But…they don’t? Their mainline games are always a few years apart (with the exception of Bloodborne, which they had a separate team doing concurrently).
Unless you’re referring to the other games they publish that no one really knows about or comments on? I don’t think Metal Wolf Chaos XD, Déraciné, or Monster Hunter Diary: Poka Poka Airou Village DX should really factor into the discussion.
Metal Wolf Chaos should factor into all discussion, even those that have nothing to do with FromSoft.
LET’S PARTYYYYY!
2-3 years is a very fast turnaround time these days and that’s where From is at. Look at Horizon by comparison. It was 5 years between the Horizon games despite using the same engine and some of the same assets.
Horizon is a bigger game with more cinematics and voice acting, so that’s part of it. But From is definitely faster at pushing out AAA games than most studios.
I wouldn’t say FROM SOFTWARE’s games are AAA like other AAA studios.
What does that even mean… Elden ring is as AAA as it gets.
Quality of the code base? Dunno.
Am a professional game developer I can guarantee you that the quality of the code base of the average AAA game is no better than a small studio. It’s at times a lot worse, it’s just got better documentation or a bigger knowledge base. I hear the current call of duty engine is a nightmare to work on.
Does it still contain remnants of Quake 3 or have they finally gotten rid of them?
Other AAA games have hand holding I guess…
For all the “From Soft games don’t hold my hand” I see, it sure seems like everyone just uses a guide anyway.
“But I didn’t” Yes you did.
Ok sure… Let’s say bugs and incomplete development, shit performance on latest hardware, fixes in a future update tba instead.
This is a genuine question, not a “gotcha” shitpost or w/e because I haven’t played it a while. Did the microstutter in ER get fixed?
Tbh I have over 250 hours in elden ring and I didn’t even know what you’re talking about.
AAA literally just refers to games published by big publishers that are large scale and have huge budgets.
I’m aware, though these days it’s more like published by heavily “Yeah I’ve played games, I was the best at pong in elementary school” shareholder influenced publishers and devs that make totally out of touch decisions and then lay off all the staff that were responsible for anything in the game considered good right after the game gets bad press.
“At the cost of our staffs sanity!”
What, you think you can make games where the player’s sanity can be broken without insane employees?
This studio is not just known for an even by Japanese standards exploitative work culture, but it also reuses assets of all kinds far more liberally than other developers. Art is by far the biggest cost factor in games development and they are taking significant shortcuts wherever they can.
I will say that reusing assets is 100% okay, and I actually wish more studios did this. You don’t need to make everything from scratch. It’s okay to reuse the thing you made previously.
I dunno. If the dlc is like the rest of the game and I see the same dungeon changed slightly 20 times I’m going to be disappointed. But I guess that’s what reviews are for.
Elden ring dungeons and dungeon bosses did get kinda samey. But god i did not care, there was a list of i think 120 bosses in the game, and i had to be sure each and every one got murdered. I honestly hope this new dlc is a window to the past and the whole ass map gets reused to form the new lands, and we get another 120 bosses to slay.
Note a difference between that and what we’re talking about. We’re saying that if you modeled a table in your previous game, just use that same table again.
Repetitive use of assets within a single game is another thing
Like that recent thing where people were talking about how a Halo map used a single rock in it, just scaled and rotated in different ways. Clever recycling of assets happens all the time and people never even notice. Even in the trailer for Shadow of the Erdtree, you can see they reused some model rigs - like how Messmer has the same standing idle pose as the Cleanrot Knights (though knowing FromSoft, there’s probably some lore implications behind it).
Though, if they make us fight a pair of Ulcerated Tree Spirits in a Scarlet Rot room or something, I might have some unkind words to say…
It is definitely a smart move. But still, maybe we can retire the Asylum Demon?
But the who will sit on me with their dumptruck ass?
For starters they keep making mostly the same game over and over. They’re essentially doing the Bethesda shtick except their end results are better. Sticking to stuff that can mostly be made in the same engine as the thing you finished 15 minutes ago is going to shave off a lot of time compared to making a new game.
Of course that’s not to shit on incremental improvements or engine reuse or anything. That is just sound thinking as long as the games are good.
The three games I was most interested in last year were Kerbal Space Program 2, Cities Skylines 2, and Zelda Tears of the Kingdom. Two of them had newly designed game engines. The third used the engine from the previous game.
Guess which one I enjoyed playing the most?
In software development sometimes you do have to rewrite some code to improve things. But if you have something that functions really well, it’s better to be just continually making improvements. A lot of what makes a game great is going to be artwork, story, creative level design, creative enemy design, etc. But all of that work can be wasted if the software is buggy, which will happen if most or all of the code is written on a tight deadline.
They also had great success with Sekiro, which was (and still is) very different from their other titles.
It’s still the same engine and general gameplay concept though. The combat was the big difference.
It’s the same gameplay concept on a basic level, but that simply comes with the genre. I don’t think you could really change much more than they did without changing genres.
It really isn’t except it has a decent and intelligible story
I love the Dark Souls games. I use two moves in those games: swing big sword, dodge.
In Sekiro, there were many more moves I was forced to use, with precise timing, and split second reads to know which moves I needed to use. My aging brain cannot do that. So I didn’t enjoy Sekiro.
You’re only forced to use one move: parry. The moves you can’t parry, you just dodge. You can finish the game just with that.
Give it a try again! Sekiro is a rhythm game, and when it clicks, the combat becomes one of the most fun of all FromSoft games.
It looks fun as hell if you can get it down, but it was just too difficult for me. I really didn’t enjoy dying repeatedly until I figured out the rhythm. The other soulsborne games felt more fair somehow, and often give you a way to make the boss fights significantly easier.
There’s a candy you can use to reduce posture damage so you can start out just holding block instead of trying to parry. That can make learning attacks and timings much easier.
Almost every mini boss can be backstabbed
Most can be made much easier with the right prosthetic tool
Consider giving it another shot someday!
I used parry on like 2 bosses across 3 Dark Souls games. And each time it was a pain in the arse.
There is an art to parrying. It’s a deep rabbithole with parrying frames, different weapons being better or worse, and a lot of practice. Parrying in Sekiro is way different than souls parry
Well, it’s still the same as Dark Souls. Engine wise, it’s the same. Someone who made models for Souls, can make models for Sekiro. The debugging tooling is the same, etc etc.
The best example of this is actually Armored Core. They used their engine again, yet the game obviously plays different than anything else they released. And yet, it’s the same techstack, the same engine and the same programmers. Nothing changed.
Compare that to the jump from Oblivion to Skyrim, the engine is no longer recognizable. The models need to be of a very different quality. Etc etc.
To anyone who’s played the games it’s very evidently exactly the same engine used in Morrowind, running on faster hardware and with less functionality due to it being unable to handle the higher quality graphics. (Morrowind had mostly open cities - except for Vivec - and flying, for instance; later games had to sacrifice those and add more and more loading screens…)
I mean, make no mistake, it is fundementally different in lots of ways, but in terms of what the engine needs to do to work, what the character needs to do, how the player interacts with the world, at those basic building block production points Sekiro is almost the same as Dark Souls, I so can agree there.
Sekiro can jump, climb, grapple and swim. Those kinds of more agile behaviors add a lot requirements and considerations to the engine and content makers.
Definitely, but I’m also agreeing that a hugely significant chunk of what they’d already accomplished could save time when moving on to Sekiro. They did of course have to work on the engine and new mechanics as well, but it was far from starting from scratch.
The mechanics are pretty different. Grappling (both terrain and enemies), high vertical jumping, less equipment (but strong diverse builds) and very different combat mechanics with deathblows.
I don’t know if it could be much different without literally changing genres.
Huh… Not really? How is Armored Core 6 “mostly the same game” as Elden Ring?
Ac6 is “basically” the same game as ac 1 through 5 or whatever. Elden ring is “basically” the same game as the dark souls saga.
Have you played any of the games you’re mentioning? Doesn’t sound like it, to be honest.
This would be like saying “all those Marios games are all the same, Super Mario World is “basically” Super Mario Odyssey”
All the Mario platform games are basically the same. You have the 2d ones and 3d.
Yeah - I won’t bother replying, this is the most absurd simplification I’ve ever heard. This place is like Reddit, except with even denser comments.
I guess all games are the same - you just press buttons and lights go blinky blinky on the screen.
“Yeah I won’t bother replying”
Goes on to write a couple paragraphs why.
Yes Mario games are fictional the same thing over and over again. I’m collecting sunshine rather than stars this time and I have a new hat!
You’re totally right. I’m a fan of the Xenoblade series and it’s obvious that they use the same engine with some slightly different tweaks and mechanics.
All of the 2D Mario platformers are the same format with unique aspects on top. The same can be said for the 3D games, but it couldn’t be said about the Super Mario series as a whole.
If he hasn’t played them, he’s managed to get the right answer. I have played them, and AC6 is to AC1-5 as Dark Souls 3 is to Dark Souls 1 and 2.
Played and have beaten them all. Youre not seeing what Im trying to say
I’d like to add that from a technical point of view, their games don’t really push the boundaries and at least on PC, their games often aren’t the most polished. Elden Ring had severe shader compilation stutter at launch and a 60 FPS limit - which is a big no-no on PC if you ask me. Nothing game breaking like the state some publishers (EA) release their games in, but not great either.
Their games have always been dreadful performance wise. Frame pacing issues and stutter galore.
Not to mention they were actively hostile towards ultrawide gamers. The engine would render it, but then put black bars overtop the sides. Kind of amazing really that level of hatred towards gamers.
You’re the weirdo for having a weird monitor…
There was a time when 16:9 was also weird because 4:3 was the norm. I wouldn’t call it weird, I think over the next decade it’s going to become a bigger norm in PC gaming.
I was a sceptic as well but when I needed a new monitor and saw a decent UW monitor for cheap I decided to give it shot, after all if it sucks I’ll just use it in 16:9. Turns out it’s one of those “once you try you can’t go back” things. I love it for gaming, it feels so much more immersive. So much that 16:9 feels small and constrained. It’s just a superior experience in my humble opinion.
I don’t think UW is a, must for games, I’m well aware how small minority UW monitors are. But having UW support increases my enjoyment of the game.
I think it’s less hatred and more… Not understanding the wider audience, afaik it’s just not as common in Japan for uw to be a thing in general. Also it adds even more complexity to performance tuning which… They’re not known for. They clearly make games targeted for consoles over PC, the Bethesda comparison is pretty apt in engine reuse and odd decisions to limit fps/uw gaming, Bethesda is at least more open towards modding, but they also don’t make multiplayer games mainly, and while the MP aspects of FromSoft games are unusual, it’s definitely a large part of the appeal/design process and does inherently limit modding due to cheating.
It’s not common, period, but because the people most likely to brag about a setup are those with more money than good sense, it gets misrepresented. Same deal with top of the line hardware – look at Steam surveys, most people are still gaming with 5+ year old hardware.
Ultrawides aren’t even prohibitively expensive these days though, you can get a off brand uw for around $150-200
Don’t HAVE TO go crazy with it and get a Samsung Odyssey or what have you :p
I guess that makes sense, if it’s not that common … but then … why go OUT OF YOUR WAY to make the experience worse? It’s like, why didn’t they just say “oh hey, they have a wide monitor, nice!” but instead they said “oh hey, they have wide monitor, GO FUCK YOURSELF”
The dev team’s boss is literally an elden ring boss.
By releasing the same game over and over for the most part, just with minor changes to the formula. Same engine, same mechanics, same style, same aesthetic, etc.
You don’t have to actually finish the game when a bunch of marks will treat every bug and inconsistency as some grand difficulty hurdle and some deep lore the normies don’t understand
Tell me you’re shit at games without telling me you’re shit at games
You’re shit at games without telling me you’re shit at games.
I don’t kink shame!
where’d you get stuck?
I didn’t
What are you even talking about, like actually, I’m genuinely asking
I think he might be talking about the Bloodborne lantern bug.
Equipping the lantern used to reduce your stamina regen and a lot of YouTubers were making videos about how it was intended and genius in some way.
The bug got fixed later on.
I didn’t know about that as I’ve never played Bloodborne, but even that seems kinda not a big deal.
It’s really not, I think people look too deep into their games sometimes but that’s not a problem in my opinion.
are you talking Bethesda or From software?
They’re the same thing
What is a AAA game? A game released by a large publisher? Is that the only criteria? Then the answer is “money”.
If a AAA game has to meet some level of quality control before it’s called AAA, why is Ubisoft and EA considered AAA?
It really comes down to money more than anything. Quality factors in very little. More marketing, higher budgets, larger teams.
I agree and disagree at the same time here. AAA should and used to signify a higher level of quality. Lately, though, it seems like they finally realized they could shovel shit and still turn a buck.
Negative. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Ubisoft is AAAA now.
Massive, massive whips.
They wisely stick to AAA games and avoid the hassle of AAAA games like ubisoft
How long before it’s less
n(A)
games, and more screaming?what the hell does the number of As even mean? how does one quantify how many As your game has? if I made a game today and shipped it how many As could I get today?
Recently one of the executives at Ubisoft called Skull and Bones a AAAA game. Now the internet is dunking on it.
I read it’s how the companies talked to the stores, AAA meant it would probably be popular and expensive so you better order a big batch.
Is that so?
It fits with my understanding as well, but comes from investment grade bond ratings where AAA usually signifies the highest quality (i.e. the best chance of getting paid back). A AA bond is still a good bond, but it has a higher risk of default.
But in practice, I just see AAA as a “high budget production,” both in development costs and marketing. It doesn’t mean it’s a better product, just one with a lot more money on the line.
So frequently? Dude it’s been like 2 years since they announced DLC for their last game and it’s only finally coming this June assuming it does not get delayed.
It’s a huge dlc from the looks of it though, and they also released Armored Core during that time.
They released a whole ass other game in that window.
Armored Core was pretty dope too. Saying as an old fan
It’s also a Japanese company with Japanese work ethic.
There were already some rumors about bad working conditions during the Dark Souls titles, now more with Elden Ring: https://www.ign.com/articles/elden-ring-developers-compare-working-at-fromsoftware-to-playing-dark-souls
Even with some negative accounts, other FromSoftware employees said working at the studio has been a great experience. One employee even likened it to FromSoftware’s own Dark Souls, saying, “There’s a lot of struggle to get things right, but if you get over the hump it is very satisfying. It’s just like you defeated a boss in Dark Souls.”
I’m not sure if we should be approaching work like Dark Souls.
Genuinely heart warming quote
I dunno. But I’d like to see queen pwnsalot blind fold play a fromsoft game.
If it was actually a blind fold
Karl jobst is right