As are several additional hands, by the looks of it. And a few... testicles?

Not gonna lie, a cat taur whose upper torso is just more cat is inspired.

So it's no longer enough to wait for reviews before deciding whether to buy or not, now you have to wait a few months longer to see whether the devs add crappy features they held back to deceive the reviewers. That's just fucking fantastic.

I don't mind the wait, but I do mind the Denuvo DRM.

Sean Murray may be riding that high and lost track of the lesson he should’ve learned

Oh hell no. He learned his lesson very well, that being that you can lie through your teeth, sell unfinished garbage, spend a decade implementing a fraction of what you promised, and become one of the most beloved studios in the business as a result. He's doing the same thing again because it worked like magic the first time.

Looks more like Christopher Lloyd to me.

Hot take: It's not that LotR was a fluke, it's that it's massively overrated. It's just your standard big-budget American blockbuster with amazing visuals and music that does little more than pay lip service to its source material. I have to laugh when people get up in arms about the character derailment of Luke in the sequel trilogy but nobody bats an eye at Aragorn just straight-up murdering Mouth during negotiations in RotK. I likewise don't get the hate for the Hobbit movies, as if they're somehow obviously worse than LotR. I really don't see it, to me they're just more of the same.

Or going further back: Remember Star Wars Galaxies?

The game that was shut down less than a week before Star Wars The Old Republic released? You're not wrong about the other stuff, but this one definitely wasn't just a big patch.

At first I thought, "Oh cool, they're showing what the game used to look like before they reveal the new graphics." But that is what the game looks like...? I mean, the before and after comparison footage looks completely identical, doesn't it? It's October 1st, not April. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

That's cute. How about Hall effect sticks so they don't wear out after six months?

Elden Ring is pretty much my favourite game of all time. I feel like it’s the “culmination of Dark Souls design”, and just happens to be exactly what I was personally looking for in DS games

I'd probably feel the same way if I hadn't played a few other similar games while waiting for ER. Nioh and especially Nioh 2 showed me how much more Dark Souls could do. Their combat system is much richer and deeper, and I find it baffling that From Soft hasn't tried copying even a few of their ideas. I hadn't realized anything was missing from the Souls formula until I played them, but now I can't unsee it. Maybe my expectations are excessive. From Soft seems incapable of copying even its own good ideas. Dark Souls 2 made quite a few good (if relatively minor) changes to the formula, all of which were erased the moment Miyazaki took back control of the series.

I also recently replayed Blade of Darkness, which I consider the forgotten true originator of the souls-like genre. Being more than twenty years old, it's much simpler than its spiritual successors, but it showed me that Dark Souls also does a bunch of things it really doesn't need to do, such as bullshit artificial difficulty. I used to think BoD was really hard back when I played it for the first time more than two decades ago, but after several thousand hours in Souls and Nioh, it feels easy. And you know what? That makes it great fun. Enemy attack patterns are quite basic and easily readable and predictable, there are no surprise ganks and no spoiler enemies (which is what I like to call annoying enemies specifically added in order to spoil what would otherwise be a fun combat encounter). Hell, there's even friendly fire among enemies, so it's much harder for them to gang up on you, and you get none of that toxic and abusive encounter design based around ranged enemies shooting you through melee ones that From Soft seems so very fond of. Nioh showed me what the Souls series is missing, and BoD reminded me that sometimes less really is more.

Seeing that ER is just more of the same has really sapped my motivation to play, and I haven't gotten very far in it as a result. I'll probably finish it someday, but I'm definitely not going into the NG+ cycle and PvP for hundreds of hours like I used to do with previous Souls games.

as for Fromsoft just doing the same thing over and over - Armored Core VI coming out next week, and that’s quite different. :D

Ah yes, the sixth game in a series. More than halfway to double digits. Such innovation. ;D

Elden Ring

It's just Dark Souls 3.5. Which is not necessarily bad if you really liked DS3 and just want more of the same thing, but I considered DS3 by far the weakest in the series to begin with, and playing the Nioh series after it has opened my eyes to just how much room for improvement there is in the DS series as a whole. From Soft has basically followed the same path as Bethesda - they used to make varied games until one of them randomly became wildly successful, and from that point onward they haven't had the balls to deviate from the winning formula and have just been remaking that same game over and over with a slightly different coat of paint each time. Which makes sense from a business point of view, I guess, but after this many repetitions, it's become clear to me From Soft is totally creatively bankrupt. Hell, it's been more than a decade since Demon's Souls, and they still can't even figure out a better counter to the "roll behind them and stab them in the butt" strategy than making enemy tracking ever more effective and their movements ever more spasmodic and unreadable in each subsequent game. The end result of this complete lack of willingness and/or ability to innovate is that despite being expertly crafted, Elden Ring feels very by-the-numbers and utterly soulless (if you'll pardon the pun).