Poking holes in the ever-sexist "men die in war, women affected most" commentary from the usual always-woke sources, it's the latest episode of Splash Damage:
Game Rant published a bizarre article arguing that the tragedies Elden Ring characters endure are gender coded, or, in other words, women and men in the game suffer in different ways and somehow that’s a problem. We break this idea down and also discuss a popular easy mode mod for Elden Ring along with a New York Times article that claims the game is successful only due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Blizzard’s new diversity officer’s influence on games and the company’s reversal on its vaccine mandate, and plenty more.
Find the episode here or on your favorite podcasting app, and thanks for your support!
Standartd disclaimer: I'm not Scrivonaut and I'm not associated with the podcast, I'm just reposting this from Reddit as a signal boost for the show.
Isnt elden ring already the easiest Souls game?
While I can't speak to the difficulty level in relation to the other Souls games (yeah, I'm a pleb newcomer to the genre) I don't really feel like Elden Ring is punishingly difficult. Yeah, it's hard at points, and there's plenty of times where I've been killed due to overextending myself in fight, but I recognize that as my own stupidity and learned from my mistakes. I can see it being massively confusing if one were going in blind, i.e. no referencing a wiki or talking to friends that are playing it, but it's not like it's so full of cheese from bosses that you can't progress unless you have frame-perfect timing. Getting slapped around by bosses? Level up more and learn to stop flailing around like a moron in the fights. Barely doing chip damage on the enemies? Level up more and buff your weapons. Getting lost in quest lines? There's a nifty thing called a pad of paper and pencil - take notes and learn to use the map markers. There's solutions for everything in the game, you just need to learn how to use them. There's no need for any sort of "easy mode" in its context.
EDIT: friggin' typos...
None of the Dark Souls games are very difficult either, especially if you take a bit of time to grind and level stuff up.
The reason people think it's very hard is because FromSoft used a lot of newb killing tactics like hidden traps, ambushing monsters, and vague area differentiation. Once you get used to an area, and the game itself, it becomes easily manageable. It's just that intial blind experience that is, by design, incredibly punishing.
For instance there's that classic boss fight in DS1 where you walk through the fog and get ambushed by two dogs alongside the boss that will just stun lock you. Once you're expecting it it's just hit and run tactics.