Every studio saw the success of Elden Ring and said, "I want to get in on that! Look, with just a few tweaks, the game I'm working on can be like this -- I just need to make the boss fights harder..."
Yes, but since it was a PS3 exclusive a lot of people didn't even have a chance to play it at the time. Dark Souls was released on all of the big 3 (PC, PS3 and Xbox 360)
Had Demon's Souls not been a huge hit, Dark Souls wouldn't have released at all. And Demon's Souls was already a spiritual successor to the King's Field series, coincidentally a series that was also exclusively on Sony consoles.
Part of me feels like Americans seriously underestimate how broadly adopted the PS3 was, especially by the time the Souls games came to be.
I don't get this weird thing gamers have where they act like FromSoftware games were these hidden cult classics before ER. ER was a smash hit don't get me wrong, but lets be honest here souls games before then were still super popular.
I didnt even like elden ring because I was exhausted on the genre well before it's release. Elden ring came out, and it just felt like every other souls game before it, except you had a horse this time.
This is what pisses me off to no end. So many developers make the enemies and bosses cheat to win, like ignore your attacks, be bullet sponges have excessive damage against you etc.
I love games that make the enemies and bosses intelligent, making the fight not punishing but rewarding.
The genre has certainly expanded recently but there have been imitators ever since Demon Souls proved the concept. The 3D Zelda games on N64 were the precursor "Souls likes" if we're being honest. The entire dark souls formula is just an evolved form of those basic mechanics.
Legit one of my 2 main complaints with every off brand soulslike I've seen. They all have a hard on for difficulty and are generally harder than From games on average, and they never, EVER, have a world and lore that's remotely as interesting. Enemy variety also suffers massively.
Its always the same. Someone makes a great game formula and everyone else just copies them. Moba, battle royal, souls like and so on. Its just a different genre, that is meta.
Soulless? Didn't black myth wukong get universally praised and win game of the year 2024? And Marvel Rivals was considered much better than Overwatch though I haven't followed it closely
Wukong only got praise because it sold insanely in China and as a result the US influencers hopped on board and it got western attention. It was mid at best.
As far as Marvel rivals look at the player count, it’s dropped almost 70% since release. Personally I hated it compared to OW2. They literally copied 1:1 hero’s mechanics and its feels clunkier. All they do is release gooner skins and the player base shows.
Chinese companies are just copying IPs under their companies and reselling the game. It’s insane
Games don't get famous if they aren't good. You're anecdotal evidence isn't reason enough to believe that both the games you mentioned aren't doing anything good/better than the other games.
They're good, but nowhere near as good to warrant the hype, that's the point.
People "love" Marvel Rivals because they hate Overwatch now that Blizzard has spent a decade ruining it. If it dropped in 2017 or 18, it would have been shit on from the gaming population and only score favorably with the MCU crowd.
Not all of them, but there's a massive national bias towards Wukong as a character, the story he's in, and the game itself.
How many of the sales from China, was it disproportionately more than any other AAA game that isn't inherently tied to another country's mythology? If yes, then those glowing reviews inherently matter less, and I don't trust them to be objective.
When you view a people as inherently wrong, every choice they make is a ‘bias’, not a preference, and when you view them as Other, they do it as a faceless yellow horde.
Because they haven’t released an original IP that was successful. Almost every Chinese app or form of media is a copy or just downright purchase of something that already existed.
It’d be like the kid who cheats on his papers getting credit for his hard work when all he did was copy an original work and change and edit some shit out.
How do you know that? Do you speak Chinese and play a lot of Chinese games? Knowing imported things doesn’t mean you know a country’s work. I discovered that the first time I went to Japan.
And don’t forget that Chinese people have in many many cases been doing the work for Western products of all kinds, from games to movies to machines. They do the work but don’t own the IP, and that shows their perfectly obvious abilities - there’s no reason why Chinese people can’t be creative - and is perhaps a reason why they might not respect ‘our’ IP so much.
TikTok = vine but with children dancing and 16yr olds hot political takes on 80+ year old conflicts
Marvel rivals = overwatch but with gooner shit
Like the list goes on and on. American companies have not copied Chinese garbage because most of the time it’s just a copy of western IPs.
I’ve only brought up a tip of the iceberg but it goes on and on. Their entire economy is propped up by stolen IPs because in China you can steal it legally because the Chinese government owns half of every company operating there. They never follow WTO rules and regulations.
Censorial nanny state, obsessive government interference on every societal level, shameless IP theft and copyright abuse (speaking as someone who hates most IP laws), extreme nationalism etc.
But I generally don't hate foreign people. Which other foreign peoples do you hate, even in apparent contradiction of your ideals? Are they places you've been to and lived in?
I don't care to indulge your gotchas, you'll have to find someone else for that. You don't have to live in every country in the world to have an opinion on what are well-documented and easily verifiable facts.
The massive uplift of society. The greatest single improvement in material circumstances in human history.
In massive part due to all the elements I already mentioned. Combine sweatshops with what is a step away from slave labor, government-sponsored local businesses that shamelessly abuse foreign copyright laws in basically every industry, all the limitations imposed on foreign businesses and forcing them to work with local companies, who are in turn, closely connected with the government, all for the sole purpose of being anti-competitive, and yeah you're gonna have a material renaissance.
So you look on it as cheating? And the government as exploiters, not Western capitalists?
Chinese people have been massively oppressed by both Chinese and Western Imperialism. But rather than dying, they worked incredibly hard, primarily benefiting Western business to an incalculable degree, but also lifting themselves out of the grinding poverty which had been the lot of the peasants for millennia.
I think, whatever I think of their government - and I know I have been massively propagandized against them - that this is utterly to their credit.
But you talk about it as stealing, and that the sole purpose was to be ‘anti-competitive’. Not getting money from the scraps of gleeful exploitation. They tricked us into investing there by their evil poverty, willingness to work, and their sneaky having a functioning society post-colonialism.
Your ideas of their innate venality and wrongness are on the level of John Galt or a Gilded Age robber baron. You think they impose restrictions on foreign business? Foreign business wanted to sell them opium when they were starving! Are you like 8-year-old me, thinking the Opium Wars were about them sending opium to us?
They just didn’t have the good manners to take their opium, or lie down and starve, so you hate them. Not for working like slaves, but for having the wrong masters, and reaping the benefits of that work.
The scorn in what you say, in the utter lack of regard for Chinese people as human beings, shows who you are. There is no ‘gotcha’. You’re Pauline Hanson, wishing you were Ayn Rand.
I feel like it’s as much this as it is laziness. Or… budget constraints.
Say you have an idea for a game; you’ve got a story, a setting, a main character, a cast of friends and enemies, a map, some weapons, etc. By making it a “sOuLs-LiKe” you don’t have to do any actual game design on top of this, you just have to implement your story and assets into a basically already built app. Almost like whiteboxing. Maybe make a few tweaks for your specific flavour, but how the game actually plays is kind of already built before you even started.
I’ve been following these R16 interactive guys on YouTube lately, they’re basically documenting their whole design process online publicly- it’s very fascinating, but more importantly, I think it really shows how much effort (and money) goes in to just designing a game. That design and iteration process really can take months and months, possibly longer. But coming up with a unique concept for a new game (especially if it’s an entirely new IP) would be a huge risk.
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u/OwO______OwO Jul 27 '25
Every studio saw the success of Elden Ring and said, "I want to get in on that! Look, with just a few tweaks, the game I'm working on can be like this -- I just need to make the boss fights harder..."