Current Events > I wish Elden Ring had better writing

(+) Yeah! (+)

Don't get me wrong I love the setting, the characters, and the way worldbuilding and lore is done but I just wish the narrative was a bit more... clear.

Like I love playing the game but I never get a good sense of why my character is doing anything. What their motivation is or whatever

Your character wants to become the Elden Lord

Elden Lord = Chaos

i wrote about this in a survey Xbox asked me to do. i said it's clear what to do, and where to go to complete the game, but literally every single character's motivation EXCEPT for Gideon is an obfuscated mess

Your character is a blank state avatar, their motivation can be anything, you just need to use your imagination

DarkRoast posted...

Elden Lord = Chaos

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/0/7/5/AAJHVqAADI8j.jpg

Youre a self insert silent protagonist like in a 90s jrpg

Reminds me of Hollow Knight's plot.

The whole point of the narrative in these games is that it isn't just exposition or shoved in your face. It's found by reading items and the environment

Flame of ambition

What's the term they use for these games? World Building?

OudeGeuze posted...

The whole point of the narrative in these games is that it isn't just exposition or shoved in your face. It's found by reading items and the environment

You can have a loose yet still understandable narrative without it being all exposition or shoved in your face

this argument bears repeating and the design will never change since fromsoft fanboys will gobble it up:

Almost the entire story takes place in the lore which means they can come up with total outlandish bullshit without having to go through the actual effort of realizing it on screen for the player to actually experience.

For instance one of the major plot points of cyperpunk involves patricide and therefore they have to design a large part of the game around that point which includes the setting, several pages of dialogue for each of the characters as well as their motivations and the eventual resolution going forward.

In your typical fromsoft game that would be relegated to a text or passing comment from 1 of the maybe 10 fleshed out NPCs saying: this guy was killed by their child and thus the land was covered in darkness

No you see the only options are learning the story through item descriptions or learning the story through giant walls of text and 20 minute cutscenes

Even Bioshock did this, you have to piece the story together with the audio diaries.

AsucaHayashi posted...

this argument bears repeating and the design will never change since fromsoft fanboys will gobble it up:

Or because that's simply how they want to present their story.

FROM does not give a fuck about western gamers and it's pretty based

It is from soft tradition for me to look up wtf even happened after I beat their games immediately after the credits roll.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

I'm not sure either. When I first heard of the term in video games I thought people were talking about Minecraft games. Turns out it means its a game with a ton of lore and you can figure out as much as you want or something like that.

Its refreshing after 2 decades of games that tried too hard to be grandiosely cinematic.

ThyCorndog posted...

No you see the only options are learning the story through item descriptions or learning the story through giant walls of text and 20 minute cutscenes

Few games seem to strike a good balance between the two.

I only get annoyed that characters ask you to go to places but won't mark your map or tell you who people are.
Selivus: Give this to Nelphi.
Me:Who? Any idea where to find them? Identifying features?
Selivus: Did you do it yet?
(I literally never met Nephi once in my main.)

Rya: A man stole my necklace, he's "down the way"
Have to find a damn shack myself because apparently she can't point on a map.

The world is amazing, the lore being learned through items, and occasional npc is...better than usual here actually thanks to the sheer amount of npcs, the characters lore can be interesting, but yeah, sometimes the writing of the characters can be a bit off.

Then again, it ain't quite Dark Souls levels at least!

OudeGeuze posted...

Or because that's simply how they want to present their story.

FROM does not give a fuck about western gamers and it's pretty based

they're free to do what they want.

the problem comes when people pretend there's nothing to criticize.

VerisimiIitude posted...

Few games seem to strike a good balance between the two.

Dragon Age and Mass Effect did it pretty well, I think.

Like it's all there in the Codex but you can see it for yourself in the actual game pretty easily.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

Dog ahead

viewmaster_pi posted...

i wrote about this in a survey Xbox asked me to do. i said it's clear what to do, and where to go to complete the game, but literally every single character's motivation EXCEPT for Gideon is an obfuscated mess

lol what
honestly what gideon's motivations are is probably one of the most debatable aspects of the story
whose story did you have trouble understanding? for a from game, everyone here was pretty up front. the only character i remember not really understanding was D. everyone else in roundtable has a pretty clear and easy to follow story arc.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]


I haven't played Elden Ring. What is the significance of this meme?

The writing is better than the majority of games even though the story isn't in your face, which I feel is a credit in this case. It's different, and I like that.

I never understand what's happening and it's one my favorite series. I like it like someone likes games before everything had to revolve around a story. Just put cool shit in front of me.

Another one of my favorite series is Yakuza for the complete opposite reason.

For me, games are about making entertainment out of whatever they put in it. The more you can find entertainment in it, regardless of what type, the better it is.

My most in depth thought on characters in Souls games is "Hey, it's the guy that likes kicking me off ledges"

people out here acting like this game doesnt have long expository cutscenes at all

def could use a few more to fill in the gaps

Imo elden ring's lore is so much easier to understand than darknsouls

St0rmFury posted...

Reminds me of Hollow Knight's plot.

I think HK's is simpler to understand just because it does a much better job of telling you what to do and where the NPCs are.

AmericaTheBrave posted...

I haven't played Elden Ring. What is the significance of this meme?

You can write messages which other people can then read. The messages aren't completely custom, you have to follow a number of preset templates which you can then customize with a fair number of preset words. You can combine two templates with conjunctions between the two.

So say there's a spot in the left side of a room where an enemy is hiding and it'll ambush you when you get close. You pick "**** ahead" for the first template, "ambush" for the word, "therefore" for the conjunction, "Be wary of ****" for the second template, and "left" for the second word. People who read your message will see, "ambush ahead therefore Be wary of left"

You can leave helpful messages like that, but you can also just leave joke messages. The game's godlike creatures are called the Two Fingers, so the game includes the word finger because there's just a lotta shit about fingers. So "Try finger but hole" is just a meme. Another is that a good number of in-game animals aren't in the list of words, so now any animal (particularly turtles) are called dogs.

Oubliettes posted...

whose story did you have trouble understanding?

uhhhhhh everyone's? the motivation behind marika doing anything she did? what even is the elden ring? is it an actual object, or representative of something, like the final boss? everything's abstract, like they hope you just don't think about it. i feel like the answer to everything is aliens

at least the dung eater was on the level. dude just liked killing and cursing people, lol

I've always really enjoyed From Soft's storytelling, since I prefer lore dumps and stuff that I can read on my own time when I'm not tryna kill God. I've preferred that method since Metroid Prime and the scan log

Gwynevere posted...

I've always really enjoyed From Soft's storytelling, since I prefer lore dumps and stuff that I can read on my own time when I'm not tryna kill God. I've preferred that method since Metroid Prime and the scan log

What DLC was God in?

Lost_All_Senses posted...

What DLC was God in?

Ashes of Ligma

something like a scan log would have been cool for elden ring, maybe finding lore books tucked away that you could read later. anything's better than listening to youtubers

Gwynevere posted...

Ashes of Ligma

Im gonna ask you bout that, but there's something else I been wanting to ask I just remembered.

Can I lick your balls?

FROM is just lazy at providing any form of character quest story much less your own.

Everything still stands on the shoulders of its predecessors glory of item descriptions, some light back and forth from NPCs with archaic sentence structure and the occasional cutscene that is batshit crazy.

Theyd rather have a YouTuber give the meaning behind most things which is a shame because a lot of times characters are genuinely interesting and Id like to understand more of their history.

St0rmFury posted...

Even Bioshock did this, you have to piece the story together with the audio diaries.

lol no

Bioshock has a main story you actually experience in game. Youre piecing the fall of Rapture together with audio diaries.