Elden Ring DLC - July 2024 Part 1

Blaugust is returning for 2024. I don’t know if I’m going to sign up this year. I like to have some kind of theme or new process to test out, and I only had one idea, but I don’t think it’s really in the spirit of Blaugust. Also, it’s more work than I particularly want to do.

The idea was this: Take 31 pieces of writing from the 10+ years of NaNoWriMo drafts I’ve done and post one per day. I keep trying to think of ways to do something useful with those drafts, because at this point, they’re definitely not going to magically turn into novels. My eyesight and back isn’t strong enough to sit at a computer banging out words all day every day anymore. But some of them could possibly become short stories or novellas.

Gaming

Miracle of miracles: I completed the last boss fight in Lords of the Fallen. I did it almost without paying attention to the screen, while listening to a podcast. That’s the level of engagement that I feel while playing these games with garbage boss fights, where the only requirement for success is the persistence to just keep trying it until the randomization lines up in your favor. As previously stated, I hate that style of gameplay. I felt nothing on beating the boss, because I did nothing at all different from any other previous attempt. The important thing is that I now have an ending for my video series, and I can uninstall the game forever.

Shadows of the Erdtree

On the Elden Ring DLC front, at first I found myself resisting playing. I would think to myself, “Okay, I have a full weekend where I can play the Elden Ring DLC.” Then I wouldn’t play it (or anything else) a single time over the whole weekend.

I think it’s mainly because Elden Ring is essentially an open world game, and most open world games are designed such that you’re not actually doing anything roughly 75% of the time. So it takes a while to get into it. I wish they would go back to the Dark Souls formula, where every step and every moment is part of the overall trajectory, and there’s no “down time.” In Elden Ring, first you have to find the interesting stuff, and only then do you get to play it.

Anyway, I’ve finally gotten into a groove with the Elden Ring DLC. My character started the DLC at level 150, and has been waiting patiently under the burning Erdtree, pre-NG+, for two years. I have no way of knowing what percentage of completion I’ve reached, but it looks like a huge area of exploration, and I’ve only encountered a few “story” bosses so far: The Divine Beast Dancing Lion, the Golden Hippopotamus, and Rellana, which I skipped because bleep that bleeping bleeper. (I define “story” bosses as the ones that block progress and/or have NPC summons available.) Otherwise I’ve mainly seen side quest bosses that drop loot I’ll probably never use. (I mean at character level 150 you’re not going to change your loadout much, right?)

At publishing time, I’ve played about 25 hours, reached level 158, and, more importantly, Scadutree Blessing 8 and Revered Spirit Ash Blessing 7, which is their alternate leveling mechanism in the DLC. As yet I don’t see any ending in sight, so it’s possible I will record more videos for this DLC than I did for both Lies of P and Lords of the Fallen.

I remain impressed at how open Elden Ring’s version of an open world game is. Most open world games actually put you on a railroaded story path through the open world, using level-gated quests. The “openness” is achieved by allowing you to do optional side quests now and then. In Elden Ring, you can go anywhere you want in any order, as long as you can find a path there (and survive), which is very rare in the “open world” space. (To be fair, even though From Software games are rich in lore, they aren’t really quest-based, so it’s easier for them.)

I added another of my world-famous game progress pages for the Elden Ring DLC which I will update from time to time.

In other news, I bought the Myst and Riven remakes in the Steam Summer Sale. Myst was a trend-setter. I played the original version, but I don’t remember how far I got (not far, probably, because it was way less exciting to play than Quake). Now, Myst isn’t terribly memorable. Otherwise the Steam Summer Sale was a non-event, as per usual with sales these days. A sale is about as rare and remarkable as brushing your teeth.

Media Production

Playing a new game (the Elden Ring DLC) means recording more videos. I had to plug another 4TB external USB drive into my gaming PC. At my current rate of video recording, I require two 4TB drives per year.

In the course of recording Elden Ring videos (and any other game, honestly), I’ve found that I don’t particularly want to record live commentary while I’m fighting a boss for the 5th, 10th, 20th, or 50th time and getting killed repeatedly by some random happenstance right before the end. (I’m looking at you, Rellana.) After the first few tries, there’s nothing to report, except, “Oh look, it’s yet another terrible Elden Ring boss fight design that makes me crazy. Did you see that move the boss did just then that was complete and utter cheating b.s.? Oh gee I randomly lost my target lock again.” So after five tries (or less, sometimes), I just end my commentary and put on a YouTube podcast or something to distract me while I mindlessly churn away at the bosses.

Eventually I’ll beat those bosses, but I end up with a piece of video with no commentary. So I worked out a way to easily load videos into REAPER and record a quick overdub of post-game commentary. That’s the big media production innovation this time around. Once I have a “remixed” commentary audio track, I can put it in the directory with the video files, and my post-processing rendering scripts will pick it up and mix the new commentary track with the game audio.

In the past, I’ve taken the 50 boss fight attempts and edited them together into montage videos, but I’ve been lazy and haven’t been doing that this time. I just show the first, say, five attempts where I figure out what the boss is all about, then I just cut to the last, winning attempt. It’s just easier that way.

Television

I fell into a rabbit hole of watching new-to-me episodes of Penn & Teller’s Fool Us on The CW streaming. Penn & Teller are heroes of my generation. (Though it turns out they’re actually quite a bit older than I thought they were.)

I’ve secretly wished I could perform magic tricks for most of my life, so I find it a fascinating subject. I grew up watching David Copperfield specials and then Penn & Teller came along and blew the doors off of everything.

Movies

I spent the July 4 holiday watching movies: The Beekeeper, No Time To Die, The Wall (2017), Asteroid City. I commented on them in various microblog posts. The main point that neatly encapsulates cinema in this moment: The Beekeeper is a pretty awful movie in almost every department, but somehow it got a 92% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.

Audiobooks

I’ve been listening to Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat series. They are short books, and short audiobooks, read by someone named Phil Gigante. He does a decent job, although his interpretation of Slippery Jim DiGriz doesn’t quite match my head canon. (Ugh I used “head canon.” There are certain cliche fandom phrases that I try to avoid using and that’s one of them.) He doesn’t even pronounce DiGriz the way I do. Anyway, these are some of my favorite science fiction comfort books, and, in my mind, established the bar (way back in the 60s!) for the sarcastic first-person narrative that all of us bloggers use today.

World Context

As yet I don’t know what to replace TweetDeck with for news.

• The UK General Election saw a landslide victory for Labor, which I think is roughly equivalent to the extinct Democratic center-left here in the U.S. Also some gains for their version of the crazy right-wing party far to the right of the Conservatives. I can’t think of any way to use that information to prognosticate the U.S. election, because the political landscape is so different here.
• Hoo boy the Biden Buzz is heating up after that debate. I’m genuinely curious what will happen now, because it’s probably going to be something I’ve never seen before. However, after spending the last eight years watching the Democratic Party self-destruct with continuous own-goals, and the Republican Party self-destruct with non-stop demagoguery, I remain steadfast in my conviction that it’s impossible to imagine a non-farcical outcome to this election, or how the U.S. could ever return to a time when it had functioning political parties. We citizens are left hunkering down in our figurative bomb shelters trying to avoid all the madness.
• Speaking of hunkering down… surprising literally nobody in the normalized, rhetorically apocalyptic climate of American politics, there was an honest-to-gosh assassination attempt on Trump. (I didn’t hear this news for two whole days, and I’m grateful for it, because it would have ruined my weekend.) As if we didn’t have enough political conspiracy theories, I have no doubt the unsophisticated masses will now start inventing new ones.
• Ongoing Trainwrecks of the Year: 2024 Presidential Election, War in Israel (since 10/2023), Nigerian Coup (since 7/2023), Sudanese Civil War (since 4/2023), War in Ukraine (since 2/2022).

Have fun storming the castle!