/v/ finds E33's story to be a little too famailiar

Posted by WestRedneck3@reddit | greentext | View on Reddit | 12 comments

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1967542950@reddit

Anon forgets that FromSoft's dogshit storytelling methods have always been the problem, not the stories themselves, and that stories have been ripping each other off since the dawn of time.

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SuspiciousPine@reddit

What? You don't like piecing together a story from 100 3-sentence item descriptions describing like 20 different plotlines?

It's like you missed the lore-critical information from [Strange Hat +1]

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Definitely not dog-shit, is it frustrating if you want the entire story? A little, but it makes the world feel mysterious when I don’t know exactly what happened, I have to do a little bit of investigating in the world to fill in the blanks, also means some elements can be up to the players own interpretation.

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Slide-Maleficent@reddit

This is a legendarily massive understatement, it's easier to miss the entirety of any DS storyline than it is to figure out even the basic framework - and most of the time it wasn't worth the trouble by half. You're confusing 'story-telling' and 'world-building.' From are great at worldbuilding, arguably the best at that kind of subtle details-oriented mystique, but they can't story tell to save their lives. Something like 75% of even fairly hardcore Dark Souls players have no fucking clue what the plot of any one of the original trilogy's stories even was.

I've only spoken to one person outside of reddit who could tell me more than a half-remembered paraphrase of the noodley bullshit they give you in the opening cinematic, and he freely admitted that he only knew what he did from a youtube video made from the wiki. That's undeniably bad story telling, when the vast majority of your biggest fans have no fucking clue what even happened in the narrative. You can counter by saying it's a 'style' when 80% of the NPC dialog lines are babbled nonsense 10% is drawn-out goofy laughter - and sure, it is, but it isn't one that tells a story - it's one that intentionally distracts from the lack of one.

I love Dark Souls, but Elden Ring was the first game they ever made that had anything even marginally close to a coherent narrative. All the other games were just a nutcase patchwork pieced together by online superfans willing to fill in the massive blanks themselves.

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ChoiceFudge3662@reddit

Yeah you’re right I was confusing story telling and world building, oops!

And yeah, I have no idea what dark souls is about besides the first games whole deal being that you gotta learn to let go and accept change.

Good thing they had George RR Martin to help write elden ring lmao.

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Slide-Maleficent@reddit

There was something about an age of fire, and an age of darkness, and a literal fire that undead are made to sacrifice themselves to keep going. I think the old gods/firekeepers/really fucking big guys with weird swords and bullshit chain attacks were somehow parts of the age of fire. Also, the age of darkness is also the age of humanity, so you can choose not to sacrifice yourself and instead take a shit on the fire and become the 'dark lord of humanity.' Presumably if that ending was canon, there'd be guns and nuclear weapons, and Dark Souls 2 would have been Call of Duty Modern Warfare.

I used to know the whole thing in detail. It was cool, and it looks unique on the surface, but when you scratch past that and bother to actually piece the whole thing together, you realize that it really isn't all that different from the story of God of War, or any of the boss-rush souls-like games that came after it.

Every area has a story, and that story is inevitably that some crazy demi-god douchebag fucked it up because he was pissed at some other demigod douchebag - and then you end up killing both of them. The drama isn't particularly detailed or interesting, but they manage to make it seem that way by telling the story exclusively through environmental details, item descriptions and the 1% of NPC dialog that actually means something.

Your imagination will inevitably end up filling in all the massive gaps of the stuff you miss and the stuff that was never written in the first place, and it will seem much better, deeper and original than it actually is because of that. It's actually kind of genius, generating the skeleton of an interesting story then worldbuilding so well that they can trick you into writing the rest of it for them.