#They don't even know how belts work || the saltmines

[coffee-in-veins]

Have you heard of how reynauld goes back to being a farmer after it all in dd2? Apparently if you fully upgrade his altar, a narration says that "he will retire his battered helmet atop a scarecrow, and labour the land beneath its baneful gaze" Any thoughts on that?

hello hello o/

thank you for the ask! ^^ i hope i won't dissapoint you with my answer, but after the last stunt RH pulled, on top of my already sour reception of the butchering changes the game made to characters...

let's just say, don't expect a pure, not salty, unbiased opinion, alright?

short version:

i'd say - i'm getting progressively more and more glad DD2 got cancelled in the making the more info i hear about it :}

long version:

the word choice in that particular snipet is so baffling i don't know where even to begin.

let's start with the simple things. upgrading the altar means nothing to land restoration. you either channel your JRPG and kill a god, or you don't. there's no in-between. you're restoring memories of what once was by grinding the candles and pouring the wax into the altar instead of feedingit to Tardif or something. if it implies living in the memory and denying reality as the only thing worth doing in a ravaged world, well, that is a shitty message to bring along as the only hope your fictional world has.

then again, looking at the real world now, i somewhat get the appeal... but i digress.

secondly, the guy is naively optimistic if he thinks he'll be able to return to farming without some community or an armed force to defend that land and whatever results of his labour bring - especially after such a massive shitshow as the full-world calamity DD2 implies. after DD1, localized and contained in just one county at worst? oh, sure, no issue with that. grab that Dismas' arse and go fulfil your redemption husband dreams in a neighbour country that have never even heard of walking fish. but after the fuckupery of DD2 where the whole world is corpses, burned cities, undead and tentacle fun? ehhhh... not as many places to go to, ain't it? starting community from the scratch? again, see point 1 aka "good luck putting that helmet away instead of sleeping in it if you found some untainted land".

thirdly, "baneful gaze" addition is just... what do you even imply here? that it's his past sins and he's the only one who can't leave the past behind? that there's some higher ups (probably the church who canonically have military here) who will be watching him and controlling his land and its harvests? is it just a throwavay line to make it sound more poetic? is it vague for the purpose of being vague...?

"baneful" is a very strong word. it implies hate, poison, promise of harm. is this a hint that DD3 Electric Boogaloo will be about the crusaders DD2 tried so furiously to scrub out of itself and then just slapped a DLC about them on top of itself without care and thought about the timeline and how none of it makes even a lick of sense if you stop for a moment...?

let's say, i can see Rey wanting a retirement and starting a farm somewhere on the outskirts of some village. but i doubt it will keep him, unless there will be some trauma which would prevent him from asking to work anywhere better - or someone who'd keep him there. Rey is knighted. he's a soldier in a medieval world, with a gear and maybe even a horse. he's worth a small fortune and i doubt he doesn't know that. hell, if we look at his barks:

Eyes down, you cowering sheep!

The faithless have no right to harm anyone...

Fool! Stop getting in the way of the soldiers!

No. And if thou breaks rank again, I will smite thee.

It profanes the Light to visit blessings upon you unworthy dogs!

You are not worthy of aiding me.

does he sound to you like someone who'd settle for a peasant position unless he has some outer reason to...? he doesn't to me. more like a guy who has a pride of a knight - and the life expectations of one. i can see him becoming a borderline knight, with a castle tower of two rooms and a village or two in his grasp, tho. that would fit, imo. a tiny lord with a lot of secrets in his past, battling PTSD and trying to get back into the civil life. that would be interesting to see.

then again, maybe he's a poor little meow meow like the rest of DD2 crew, i honestly have no idea. i tried to play the DLC, but the story was giving me seisures, so i dropped it pretty fast. i got him and Dismas together to the tavern, fed them chocolates, quit the game and never opened it since because that scene with the warlord was making me unreasonably angry.

sorry if you were expecting a better opinion.

[coffee-in-veins]

As someone who (very casually) enjoys Eldin Ring, I am very curious what you think

thank you for the ask! ^^ that was quick xD

well, then, i hope you won't be upset about what i have to say about it. i genuinely love it from worldbuilding perspective and it looks cool and thrilling more often than not. other things, though...

for the context, i did my best to like it for like casual 80 hours or so, playing very slowly, very cautiously, and probably very inefficiently, because i would often just chill at the location, so those hours mean almost nothing. i managed to kill the grafted guy, the moon lady, got to meet Ranni (god i remember at least one name from it all without cheating!) and got to the point where i was supposed to get into the autumn plateau which name i won't remember even if you torture me.

and this is my first gripe with the game. this one is more of a personal struggle, so take it with a grain of salt. i struggle quite a lot with remembering names, both irl and in media. i remember visuals, i remember voices, i remember plots. but names? beats me. hell, i only remembered Dis and Rey after like half a year of a deep dive into DD, if it gives you any perspective.

with that explanation out of the way, comes the gripe itself: most of the time, i was completely, utterly and hopelessly lost who were those people, whom they wanted killed and where they wanted me to go. my quests would go something like this:

"Go fight General Radahn!" someone said. I think I saw their helmet, twice, and I remember they are a blacksmith. probably. i remember the voice tho. they are genuinely nice to me, so i'd probably do it.

however, not a single braincell rumbled in that head of Tarnished of mine as i sat in front the screen and looked at them blankly: "Who?"

but the NPC already continued: "They are in Caelid!"

not a drop of recognition. "Where?" okay, i sit and think frantically, i have a map, maybe it has parts named, maybe i won't have to wander for half an hour before giving up and going to the wiki again...? no? well, fuck, maybe some locations are named? right! locations. jackpot, some have 'caelid' in them. ah, the red poison swamp! dude, why didn't you say so? on my way!

me, meeting Radahn: aaahhh, that big dude on a tiny horse! sure! from the promo! wait, who asked to kill him again? and why?

and that was every time. there are dozens of names and places and they all are deeply connected and you somehow are expected to keep it all in your head or make notes on a piece of paper, idk. call me whiny, or call it an aesthetic (put a pin into that, we will return to it later), but wouldn't it be convenient to have something like bestiary that Witcher 3 had, with a tab for people you met or heard about? nothing too concrete, hell, this series is know for being frugal with explanations but... like, something, so i don't have to keep wiki constantly open and ready to alt tab to understand who am i talking to and who are they talking about.

and while we're talking about dialogues, BG3 made me understand how much i need a tab where i can re-read recent dialogues. if not to understand things better with all the ye old-english-y words some of us filthy non-eng speakers have no idea even exist, then to see how those names are spelled so we can search them in wikis later.

and have you noticed a thing which is going like a red string through all of my writing? wiki. hell, i'm writing all of the above using wiki because i still don't remember how those people are called. you get used to it just to know who's who. wanna laugh at me? because i was so stressed out by the first bosses, i completely blacked out at the first boss, only seeing vague shapes, and i genuinely thought that Godrick and Morgott were the same guy for the longest time because i was stressed out, didn't have enough time to look at them and was frantically thinking of moves and skills instead of actually watching the cutscene with proper attention. it didn't help that they both spoke with similar tones and in a ye old-english-y way, and were in the same location. so yeah, you can imagine my confusion during the game later on...

there's one thing, though. constantly checking names in wiki makes you feel like it's fine to check other things too. and, Io and behold, before you know it, you're just tired and grumpy and look up where the hell are things you need, quests you missed, resource nodes... and suddenly, the best part of the game (exploration) is gradually chipped away, without you even noticing.

i mean, i had to look up how the horse is called and I love Torrent to bits, even if he is as responsive to controls as a DD2 bangwagon that was put on two very greasy, very non-cooperative pigs on skis. which is another gripe of mine, but the poor guy is so abandoned in the second half of the game, that it's genuinely depressing.

which brings us to my second most gripe in the game: menus. remember that aesthetic pin? let's get it out. menus are a genuine pain in the ass to navigate, they don't respond to mouse (oh, we're gonna return to that. oh, we're gonna...), and for the first thirty or so HOURS i wasn't aware there were other tabs in the inventory. genuinely. i simply wasn't aware. i hovered the mouse on tabs, they weren't scrolling, and knowing that this is primary console game, i didn't pay much attention to the keys besides those, assuming (rightfully, as i thought) that those were for consoles to switch tabs. forgive me for my 'pc master race' mentality, but i'm not used to things in the menu not being responsive to the mouse. so some of the quest items you see in there somewhere? any tab after keys? nope, i didn't know they existed.

remember painting quests? i loved those. but also i had no fucking idea you carried a copy somewhere in the bowels of the inventory tab. thus, like the moron i was, i would come to them, make a photo of my screen on my phone, and try to go around, keeping the photo up on my phone as a reference. or go back to the actual in world painting to check. my frustration was immeasurable and my pain was immense. or maybe you wanna find the weapon you just looted and see if it is of any use? pff, good luck, hope you remembered its name or how it looked, or didn't have anything in your inventory, else get ready to go through a warehouse of other gear you carry. not to mention that sorting on those is extremely non-intuitive. why are lantern and looking glass and prattling pates in one section but wraith calling bell and mimic veil have separate ones? why is horse whistle with flasks and flasks 2.0? why are memory of grace with the flasks and horse whistle? am i missing something?? genuine question.

quick side note while we’re at the topic of prattling pates, should i even mention how notoriously convoluted the better ending for my sweet boy Boc is…?

not to mention that 'Switch display' option is very... unexplained, to say politely. it turns out you can see how many runes exactly is Golden Rune [7] - if you switch the view. because having explanation of 'use to gain many runes' on one screen totally gives you a hint that it would say 'use to gain 2500 runes' in another.

i mean i get it. the series has a reputation. it is dark souls 4, 5 and 6 with a new coat of pain (or maybe paint), it has to be hard, you gotta 'git good', you have to fight for every sliver of lore and then listen to 12 hours of youtube explanations anyway just to have a semblance of understanding what's going on. but - and this is an important but - there's a difference between working for the lore and being unable to understand what the hell you looted and not being aware you can actually know how rune [6] 'many' differs from rune [9] 'many' without trying to go and use it and make a table with those orrrr - say it with me! have the wiki opened.

also the fact that nowhere does it say that spirit ashes can be summoned only in specific areas AND you need a bell you need to get later on somehow bumbling into Ranni is simply false marketing. i took twin imps as my trinket and boy ho boy, lemme tell you someone was pissed for the first hour of the game...

which brings me to creme de la creme of my gripes. the controls. pc port is... well it exists, and i still haven't recovered from that. it makes you extremely aware from the word go that you're not the target demographic. that you're unwelcome here. that no one looked at it and thought: huh, we have battles where we expect Tarnished to get on and off Torrent mid-fight, so how shitty of us would it be if we make Torrent summon be "F + [arrow up]" for keyboards? you know, so the player would have to get their hand off the mouse. mid-battle. naaah, that would work just fine, ship that bad boi as is! oh, and make it non-mappable too. they have keyboard with 75% keys being unused? who cares! it mirrors gamepad, and that is what truly matters.

i said it once when a pal of mine let me use his acc and try Dark Souls. i think it was the third one...? well, my experience was - 'i'm not fighting the monsters, i'm fighting the game'. and it's pretty much the same for Elden Ring. did you know there's a power off hand attack? i didn't. did you know there's a way of switching your weapon to hold it in two hands? i didn't did you know you can make it on the fly? i sure as hell didn't. did you know your RH attack is bound to your LMC and it fucks your brain when you play because here it plays role and you can fuckup by using weapons in 'wrong' hands? yeah, that i experienced a plenty.

do you know how i know all those? i plugged in a gamepad and oh god all of the mapping makes so much goddamn sense! i had to reverse-map things because i only played FF9 with a controller, and was extremely uncomfortable with it in a non-turn-based game. which left a taste of bile in my mouth.

loading times are awesome thought. i dunno how they achieved that, but that's hella impressive for a game this big.

i ended up liking the world. vistas. lore that people dig into. but this game isn't for me. not because i'm not interested but because i have a setup they clearly don't care about. and it's okay, i guess. but i have too little free time to spend it fighting not the monsters the game sets in front of me as a challenge but the game itself

hope it wasn't too convoluted ^^'

and thanks again for the ask! :}

[coffee-in-veins]

I find the belt thing like... very interesting. It kinda vaguely reminds me of the story of how the Bounty Hunter got his iconic bounty scroll. Although it is like. Weird, I imagine that whoever does the majority of character design (which, as far as I'm aware is Bourassa) doesn't really have the time to check details like that. It's silly, admittedly (speaking as someone who's pursuing costume design), but also like. As an artist, I know the feeling of not realizing a thing is wrong with my drawing until after it's done. Idk, this is mostly like. Rambling hfdshkjs

thank you for the ask!

well, to be fair, this isn't exactly me you should be asking ^^' i wasn't the one to notice this, i don't wear belts enough to notice that it's wrong. all i noticed was that the knot with the tail's end was looking weird but hey, i was drawing from a reference of an official art director, so what did i know? i shrugged it off and drew this mistake, too

now i know better and i won't repeat it. i guess it proves, once again, an old saying of never using another drawing as a reference and only using real life references, because you'll be copying someone else's mistakes, huh...?

but if you want my opinion, it is lowkey a sign of lack of polish. if someone noticed it (and someone clearly did, since some of DD2 models don't have this issue) they never bothered to check other models for this and fix them