I don't think I can agree with you here. Elden ring, for all of its flaws, is one of the last true honest to God video games you can buy recently. For $60 you get a complete, no microtransaction, no battle pass, no cosmetics, whole, playable game.

There aren't pieces taken out and sold back to you one item at a time like Sims 4. You don't have to buy the horse dlc or spend money to get the magic battle pass. It wasn't a completely buggy mess from the start like no man's sky or cyberpunk 2077. There's no integrated battle pass designed to suck your wallet and your soul dry like in Overwatch 2 or COD. There's no cosmetics to make you look like SpongeBob SquarePants or any other fictional character like in Fortnite and countless other games. This is a game that knows what it is and doesn't try and bait you into playing it like the others.

Sure it's difficulty is hard and it doesn't hand hold you but it certainly doesn't require you to use the wiki. Don't get me wrong your experience WILL be better with it but one of the big marketing points was the sites of grace pointing you where to go. The game actually goes through some trouble to make sure you understand what it is when you get to the round table hold. Gameplay mechanics are also explained in the inventory under the info items tab. But by and large you're supposed to learn through doing here.

Largely I agree that recent games are more slot machines with collectable crap tacked on but Elden Ring is not an example of a zoomer game. Hard? Sure. Garbage? Not on your life.

[–] lud@lemm.ee -3 points 1 year ago

I don't like the sims games or their business model. But saying that they cut content to release as DLC is a bit overboard.

The game is very different to what it was at release. Releasing all that extra content for free wouldn't make a lot of sense when a lot of people have spent a lot of years creating it.

Now, the amount of DLC Is insane. All the packs are stupid.

It should just be big DLCs and no small shitty clothes or animal packs or whatever.

Paradox games are a bit like that too, but imo they are more reasonable since you don't need DLC and they release free updates with a few new features as well as paid DLCs.

[–] WiildFiire@lemmy.world -3 points 1 year ago

Not having MTX doesn't make a game immediately good.

I agree with both you and the person you replied to, but, while the story definitely isn't barebones, it's explained like shit. It's a caveat of souls games, but that doesn't make it okay, it makes it inaccessible to people who haven't played a souls game before.

Elden Ring was a lot of people's first fromsoft game, and from what I understand you'll get about 80% of the story and world building through watching YouTube videos. Yeah, I'm sure there's characters in the game that give a little backstory here and there, and I'm sure there's descriptions of the world through items and such, but there's "giving the player the freedom to figure it out, and not holding their hand", and "fuck it this dude you might never meet in the game has an incredibly important piece of information, you'll only realize after you Google 'what am I missing about this game'" and Elden Ring falla under the second category.

A story as complex and in depth as Elden Ring's deserves to be explained better, in game.

Still not a Zoomer game. I think it's just in a weird spot where it's catering to a very specific audience so it's much harder to become a fan of when put up against other games of it's caliber