I hate directional attacking and I can't turn it off in this game.

I have a physical copy of this game, but I don't plan on playing it anytime soon, and that's 100% of the reason why.

An oldie, but a goodie.

It's actually kinda funny watching them flail around blaming nothing and everything because one of their own tried to shoot Trump. They were NOT prepared to deal with this situation at all.

...Halligan? Is that you?

That's kinda what I want my wedding to be like.

"Okay, here we go! The short short version: Do you?!"

"Yes!"

"Do you?!"

"Yes!"

"Good! You're married. Kiss her!"

and the story takes a while to get started.

That's the problem the game has always had, though.

I played for a bit right as Endwalker came out. I went in blind, played consistently for two months, and by then, I had just finished the first third of Shadowbringers. In contrast, it took me a month-and-a-half to level my first WoW toon back during Wrath of the Lich King.

People may praise the story, but while there was a lot of great stuff, it just takes so loooooong to get there. They really do need to go through and prune the filler quests or boost experience gains.

The more I read about it, the more it reeks of a baseless smear campaign. CNN actively tried to make Biden look bad during the debate, and a huge chunk of the corporate media saw it and jumped on it.

It helped when Biden turned right around and had a strong showing at one of his campaign rallies. He had one off night, and everybody tried to make a mountain out of a molehill because they're more concerned with making money than fighting the fascists.

In DA2's defence, the game went from concept to release in 16 months. With a development cycle that fast, it's a miracle it was even playable; I wouldn't call its rampant copy-pasting "lazy". I'd call it many bad things, because that game had tons of problems, but that's what happens when the beancounters have an unexpected success and want to capitalize on it yesterday.

instead of just playing the game as intended.

I feel like you just unwittingly hit on the problem many series veterans have been having.

People are approaching bosses in Elden Ring like they're Dark Souls bosses, and in my thousands of hours across the series, the only bosses I summon help for is Sister Friede and the Demon Twins. Everyone else I was eventually able to defeat on my own, because that's how they were balanced.

But in Elden Ring, you have the open world to grind in and Spirit Ashes and crazy weapon arts that are far beyond any that were in Dark Souls 3, and the bosses are balanced around these things. It's harder to make a good guess at how powerful a player is at any given time in Elden Ring, so in order to counter the player's bullshit, the bosses need bullshit of their own.

This, naturally, throws a wrench into the plans of veterans who are used to bosses that are tough but fair and approaching them in that manner. They then promptly get their shit pushed in because they aren't using the things the encounters are balanced around having simply because they didn't used to need them.

It makes the bosses binary. Either you get your ass kicked, or you summon help, use a Mimic Tear, and run a train on them. They're either frustrating or boring, and fights that are frustrating or boring just aren't fun. I'm not having fun getting comboed to death or just pelting the boss with spells while my goons beat them up.

The magic is gone. Bosses used to be the highlight of Souls games, and now I just want them to be over.

The only time it was challenging was back when AI factions had a hate boner for the player and ONLY the player. Like how they would leave their settlements undefended to march halfway across the map, through territory belonging to a faction they were at war with just to sack the player's settlements.

Mages are really nerfed despite the story saying they're super powerful and dangerous.

This is kinda selling mages in the setting short.

Magic in this setting is basically the same as it is in Warhammer 40k: mages get their power from an alternate dream dimension that is also where demons reside, they can spontaneously explode and/or summon demons if they're not careful, and they're heavily regulated/repressed. Rogue mages are hunted down and killed by Templars, and everyone else is mostly confined to wizard towers that double as prison camps.

It never comes across in gameplay, but mages and how they're treated are major plot points in all three games.