In Quest for Camelot, why is there a sign pointing towards the "Forbidden Forest"? Is it, like, a point of interest?
Rewatching Smallville in HD is very illuminating. You can see exactly which actors smoked in the 2000s and which tooth they held the cigarette against.
Lana was a front-right tooth gal, while Whitney's actor was a middle-of-the-road kind of guy.
FromSoftware needs to remove invasions from their next game
People who invade in FromSoft games are trolls who derive their fun from ruining other people's progress and experience, and the mechanic should be removed in future games to stop encouraging shitty Gamer behaviour. Any argument the trolls make to try and justify themselves is inherently disingenuous.
They say "git gud," but they actively thwart the progress of and drive away new players.
They say "it's how Miyazaki designed the game," but then bitch about being "ganked" in Elden Ring because the developers limited invasions to those who have summoned a coop partner. Isn't that "how Miyazaki designed the game"?
They say they're "in it for the challenge," but if that were true they would separate after realizing how one-sided a fight is instead of persisting and ruining the progress of an inexperience player; and they would certainly separate when they realize they've invaded the same player they've already killed three times in the last 30 minutes. The people who make this claim are also ignoring that there are red summon signs specifically for duels with people who actually want to participate.
These are the same kind of disingenuous defenses that alt-right trolls make, which is why I stand by my claim that the Venn diagram of Gamers and Nazi sympathisers is a perfect circle.
There are three places in FromSoft games where you will always find invaders more so than anywhere else, and they prove what the real intentions of invaders are.
- Early game areas because they want to hunt inexperienced players, which is the same mentality as schoolyard bullies who like to pick on younger kids.
- Anywhere with mobs of enemies that they can drive players toward, because they don't care about winning in a fair fight as long as the player's progress is ruined.
- Anywhere they know is a slog to get through due to limited checkpoints and shortcuts, because they want to ensure that the progress they cost you is as painful as possible.
Yes, FromSoft does actively encourage this shitty behaviour by offering rewards for successful invasions. But those rewards tend to suck and aren't worth it for people who don't think it's fun to ruin someone else's fun. I'm a completionist and even I can't be bothered to farm 30 pale tongues for a Man-Grub's Staff that I'll never use, because I don't think it's fun to ruin someone else's day, because I'm not a psychopath.
FromSoft also encourages this behaviour by including invasions in their games in the first place. That doesn't mean it's a good mechanic or that the behaviour is justifiable. It means FromSoft fucked up and needs to do better in the future, unless they truly want to court people with psychopathic tendencies.
It all aligns with my assertion that Gamers are genuinely bad people. People who play games and don't act like psychopaths don't call themselves Gamers, or are far enough removed from Gamer culture to think that gamer is a generic term for anyone who plays games. It's not. A Gamer is a subhumanoid whose strongest personality trait and source of identity is that they play video games, which is pathetic. Deep down I think they know how pathetic they are, which is why Gamers are so defensive and get so much joy out of tearing others down. Certainly post-GamerGate, anyone who doesn't want to be associated with the absolute worst behaviours of Gamers has stopped using the term to describe theirself.
And, no, this isn't spurred by any recent bad experience. I've simply been playing Nioh 2 and Rise of the Ronin lately and remarking how much better they are for not having invasions. The only FromSoft game I've replayed since beating Shadow of the Erdtree last year is Sekiro, which also doesn't have invasions and is thereby a way better game than Dark Souls and Bloodborne.
I play FromSoft games because the combat against NPCs is really satisfying, the weapons and armor are fun to experiment with, the lore is interesting and the world design is grotesquely beautiful. Invasions are simply there to ruin the rest of it. I'm going to start calling invaders "E.M.M.I.s" because, just like in Metroid Dread, they're a bad decision by the developers that only makes the game worse.
So, Metroid Dread is a really bad game, right?
Is that where we collectively landed on it? Nobody talks about it ever since it came out, as if everyone is afraid to say what they really think. The E.M.M.I.s absolutely ruined what might have otherwise been a really dull game anyways.