This is a pretty great idea. Man, imagine how awesome it would be to roll extra Eximus on it! That would actually make me run the Sortie.

My raidteam managed to get a server first boss kill while raiding Mythic Tomb of Sargeras in World of Warcraft:Legion. I was so proud of our teams achievement, I actually got a tattoo of the Mark of the Kirin Tor, a symbol for my mage character, in commemoration of the achievement.

It’s pretty fun, but I wonder what will make me return to it after the clan event ends. I managed to naturally drop all the blueprints I needed, so now I’m just stacking up the Arcanes. Once I have everything, it feels pretty unlikely I’d return. The “overwhelming Eximus” at the top were nerfed, so it’s not a good Affinity farm. The mission itself is pretty long, so even if it gets added as an Omnia fissure, I’m probably not going to choose it for relic cracking. It feels like another Tyvar Pass, where even though I really like the gameplay, I’m just never going to come back after running it 150-200 times.

Spoken like someone who hasn’t touched the game.

The single biggest issue is that the high difficulty is the only thing that actually pushes you to explore the world. If you were able to just kill every boss right away, 50% of the Elden Ring’s content becomes immediately pointless busywork. It already is, but that busywork offers small, incremental rewards that allow you to last a little bit longer, or learn a little bit more about a boss’ moveset. The intended gameplay experience is to run into a brick wall, explore and discover new options and opportunities, and then returning to break the brick wall. For experienced players on their second or third playthrough, you can basically strip out the open world entirely after an initial 2-3 hours of running around to grab what you want.

I’d also like to point out that 90% of the difficulty of bosses has nothing to do with their health or how much damage they do. FromSoftware has really pushed the envelope on boss design and AI, to the point where many of the hardest bosses are difficult because of their moveset. You can especially see this in the DLC, where you’re able to collect Scadutree Fragments to increase your damage and health, but players still have difficulty with many bosses even after maxing them out. Dealing 3x more damage doesn’t mean anything if you can never get a hit in, and taking 3x less damage won’t save you from a fatal grab. You can make an argument for difficulty levels toning down boss AI and making them less aggressive, but I’ll make a different one.

If a player doesn’t want to engage in difficult boss fights, and doesn’t want to be forced to learn combat encounters, they probably don’t want to play Elden Ring. There’s a lot of people who didn’t actually want to play Elden Ring in that 20 million. Only about 27% ended up completing the game. FromSoftware is still making niche games for a niche audience, but now they’re known for their exceptionally high pedigree, which causes people to feel FOMO. It’s okay to not want to play Elden Ring, but no amount of handicap is going to change that feeling for players.

The difficulty is tied to the story and the gameplay though. A lot of things start to break down if the Tarnished is able to travel through the Lands Between unfettered. Should a successful developer who develops niche games for a niche audience be forced to capitulate to the demands of players outside of their niche just because they have a fear of missing out?

Nowhere else to send them, unless you wanna shoot em into space.

I hope this kinda response is blasted from the rooftops, maybe make sure it’s on a billboard during the fall when prospective students are being showed around. Let high-schoolers across the country know that Columbia University supports genocide and is willing to use their reputation to spread misinformation.

When Ronald fucking Reagan is too liberal for your party, I think it’s time for self-examination.

Yeah, it’s unfortunate that death-cults preaching about the poison of reality are really bad at surviving through time.

What do you mean somehow? Cyberpunk as a genre has always been a vision of a future of unchecked corporate power, it only became prescient because Americans gave corporations unchecked power.

Yeah, it’s a bit of a let-down when you compare what’s on offer here with a previous Larian title like Divinity 2. That game lets you make full on campaigns.

God I’m glad we got Stewart back, he’s been on fire with his Monday nights.

It worked fine at the time, the problem is that all of that motivation to defend democracy was artificial, and slowly faded from the public as the war faded into the past.

I don’t know if diverse is the right word, considering most of the perpetrators are white, male, and right-wing. Difficult to counter is also a real funny way to write “refuse to counter because our counterterrorism organizations have already been infiltrated by right-wing white males.”

I fucking hate half-measures like this. Yeah, if you’re one of the 550,000 saved from deportation, or one of the few hundred thousand that got your college debt forgiven, I’m sure it feels great. What would be objectively better is to actually fix the problems requiring these patches. Biden’s made no progress on education cost reform, and has made negative progress on immigration reform, making these kinds of actions pure political theater.

Weird that she’s very vocal about the acts supposedly committed by Hamas, but is staying completely silent about all the sexual assault being committed by the IDF against Palestinian women. Almost like she’s a massive fucking hypocrite.

If you crossed Sonic and Eggman, which one would get pregante?

The flavor text teally sells this meme.

At the very least, FromSoftware continues to prove that level scaling is not a requirement. I honestly think that without their influence, we would have seen a lot more adoption of the practice. It’s the kinda brain-dead idea that comes from an MBA who’s sole focus is reaching the widest audience possible .

Yeah, that’s fair. I guess I’m hopeful that things have changed after Microsoft bought them, but they probably still suck.