>>254014
that´s my point though, i was playing it for the narrative wich is why i haven´t mentioned any game mechanic at all in the OP (since its gonna get handwaved away on the basis of it being a Narrative game), and instead of narrative i got fetchquests, backtracking, and playing whereizwaldo looking for "whatshiface" in a sea of random NPC´s while holding down TAB to highlight everything, and barely got told anything about the story, as i said in my previous post, it feels like they wanted to make a VN or a Graphical adventure but instead of making one they decided to be pretentious and mask it as an RPG because many creatives are narcissistic and need to constantly assert themselves to other people, instead of being streamlined and engaging like a regular VN/Adventure (This character is here, this character is there, and this item is there, move through screens, solve this puzzle, etc...) now you have to deal with seas of NPC´s and cascading fetcquests that, in any other narrative game, would have amounted to a cutscene after solving a puzzle
its a narrative game that fails at giving you the narrative because its developers were too busy trying to convey to you how deep, intelligent and quirky they are, if planescape torment was released today it would have been labeled as "A Game for Troons" much like Pillars of Eternity or Disco Elysium, wich are, by the developers own admission, inspired by Planescape
>>253974
i don´t know how different Elden Ring is from the Dank Soles series, i remember being coaxed into playing Dark memes 3 back at the peak of its popularity, it really is just 3d person kingsfield with a berserk coat of paint on it, its "Difficulty" comes from forcing you to repeat sections and lose all your souls when you die, wich ironically punishes you for exploring and basically had me just going on Kamikaze dives untill i had the whole thing mapped out and could actually plan a route, only to then rush the boss and realize that is the only thing that matters...
my theory is that, many of these "Critically acclaimed" games are just poorly designed or shit games overall, but have very Narcissistic/Magnetic Developers behind them that try to gaslight you into thinking that their shit is better than it actually is
after all, why admit you can´t make a proper difficulty curve when you can just claim that the game "doesn´t hold your hand" and blame it on the player?
Why write a story when you can just make a rogue-like (its not as if anyone is going to survive long enough to find out about the story so why write one aye?)
Why bother with level design when you can just procedurally generate everything and then dab the "infinite replayability!" tag on it?
i´ve seen people critizicing the Open World craze precisely because its an excuse to have empty sandboxes, but then they seem to forget about these very same complaints when they look at the many "Flawed masterpieces" of the past, these types of Obtuse-for-the-sake-of-being-obtuse games tend to attract people that are just as Narcissistic as the developers themselves, wich circlejerk around these games and are secretely glad that these games are as (alledgedly) inaccesible as they are (think about FE autists screeching about Casual mode despite being an optional feature that most people don´t even use anyways, or Morrowfags screeching about skybabies despite Morrowind being the easiest game in the series by far), because otherwise how are they gonna screech in their elitist circles about how they are better than everyone else and how XYZ game was "Ruined"
this phenomena is not exclusive to games and is from what i have experienced just a smaller part of a bigger problem related to the current state of the world, Spiritual Climate, and the Cultural Zeitgeist