I Hate Modern Gaming Part 2 – Walkthrough Addict Denounces Hand Holding

In the inaugural entry in this series I mentioned the “Soulsborne” genre, created and popularized by developer FromSoftware, and leading man Hidetaka Miyazaki. If I may quote myself. 

Soulsbornes are shitty action games that overcompensate for their lack of depth by deliberately wasting the player’s time. They reframe this tedium as “difficulty,” and if you point out how obnoxious this is, a legion of (P)reddit-tier NPCs will descend upon you with their regurgitated slogans of tolerate tedium “git gud” or just use a guide like I did “you just want your hand held, casual.” 

One of the mindless slogans bandied about by FromSoft Fans is that a Soulsborne game “doesn’t hold your hand.”

I wondered what this meant exactly. Luckily, I found some tranny on Medium who enlightens us. 

Medium (Some literal tranny):

The Soulsborne series, a term lovingly coined by fans, has become a revered collection of games that elicit both frustration and sheer delight. From the twisted landscapes of Demon’s Souls to the cosmic horrors of Bloodborne, these titles crafted by FromSoftware have left an undeniable mark on the gaming world, creating a community of players bound by a shared love for challenging experiences and intricate storytelling. It continues to be no surprise when they continuously win game of the year awards.

One cannot discuss Soulsborne without acknowledging the series’ hallmark difficulty. It’s not just a game; it’s a gauntlet, a relentless journey that demands your every ounce of skill. The absence of hand-holding tutorials means every death is a lesson, every mistake a chance to improve. The feeling of overcoming a seemingly insurmountable boss is unparalleled — an adrenaline rush mixed with the sweet taste of victory. This difficulty provides not a challenge but a new level of immersion for gamers. For you are not playing a protagonist but rather you are the protagonist learning every enemy and level.

You hear that, casuals? Not one hand holding tutorial to be found in all of Soulslandia.

MP 1st:

Soulsborne games can often be intentionally obtuse in their design.

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There is an unfathomable amount of guides, build strategies, and walkthroughs all designed to help new and veteran players alike. The community wants other people to play these games they love so much and make sure to help you with whatever knowledge they have to ensure you succeed. Players mistake using these tools for cheating and believe they will dilute the experience but it is quite literally the opposite.

These games do have a steep learning curve, and many things are either poorly explained to the player or not at all. Using some of these online tools helps to alleviate much of the stress for players by explaining anything you might not understand. Other players have done the hard work of figuring out the best weapons to use, or the optimal path to take so that you don’t have to. Doing a playthrough with the wiki open beside you or alongside a YouTube walkthrough is encouraged within the community because it allows you to get the most out of the game. Instead of wasting time wandering around or dying over and over somewhere you really shouldn’t be yet you can focus on actually making progress and feeling good about it too.

“It’s good that Miyazaki fails to explain anything, because explaining things is hand holding. Also, just use a guide, bro. That’ll explain everything to you.”

FromSoftware games have bizarre leveling up systems, bosses with seemingly random attacks that one shot the player, and quests that are nonsensical gibberish, most of which are effectively impossible to complete without a guide. The developers appear totally disinterested in explaining diddly squat, because that would be “handholding”. Their loyal fanboys cope with this by playing these games with a Wiki or YouTube walkthrough open the entire time.

The guides tell them, in an extremely inefficient and clunky way, replete with spoilers, how to play the game. They get their hands held told how to level up. They get their hands held told what to do against any particular enemy or boss. They get their hands held told how to complete some batshit crazy questline that takes us back to the dream logic days of early 90s adventure games.

They get every aspect of the game spoonfed to them in painstaking detail. Then they go online and seethe at anyone suggesting Fromsoft get their act together and provide the player with a journal or, God forbid, a quest marker. That would be hand holding, you filthy casual.

I found a bunch of these disgusting casuals whining about FromSoftware’s perfectly designed Elden Ring quests.

Reddit (Elden Ring sub):

Worst part is that the quests themselves are decently well put together, there is just no fucking way you can do them without alt+tabbing to the wiki every 5 minutes. It is absolute trash design and Fromsoft need to get it in their damn head that locking story behind cryptic bullshit is not the way to go.

The responses were refreshingly sane, and have been amalgamated into the quotation block below, broken up by a line dash.

From, please stick to linear games. Elden Ring has been a true test in patience. Some of the worst quest design I’ve ever seen. People will downvote and make excuses for what should be inexcusable.

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Yep its a trash system. Certain quests have a linear relationship, so if you accidentally finished the second quest, the first one become unavailable, which is a really bad design cuz player have no way to figure out which quest / area to explore first without reading the wiki.

Some fanboys might argue that “yOu sHoUlD rEaD tHe wIkI”, well if I literally have to hold a wiki on my second monitor to play the game, that’s like an extremely shitty design, especially considering lore and quests are extremely important for ER. They should either add a quest tracking system or just better dialogue rather than playing peekapoo with NPCs in the entire world with no guidance whatsoever. FromSoft just doesn’t respect players’ time.

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Every FromSoft game has npc quests that pretty much can only be completed by googling them. I don’t think in all of my runs in any of the games I have successfully completed an NPC questline without looking it up.

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I have not completed a single quest randomly, the ones I have completed have been via guides the rest are just 80 hours into my playthrough and I havn’t even seen the npc again.

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I’ve been taking my time with Elden Ring and after 70 hours and reaching maybe midgame I decided to put it down. Not because of the difficulty but because the quest design is absolutely terrible. I’m tired of going around this beautiful world with no idea of what’s going on within it. It has many interesting NPCs but good luck figuring out how to progress any of their quest lines without a guide.

Don’t think for one second that the quests are designed to reward players who have been keenly paying attention to small, minute details. The Elden Ring world runs on typical video game logic. Stuff just happens. 

It’s okay, because you’re not supposed to think about the gameworld at all. Just Git Gud go read a guide. Also, the lore is amazing and the work of genius, because it’s vague.

Have to agree, earlier today I ran into one of patches traps and I tracked him down expecting some revenge but guess this? The game acts as if nothing happened prior and the dialogue I got was pretty irrelevant to what happened moments ago.

I felt so disconnected from that moment.

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You’re not figuring things out, you’re wandering around with virtually no information or connections. A merchant acquired finger click has absolutely nothing to do with calling down a howling wolf in any way.

You might as well say you realized it was fish and chip night because the supermarket just restocked the vegetables in the next town.

The last commenter is referring to Blaidd’s “obtuse” questline. I’ll be going into greater detail with other quests that make no sense later, so I’ll skip the breakdown of that one.

Unfortunately, we’ve found even more filthy casuals demanding that their hands be held.

Reddit:

So truly no biggie, I defeated Rykard and Patches is gone making the whole Tragoth the Horned questline pointless. Which is fine in itself, no huge loss. It’s more how absolutely nothing, and I mean NOTHING, is communicated to the player.

Is the implication that I should crack out the wiki every time I receive a quest so I can even know who I’m doing it for and why? Is the games idea that I should be the one being wary of these things, like it even communicates its intentions at all?

Don’t get me wrong, I do love the open ended nature of the quests and how little they guide you on a superficial level, but it seems like they hardly guide you on a deeper level either. Dialogue is purposefully obtuse, uses terms a player of the game simply will not understand without some serious lore diving, and it seems like it would only guide a person who has already lived there their whole lives. (Which from the game sure you have, but me personally, I have not.)

Honesty time only, who has 100% solved an entire Elden Ring questline without a single time cracking out a wiki? I just can’t see it being a very high number of people, and that seems like an inherent flaw in how quests are communicated. I get the purposefully obtuse angle here, but it’s still a game at the end of the day.

The comments, which have been amalgamated into one quotation block, are once again surprisingly sane.

As a newer player I agree with this so much. I have no fucking clue what is happening. I find myself just reading walkthroughs to understand a few of the points and what I am supposed to do. I mean its a great game but I definitely feel like an outsider.

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IDK why something like an in game journal that records npcs dialogue or consolidates all the necessary clues to figure things out isn’t in the game. Other RPGs and mystery games do this without taking away from the “muh sense of hardcore accomplishment”. Adding a journal/log would probably even increase the number of players that actually find it engaging to bother doing these quests blind. In general I think the actual number of people figuring quests out on their own (/who are in the right spots at the right time) is smaller than those who dont, and that’s true across all souls games so far.

The reasons why journals/logs are standard in these kinds of games is because they work. Other game developers have, for decades, used them to provide the player with the needed information in-game. 

One of my favourite games as a child was the very obscure Siege Of Avalon. That game featured a quest log, and an adventure log. There was also a beautifully illustrated graphic novel that detailed all the main events, and most side events. 

This was in addition to a well written, fleshed out story, where you didn’t need to read a Wiki to understand what was happening. 

The developer, Digital Tome, also wrote plenty of item descriptions, something that Soulscucks believe is a reasonable substitute for actual storytelling and plot. This was all done by a tiny indie studio in the year 2000, so it’s understandable that they were miles ahead of a two decades old studio with almost 100 million total game sales. FromSoftware may have failed at creating quests you can complete without a guide, but they failed intentionally, so it’s brilliant. 

I found another post detailing the insane moon logic required to complete one of these questlines.

Reddit:

I mean that the fundamental quest progression system has large design flaws, and is possibly the worst I’ve ever seen in a game.

For those who haven’t played Elden Ring, here’s how it goes:

1. The NPC is somewhere on the map
2. You talk to the NPC until they repeat their dialogue, then go do some task (kill a monster, find an item, go to a location, etc) (sometimes you repeat this several times in the same location)
3. Once you activate some progression trigger (go to a new area, kill a boss, etc.), then the NPC progresses to the next stage in their quest (and usually teleports somewhere new on the map).

The problem is with step 3. Elden Ring is an open world game, where you can explore and do things in whatever order you want, right? But actually the devs made the quest system as if it was a 100% linear game, so if you don’t go through the game in the exact specific order that the devs designed for, then NPCs are going to teleport/disappear, locking you out of steps or the entirety of their quest arc.

Went too far north/east/west/south? Wrong, now one of the NPCs skipped. Did too much of the main story sections? Wrong, an NPC skipped/disappeared.

Players do not have enough information to complete these quests without consulting a guide. To make matters worse, the more they explore an open world game the more punished they are, because they will eventually break the quests they have started.

But it’s okay, because you can just have your hand held get someone on the internet to tell you how to complete these quests, like a real hardcore gamer.

One example: There’s an NPC ( Roderika ) where you have to find an item for her quest. Of course she doesn’t tell you where it is or even that you should find it, but that’s fine. What’s not fine is that, let’s say you wanted to explore a bit and you went a bit north before doing the main story section. Not even some crazy skip path, just a normal road in the game. Well, boom she teleports and skips to Part 2 of her quest. So now even when you find the item and try to give it to her, she won’t react to it, won’t give you the reward, you miss out on all the dialogue and narrative for Part 1, and she’s in a state which is completely nonsensical and incongruent with what she should be saying. You can google this and find many people had the same thing happen to them.

Another: there’s an NPC quest where you can find a copy of that NPC (Sellen) tied up in a basement . When you go to try to talk to that NPC about it, there is no dialogue option to mention this thing that you’d obviously want to mention to her, so you can’t continue the quest. Instead, you’re supposed to go back to her after you beat an arbitrary boss with no connection to her (Starscourge Radahn) to finally trigger the next part of her quest. Of course there’s no way to know this without a guide or reading the mind of the devs; the triggers are completely counterintuitive.

Another example: there’s an NPC that gives dialogue at the campfires in the game. If you unwittingly go through warp gate to a higher level area (there are many in the game, and often you’re intended or have to go through them to progress), and rest at a camp fire, you’ll get a forced cutscene where that NPC skipped all the way to later phase of her dialogue and says things that make no sense for that point of the narrative. ( What, you were testing me, but now that I’ve proven myself you’re going to introduce me to the Roundtable Hold? But I literally just talked to you and haven’t done anything other than ride my horse a bit since then ).

Miyazaki has publicly stated that he doesn’t want the story to make any sense. Therefore, when random things happen that’s art, not developer oversight. 

Likewise, if I say that I’m going to play the world’s most irritating sound on loop in my video game, you are not allowed to complain that I’m annoying you. This was an intentional choice, therefore I am immune from criticism.

So should you just always go in the direction of the main story arrow before exploring? No, doing that will cause you to miss out on other quests. You have to either mind read the developer’s specific intended path or use a guide. That’s awful quest design for an open world game, especially one like Elden Ring where the world is extremely open-ended and encourages free-roaming for all other aspects other than quests/narratives.

Then, there’s the issue of where the NPCs/quest locations are.

For one quest line, you have find an illusionary wall (either by attacking or rolling on this wall). There are many illusionary floors/walls like this in the game. There’s no indication whatsoever that this wall is an illusion (either graphical or dialogue hints), so you either have to:

1. Roll like a maniac at every floor/wall in the game (extremely tedious gameplay).
2. Use a guide.

Looks like you solved your own problem, moron. Or are you such a casual that you think this information should be in the game itself? That’s handholding, retard. You have to get the exact same information outside of the game for it to not be handholding.

Learn the difference, noob.

And the locations where NPCs teleport are similarly problematic. If you’re a mind reader (or using a guide) and doing the exact specific path the devs intended, then it’s fine because you’ll come across their new location as you progress.

But if you’re just naturally playing the game and exploring openly? Then once an NPC disappears, they could be anywhere. Sometimes they tell you, but often they don’t. They could be in any obscure room or nook that you already went to. Or maybe they could be somewhere you haven’t been yet. So do you keep exploring hoping you’ll find them? That’s no good, doing so might cause a quest skip (or termination). Do you backtrack to every single area of the game you’ve already been in? That’s absurd.

Fromsoft absolutely refusing to respect the player’s time is a common theme, something I’ll get into in the next entry.

It’s also genius, because real life can be messy and banal. Sometimes you need to spend an entire day, even an entire weekend, doing mindless, tedious drudge work, so video games should be the same way. Actually, they should be even more tedious, to really up that immersion factor. 

There’s also a large degree of ludo-narrative dissonance because your character is forced to do stuff that you have no intention of doing without the player being given a choice. For example, there is one door in the game that, if you open it makes your character hug a crazed flame monster and locks you into a specific ending (unless you go through a series of obscure steps which you’d never find without Google) , even though many players open the door thinking they’ll fight a boss

Again, there’s no good option other than mindread the devs or use a guide. Freely exploring is punished by permanently missing out on questlines and quest phases, and if you play normally you’ll probably miss out of the majority of the quests and narratives through no fault of your own.

Some people will say that’s fine, but that’s tantamount to saying that the narrative in Elden Ring doesn’t matter at all and that it’s OK for NPCs to suddenly be in incongruous and nonsensical states because none of the narrative matters anyway. In reality, for quests with obscure triggers like Millicent, 99% of people will only be able to do it after googling/seeing guides online, and playing a game while looking at a wiki isn’t a great experience. Saying “it’s always been like that” is also never a proper reasoning for flaws in a game.

Some questlines in Elden Ring read like an excerpt from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. 

And then there’s Sellen, who at some point says that she wants you to find two great sorcery masters. She even explicitly states that she has no idea where they could be either. Not even a hint of their potential or past whereabouts. Go on and find them, good luck.

…

Not only that, but one of them is in an obscure corner of the basement of a cave behind a fake wall behind a tombstone in a nondescript graveyard locked behind a different optional sidequest in a remote corner of the map.

The other one just requires finding a different optional area and then realizing you can walk across a lava field. Which then culminates in needing to find a doll in a false floor of an open field area, which leads to a small room, which has a second false wall in the back that then leads to the doll- none of which is signaled to the player or hinted at in the rooms design or Sellen’s dialogue.

Miyazaki: But the quest item was on display.

Gamer: On display? I eventually had to go down to the hidden doll room under the false floor of the open field area.

Miyazaki: That’s the display department.

Gamer: After I crossed the river of lava.

Miyazaki: Ah, well, the road maintenance in these areas isn’t what it used to be.

Gamer: I had to roll ten thousand times to find the random bit of wall I could go through.

Miyazaki: But look, you found the quest item didn’t you?

 Gamer: Yes, I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in the disused lavatory of the basement of a cave behind a fake wall behind a tombstone in a nondescript graveyard locked behind a different optional sidequest in a remote corner of the map.

Fromsoft fans would rightfully make fun of any other game with questlines like this, instead of praising nonsense indistinguishable from satire. 

When the game shipped, numerous quests were broken/incomplete/completely missing. IIRC it was something close to 1/4 quests either didn’t appear or would not proceed past a certain point.

I had people tell me that none of the quests were broken and it was all From’s vision for the game despite patch changelogs (and data mining) indicating that the game was shipped unfinished and broken. The quest design is often unnecessarily obtuse to the point that being completely broken and being mysterious are indistinguishable.

The game’s lack of a quest tracker, something as simple as a list of assigned quests vs completed quests, helped disguise the essentially non-functional nature of a substantial chunk of the game’s narrative content at launch.

Fromsoft’s uncompromising vision was to have one quarter of all the side quests in the game be totally broken at launch. This was not developer oversight. This was a deep, contemplative statement on a world where, so often, things are broken and unfinished. 

In life, sometimes you blink. That’s why Elden Ring has inconsistent framerate. It’s an intentional choice to simulate your eyes closing during a real fight. After all, if a sword was really being swung at your face you’d probably blink quite a bit. Also, inconsistent framerate forces you to compensate, which raises the skill ceiling, scrub.

Here’s a breakdown of how criticism of Fromsoft goes.

1. Game has objective problems.
2. Miyazaki says “no, I was retarded on purpose.”
3. People point out problems.
4. Fromcucks “uh, like, no dude. Miyazaki was retarded on purpose.”
5. People point out that they still really hate the retarded thing.
6. “Like the problem is that you just don’t understand that he designed the game poorly on purpose.”

Case in point.

Have you considered that you’re not supposed to 100% complete the game in a first playthrough? That the way quests work is deliberately designed to be obscure, much like how the lore is obscure.

Fromsoft didn’t set out to design something “objectively” bad. It’s designed in a specific way. There’s no golden trail of piss leading to your next objective, for a reason.

If you want the quests to make any sense at all and be doable without a guide, then the problem is that you haven’t even considered the possibility that the game is not supposed to be 100% completed on a first playthrough. Your peanut sized brain is incapable of understanding that the quests are deliberately illogical, and random obscure. Maybe one day you will be capable of understanding the genius that is Miyazaki, like our enlightened brethren at IGN.

When Elden Ring was released, there were a few mainstream, Western developers who had the audacity to publicly voice their criticism of The Lord’s Chosen Game on twitter. Normally I’d enjoy AAA game developers getting shouted down, except in this case their criticisms of the UI, graphical performance, and quest design were difficult to disagree with. So difficult that the only real, genuine response Soulscucks could muster was a total strawman. 

Look, casual, if you want quality of life features what that really means is that you want random text cluttering up the screen. A minimap? That’s ridiculous. Quest markers? Unconscionable. Control prompts? DEEZGUSTING.

And don’t even get me started about that spell bar at the bottom of the screen, allowing Those Who Have Yet To Git Gud to quickly select different spells or items. On the topic of said spell bar, I combined bunch of comments from filthy casuals in that thread so you could see the level of casualness that we’re dealing with here.

I actually wouldn’t mind having something like [the satirical item bar] for pc lmao. Having to cycle through like 6 spells or items to get to the one you want is very tedious and distracting.

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In all honesty, I would love that bar .. it’s something that immersive sim games have in the PC versions or CRPGs had and have and I always loved that.

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Being able to actually keybind all my spells would be nice. Unfortunately it´s just a console port so no advanced keybinds..

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The item bar would 100% fine; and is more a pc layout where you can have all the numpad for quick access, being customizable it makes sense to be shown by default.

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They need to do something for PC players, being a mage on my 2nd char and cycling through 7+ spells every time is driving me nuts. Makes it hard to swap spells mid fight.

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Honestly thats the one thing I wish Elden Ring actually had… switching through 10 spells/items one by one and not even being able to go back one step is so annoying… really terrible design choice.

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I mean of all The clutter on the screen, that one makes the most sense. The UI in Elden Ring leaves a lot to be desired. It’s quite antiquated, and probably the worst part of the experience. Switching items during combat is almost as hard as the combat itself.

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I would strongly prefer a hot bar than to scroll through 8+ spells like I have to now. But maybe that’s just me. If I wasn’t using spells, then I wouldn’t mind as much, but there are a lot of cool spells and you get a ton of spell slots… and if you accidentally scroll passed the spell, you have to go all the way back around haha

Elden Ring’s tedious and annoying UI scheme is good, because it raises the skill gap between good and bad players. It’s not the job of the game to have unobtrusive UI that just works. It’s the job of the player to Git Gud.

You might think that the issues with AAA game development are the (((zionist oversight))) leading to constant microtransactions, cultural poz, and corrupt journalists. The real issue is that most modern AAA games have quality of life features that have come about through decades of iteration.

Get a load of the garbage above. A minimap? Quest text on the screen? Numerical keybindings? Constant control reminders? I bet casuals can beat this game without needing a guide to explain everything to them like they’re a toddler. 

In a television show, if the audience keeps forgetting various plot points or side characters, the filmmakers have failed at their job. In a game, if the players have to constantly open up Google to figure out how to do basic things, the players need to Git Gud. If the developers fix this problem that’s handholding. 

We all know at least 80% of these dudes look up guide for Elden Ring cause they’re lost.

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Haha that is all I been saying, most games just put the guides etc in the game instead of making you watch some savant guys youtube. And most people would just quit if it wasn’t a FromSoftware game.

Imagine a game where you didn’t need to look up guides because the developers held your hand actually gave you the information you needed?

There are a lot of stats in Elden Ring that are unexplained, and you’re left to figure what these do, usually by trial and error.

Why does this game not hold my hand explain basic stats? Why do I need to watch a guide to find out what the Vitality stat controls? 

Did you know that leveling the Vigor stat doesn’t linearly, exponentially, or logarithmically increase your health? Instead it increases your health in a totally unintuitive way that you could never possibly know without consulting a guide or doing lots of trial and error.

The soft caps aren’t even consistent. Above we see the scaling for what is essentially the magic points stat. It’s totally different from the health stat, and in fact every single attribute has its own, totally unique, totally unexplained, and totally bizarre leveling formula.

Isn’t it great that the game forces you to open a guide in order to level your character productively doesn’t hold your hand? 

Back to the topic of quests, someone on the GameFaqs forum created a post titled “Can we have an honest discussion about how bad the quest design is?” I’ve combined three responses into one, because they outline a secondary argument that I’ve seen for FromSoftware refusing to explain needed information to the players. 

GameFaqs:

I dont agree.

The fun is in finding the solution with the community – this is souls DNA.

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I think [the quest design] is obtuse, but I also think that that very obtuseness is intentional – like someone else said, it’s deliberately unintuitive because it encourages engagement with the meta-community.

One could argue something like “no they’re just lazy,” but that feels hollow – laziness doesn’t keep them from recording one extra voice line saying “meet me at X when you’re done.” It’s a deliberate choice and part of what makes the game fit into From’s own self-defined genre. So while disliking it is fine (and the purpose of the thread; this isn’t a dig at you), suggesting that it’s laziness is just silly.

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You have to understand that these quests are solved with the community. So using a guide or forums to know where to go next in some of these quests is how they are designed to be. It encourages a community effort. Always been like this. The game was never meant to be played blind or even solo. It is just people limiting themselves for no reason.

Everything bad, confusing, or broken in any game is actually a feature because community engagement.

Anyone who has ever tried their hand at creative writing can tell you that the default state of any story is a confusing, poorly explained mess. Addressing the relevant gaps in the audience’s knowledge in a clear and concise manner is a difficult and time consuming task in any medium. This is made even more difficult in a non-linear video game, where the audience may bring wildly differing prior knowledge to any particular story event.

The writer needs to account for all this, and, in every instance, provide each individual player with all the relevant information, as succinctly as possible. Said writer can be helped to some extent through the game tracking the information the player has been exposed to, but that requires a lot of programming, writing, and playtesting.

I find it highly dubious that FromSoftware are intentionally stonewalling players through nonsensical quest design in order to grow the online following/engagement. I think it’s far more likely that the arrow of causality travels in the other direction. Miyazaki doesn’t bother with quest logic, not because he wants all the Git Gud morons to start using guides, but because he knows they already do, which saves him the time consuming and difficult task of providing authorial clarity. He then leans into the resultant mess by being even more obtuse intentionally, in the hope that this comes across as mysterious.

To be fair, part of this is entirely justifiable. FromSoftware are video game developers, not authors. The fiction they write exists to justify gameplay. If going for “mystery” over coherence lets them churn out more gameplay content, why not?

In my game, Escape From Epstein Island, you play as a girl who travels to Epstein’s Island to free her effeminate boyfriend who was kidnapped by Maxime Ghislaine and held as a sex slave in their dungeon to get dirt on conservative politicians like Lindsay Graham. Her “gun” is a hairdryer that was overclocked to fire bursts of plasma fire. Her melee weapon is an umbrella stick with a can of mace attached at the end. Her “grenades” are perfume bottles filled with holy water. She has these weapons because I was making a feminist statement on the empowerment of modern women in the internet age it works for gameplay, so I came up with some bullshit after the fact.

Above is the boss that I’ve been working on for the past two weeks. I didn’t want to animate anything, so I made him the disembodied head of George Soros. He shoots projectiles out of his mouth when he isn’t casting various spells or summoning golems through teleporters to fight on his behalf. The reason why you encounter this thing on the nine hundredth floor of Epstein’s basement is because it’s true to life video games need content.

Would you rather there be one single basement level, so that the game ends in five minutes? Is it okay for me to spend five minutes writing a few jokes justifying this, and then two weeks working on the gameplay before moving on to one of the twenty other bosses? Would you prefer that I write an entire novel leading up to the one and only boss?

Another game from my childhood, Symphony Of The Night, randomly has an entire additional castle appear from the sky upside down. The reason this happens is because Dracula uses the power of blah blah it’s totally metal and you get more content, so stop complaining.

Escape From Epstein Island is written satirically partly because that’s the fiction voice I write best with, partly for political reasons, but mostly so I can churn out content because it doesn’t need to make sense. SOTN had a campy setting, partly because it was cool, but mostly so that they could churn out content because it doesn’t need to make any sense. Elden Ring is written “obtusely” so that Miyazaki and FromSoftware can churn out content because it doesn’t need to make any sense. For video games, hack writing is another term for “being productive.” 

This does not excuse the missing quality of life features, such as the aforementioned journal/quest log stuff. Trying to be mysterious is not a good reason to not give the player the information they need inside the game itself. Relying on outside guides is a mark against the game, but it’s something most people could live with. 

What’s annoying is that Miyazaki pretentiously reframes his hack writing as some sort of uncompromising, visionary genius. Then, his army of midwits uncritically repeat this nonsense ad naseum. In their minds no one ever, in the entire history of fiction, considered not holding your hand explaining anything to the audience. This guy was the first to do it.

Even if we accept the GameFaqs guys theory, that Miyazaki is intentionally forcing the playerbase to go online and read guides to improve the social experience or what have you, the argument then is not that the game doesn’t “hold your hand.” The argument is that the game being incomplete forces people to read guides and post online, and some people are really into that. In and of itself, this is fine.  

Just don’t tell me that the game is so good because it doesn’t give you map markers, which “allows for true exploration,” when you are literally reading a guide to totally sidestep any actual exploration and making a beeline to the overpowered items. Don’t tell me that the absence of a journal which tracks quests avoids the checklist pitfalls of other games when you’re currently watching a YouTube video to follow, step by step, the instructions for completing some sidequest in order to unlock some other sidequest. 

And above all else, don’t praise the game for not “holding your hand” in the middle of a guide you wrote to make up for the game not explaining basic functionality.

Newsweek (Guide on Flask of Wondrous Physick):

The game doesn’t hold your hand in terms of explaining any of its convoluted mechanics and it is never immediately clear where you are meant to go or what you are even supposed to be doing. Not to mention, there are unpredictable traps at every turn, many of the bosses are capable of defeating you in a single hit, and don’t get us started on those Ancestral Follower archers! In short, it’s a very hostile world and you need to be smart about how you navigate it.

This is not a one off thing. 

Above we see another guide praising the game for not holding your hand. And remember that collage I showed you at the beginning of this article? Those are all from other guides.

The people who write guides which exist to explain things that the game has failed to explain are praising the game for not explaining the exact same things that they are explaining to the player in their guides, under the premise that not explaining things is good. My brain is almost incapable of understanding irony of this magnitude.

Reddit:

If your quests are that convoluted and nonsensical that you have to look up guides anyway, wtf is the point of not holding your hand? Lol. Markers would hold your hand less at that point.

You see it in nearly every quest guide. You cannot claim how great it is that the game doesn’t hold your hand, if you had to look it up.

Where does that complete disconnect from reality come from? Lol. Fromsoft could do miles better with quests so I can actually reasonably figure it out on my own. Pretending they’ve nailed it is genuinely insane.

“The game made me look up the relevant information in a guide, therefore it never held my hand and is amazing.” – Miyazaki’s Midwits.

Remember Steven Erikson, the author of the “Malazan, Book Of The Fallen” series? Remember how he absolutely refused to use exposition, or explain anything relevant to the reader? 

Malazan fans all admit that you basically have no idea what’s happening the first time you read the series. You have to read all ~3.4 million words, then start over again. Your reward for that time investment is that you might understand, on this second read through, a schlock action high fantasy series based on a homebrew Dungeons and Dragons setting cooked up by a low testosterone soyboy who has never been in so much as a drunken scuffle. 

Just wait until you get to the part where they play a mcfucking card game on a fancy stolen priest table, but the table is magical and makes the card game happen IN REAL LIFEEEEEEE.

– Joseph Patterson (on my original article)

In FromSoftware games, your reward for completing the batshit crazy quests (that you need a guide for) are some items, the occasional optional boss, and lots of lore. After you piece together the lore you figure out that, in this world, some ten thousand year old space god with fantasy AIDS fucked a sentient dog and this lead to the Night Of Black Knives, where the Cult Of Loquitatia started the Age Of Golden Magic, or something else equally vague and retarded. This brilliance would have all been ruined by some quest markers and a minimap.

For the record, I am not blaming these mouthbreathers for using guides, especially for bosses. These games do not respect your time, something I talk about in depth in the next piece. If you die to a boss, you might be looking at a fifteen minute long trek back to the boss, where you try something different only to get one shot by the same ability again. Guides are the only thing making this halfway tolerable.

I’m just amused that, when I briefly checked in with the online video game community in 2023, I found a bunch of obnoxious weirdos spouting thought terminating cliches at anyone who dared suggest the game explain itself to us instead of the guide for the game.