no different than closed captioning. There's no genre of movie where artistic vision would be a good excuse to not include them, or where the inclusion would ruin the experience for everyone.

Mr_Karate_II posted...

People expect things to be handed to them with little to no effort

So you only play Souls games and nothing else? Because you can't stand that someone is out there using accessibility settings and lower difficulties to beat a video game without trying as hard as you?

I played like 10 minutes last night before some friends invited me to play something else. Hoping to make some progress tonight.

Tenlaar posted...

Most people are not in positions of authority that make hiring decisions and the like. People that do should be punished for those discriminatory actions but people are allowed to be discriminatory in their own every day lives. Like, do you think somebody should be legally punished for going out of their way to only shop at stores owned by a particular race whenever possible?

The fascists that keep winning only do so because people keep voting for them. The powerful people couldn't have the power to affect things if they got 1% of the vote every election

VirtuousWrath posted...

Unhinged

Pro-choice means pro-choice.

Less than 1% of abortions are in the third trimester and almost all of those are medically necessary.

They want you to get outraged at the edge cases inside the edge cases, so that you become more receptive to further abortion restrictions. They don't care about viable births or babies at all. They just hate women and want to further reduce them to subhuman scum, little more than walking incubators.

Like, are people really going to say that something like Baldur's Gate 3 or the newer Doom games are incomplete, dumbed down experiences with no sense of accomplishment?

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

But we're talking about physical accessibility. Obviously, someone still needs to understand the concept to actually understand or complete the work. No one is saying an easy mode would involve taking Souls and turning it into a COD clone with an in-your-face story and MCU cinematics. But maybe someone who gets Souls is physically incapable of beating it, maybe they weren't always that way.

There is no reason you can't provide a more accessible format that retains all the spirit of the original experience. Only Souls fans hate the idea of maximizing a playerbase.

DragonClaw01 posted...

It's never going to happen. The developer has stated on record that he wants people have the joy of overcoming the difficulty and an easy mode completely invalidates that feeling. It is antithetical to the game design. Plus Miyazaki also stated that multiple difficulties split the fanbase, so instead of being a shared experience based on careful fine tuning that everyone can talk about, there are multiple completely unrelated experiences around various difficulty levels that may not be so fine tuned. So it becomes really messy talking about the game. Plus the series is built on the reputation of challenging gameplay and people get a sense of pride and accomplishment for beating these games, so having an easy mode would chip away at this reputation and make the accomplishment feel less meaningful. These are most of the arguments the developer makes for there not being an easy mode in Souls

So games that aren't Souls are not finely tuned and there isn't any shared experiences? All other fanbases are split down difficulty level lines? And no one has any sense of pride or accomplishment because they can't shake the knowledge that there are people out there beating them below the recommended difficulty?

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

Audiobook? Large text? Same as any other book.

Accessibility is not a genre thing. Accessibility is a wonderful technical breakthrough that allows everyone to experience something regardless of their limitations. I don't think any game should be above that. It's not like the features are ever mandatory, just options for people who need them. You don't even need to balance the game around the easier stuff.

Mr_Karate_II posted...

Most of the 80s and a lot of 90s games didn't have an actual easy mode because the so called easy mode was just normal difficulty.

Games don't need easy modes just because some people want their hand to be held

Games were 3 hours long and needed to stretch themselves. A lot of people never even completed games because they'd get too hard.

They already make porn.

PiOverlord posted...

This is such a dumb argument that people only say to start stuff and we all know it.

Easy modes don't ruin games if the difficulty is not a piece of the artistic expression the developers are trying to create. Dark Souls has crafted its world and design around this difficulty, and for you to tell them they have to accommodate their art to your crybaby preferences is egotistical, and it's no wonder they don't want to cater to such a lame demographic. You give a little, and they are definitely going to start crying about more things.

Halo doesn't care, and doesn't see difficulty as a core piece of its artistic representation, and thus gives the player the choice to play through the game how they see fit.

It's no wonder easy-mode elitists are always the ones crying, though. They probably think walking to the toilet to take a piss is too hard-mode for them too and need to use their juice boxes to pee in, instead.

Have you considered touching grass? It's a video game, not your wife.

There is nothing wrong with accessibility. Don't be a gatekeeper and an ableist.

VirtuousWrath posted...

The convo was always about elective late-term non-medically necessary procedures. Come on, chud buds, stop arguing strawmen we all agree with anyway

And those are an acceptable cost for completely unrestricted abortion access.

As Asherlee said, the only restriction on abortion should be what licensed doctors deem in conversations between them and their patients. The government should be practically invisible on all medical decisions. They need to defer to their betters.

NatsuSama posted...

That would include many on this board including myself. It's nice people showed up to vote, but people have to keep doing that in all elections. Not just the presidential election. But special elections, local elections and more. You have to participate consistently in them all.

My main (for the lack of a better term), issue, is we have to keep voting. Because our block of voters aren't exactly the consistent voting block.

People shouldn't be patting themselves on the back for voting in 2018, 2020, 2022 if they don't plan to vote in absolutely all elections. Even of the guy you voted for last time wasn't magically able fulfill every campaign promise they they realistically couldn't accomplish due to Congress.

And what do we do when voting isn't enough? How many decades is going to take to correct red states once their plummet into the dark ages is stopped? And how will that help the generations that suffer and die in the interim?

Tenlaar posted...

Incorrect. I am accurately assessing the offenses of a bad person. This board, like 261 did, has a lot of posters who look at every already bad situation and immediately go hmmm so how can I twist things to make this seem worse than it actually is?

"This is not actually the worst thing in the world" will never stop being a worthless argument that only serves to excuse what was done. And you're addicted to it to the point where someone can go after someone and you go "That's not an assault or an attack" because... no one is bleeding or unconscious? The crazy racist lady could have gone that far and you'd go "It's not like she killed the woman. Dial back the authoritarian reactions, everyone! Does it even matter if she was racist if she isn't committing a genocide based on her beliefs?"

Billyionaire posted...

you can't really believe that, right.

He means that there aren't non-white people being racists and excusing it with "It's not my fault. I have a mental impairment."

Hot take: It would be perfectly fine whether or not a future Souls game added an easy mode.

One of the dumbest people in the entire country was president from 2016-2020.

I do think they should follow a dress code.

No nudity
Must wear shoes
Must wear a top and a bottom
No political gear

At least FF7 Remake is making everything better again

HHH_is_the_game posted...

The part that's a little annoying is that the people on the left will look at this and say "well america is doomed half the country is evil" and never examine the ways in which their own side is alienating people or has some impact on how America at large feels.

Which is frustrating as I hate Trump and I hate DeSantis even more, and while I'm not a big fan of Biden I'd rather anybody over one of them.

Like...just think about how awful Trump is. If people would rather have him over Biden what does that say about our side? Like Im sure there are evil people out there but we are doing something wrong

Actual good people wouldn't have this dilemma. Clearly they are extremely privileged and rotten if they can have such a flippant take on poltiics.

My entire life will be ruined forever if the wrong side wina and I'm supposed to feel sympathy for people who don't feel like Democrats did enough to sound cooler than the Republicans? My life matters so much more than their stupid hangups.

People who don't take politics seriously should stay home and keep their thoughts to themselves. It's life or death for some of us.

BignutzisBack posted...

Is America too far gone to be saved in your opinion?

Correct

Billyionaire posted...

it is. How in the world does it not constitute trolling.

The party of "facts don't care about your feelings, snowflake" everyone.

Tenlaar will be along to shortly to tell us we need to tolerate free speech and that it's not hurting anyone until the ovens are turned back on.

Words are actions and these people vote. They are active in their community. To act as if people can't hurt innocents with their hateful beliefs if they aren't actively participating in murders is not a position based in reality.

No one has firmly held beliefs, extreme ones especially, and just does nothing with them. @Tenlaar is not going to sit here and convince us that the average white supremacist doesn't let their chosen beliefs influence how they interact with the world. Forget the extreme thoughts and words for a moment, human beings don't act like that. Outside of automatic biological functions, every action is influenced by what we say and think. You can't separate the brain from the person.

Tenlaar posted...

Are you of the opinion that racist beliefs are always a threat deserving of imprisonment?

Hey now, let's not forget about nuance. It completely depends on how racist the belief is.

Tenlaar posted...

My only argument here has been that people should not be put in prison just for having racist beliefs. Ive literally been talking about the constitutional right to free speech, not that racists should be defended in any way beyond that. Youre talking to me like this about something you agree with me on.

The lack of nuance I was referring to is acting like every racist belief is both the same belief and also rises to a level of working towards a genocide.

My dude, you mentioned white supremacists. Violence is the only way to achieve the society they would prefer. And your best defense is that a lot of them are just... hopeless idealists that aren't hurting anyone?