Elden Ring

[Rob_Haines]

It's Alasdair Stuart's The Full Lid. I know Al from the before-COVID times when I used to go to writing conventions, and he's a wonderful force in the community.

[Jubal]

Oh nice! Yes, that sort of actual writing and conventions scene is something I never really managed to get into sadly.

[Rob_Haines]

Making a real push to finish the rest of these albums by the end of March, so here's the next two:

Mountaintops & Snowfields

Miquella's Haligtree, Branch & Root

[Jubal]

Super pretty as ever, some very nice shots!

I think one thing that I find curious (and maybe doesn't work for me as well though perhaps that's my lore ignorance) is the juxtaposition of the very abstracted landscapes and the consistently bog-standard gothic ruin type architecture. It sort of throws me off a bit in these two albums, because the wider landscape makes me expect fittingly weird architecture and nope, it's another standard castle-monastery job. Something like that could alternatively make sense if it was a more lived-in sort of architecture, a "we're trying to still be us despite/regardless of the weird place" kinda thing, but because the gothic is there to look old it doesn't quite achieve that either.

[Rob_Haines]

I can absolutely see that, and as usual FromSoft do an exceptionally good job of reusing assets in ways that - at least during playing the game - don't *feel* incongruous, but certainly allow them to make much larger games than they would otherwise be able to afford to.

(The ruined churches - in particular - are neatly handled. They function as sanctuary spaces in terms of gameplay, but they are also named in such a way that they are essentially lore footsteps of a semi-divine pilgrimage of a key deific figure in the game's mythology, and so the similarity of the architecture and so on does make a sort of sense as a "her religion went back to all the places where she rested on her journey and built identical churches on those spots")