tomsawyee:

fallentitan98:

demilypyro:

I think what’s interesting about the Fromsoft RPGs is that even those that aren’t in the same franchise are still essentially sequels to eachother.

Dark Souls is obviously a spiritual successor to Demon’s Souls, and Elden Ring is a Dark Souls sequel in all but name, but even Bloodborne and Sekiro “feel” like important steps in Fromsoft’s design journey. Every time Fromsoft does a standalone, they take what they learned back into their main Souls franchise. The design elements from Bloodborne made Dark Souls 3 a lot more fastpaced than the first two, and the movement and open ended exploration in Elden Ring feels very Sekiro to me.

It’s fun when you can trace a studio’s path like this.

To continue on to this, this didn’t start with the souls games. Demon Souls took steps from Armored Core, such as equipment capacity, management, and setting. Post apocalypse has been the setting for their games for over two decades now. Not to mention Patches and the Moonlight blade, which have been in nearly every setting in some form or another.

From feels so special because its catalog speaks to the iterative nature of making video games in a way that we generally don’t get to see in the mainstream or over such a long period of time.

We usually see short-lived bursts of a developer’s identity evolving with consecutive entries, but the amount of money tied up in gamedev + design by capital rather than by designers usually cuts off real dynasties of development before they can mature:

Valve set the tone for much of what we enjoy about first person experiences in the 2000s, but Steam started printing money, so it doesn’t “need” to make games anymore. Skyrim launched within months of Dark Souls, but Bethesda makes unlimited money just being a parasite publisher, so why should it do anything but continue to reskin the same open world fetch quest collectathon with combat systems that were obsolete 10 years ago? Bioware’s continued existence is (likely, bc we all know EA) riding on the success of DA4 because its publisher forced it to make a game that catered to an artificial “play it forever, pay for it forever” trend that was set up to fail. Pokemon.

From is a glance at what big games would look like if they were treated a little more like art (which they are) and a little less like products.