Destructoid Checkpoint: The Soulsborne Conundrum

This week, we explore the type of media that springs up around games and gaming. Adaptations, additions, alterations. They are all wonderful things when done right and can help any game last longer than it would have, both as product and art.

The Soulsborne Conundrum

As rumors swirl that Alex Garland’s Elden Ring movie is under production with A24, it leads me back to a mental exercise I have always enjoyed performing, which is figuring out exactly what a Soulsborne adaptation looks like. 

By and large, video game adaptations have to drop most of the things that make them a game in order to tell a story as if it were taking place in real life. They don’t let characters in Mortal Kombat load back in for the next fight, nor do they allow Mario to pop back in from the other side of the screen after a mis-timed jump in the Super Mario Bros Movie. 

Yet, for Elden Ring and many other Soulsborne games, that idea of dying and coming back, of inching forward and getting squashed by something that you only ever learn to sidestep because it kills you is not just a key element of the game, it is hardcoded into world as a thing your character does, accepted within the world, often as a part of the very rules that marked your as Tarnished, Ashen, Chosen, or any other honorific the narrative bestows upon you.

I’ve written before about how FromSoftware has fun with the idea that game difficulty will cause people to stop playing, quitting their efforts to wrestle the main character over a number of morally dubious finish lines, and how this mirrors the endless failures of all “Not Heroes” in the game. All those little signs on the ground from other players grow to mark their failures, mere footsteps on the road in an attempt to marry your real-world efforts with the unfolding narrative.

It’s fun, it’s funky, it causes a product to transcend to art, and it’s not something that is even remotely possible in a movie.

Don’t get me wrong, movies are wonderful, and I love them dearly, but the lack of interaction in a meaningful sense, and the inability to truly play with those lines and how they impact and reflect narrative, just makes it hard to do what a good Soulsborne game does.

What makes me excited is that Garland has a history of showing that he knows how to take something that many would consider too complex for adaptation and make something work, and  I am specifically talking about Annihilation. Based (somewhat) on the first novel of the Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer, it understood what it needed to let go of to be a successful film. 

I’m not mad at the liberties that adaptations take in order to make their film or TV version of a game or book work. Quite the opposite. If you try to cling to too much, then the entire project can sink. Perhaps my concern about that meta-narrative in Elden Ring is something that Garland has already decided does matter to his version, and perhaps that is exactly what will make it work. 

It’s fun to think about and talk about how these projects might play out, but drawing any firm conclusions before even getting to see the finished article seems like a mistake to me. I’m eager to see what Garland and his team cook up for the Soulsborne loyalists, and how that gets married to something approachable enough for a broader audience. 

Cyberpunk’s official trading card game is a monster

I don’t often get to talk too much about the tabletop world here, but this is a nice tie-in to our usual digital focus. Cyberpunk is getting an official TCG, through CD Projekt Red and Weird Co. It has had an insane run on Kickstarter, sitting just below $20 million with six days to go on its campaign. 

One of the standout issues about this campaign is how fair it is being, and the steps that it has taken to scupper any efforts to scalp the game. First, everything is printed as needed. There is no upper limit on the run. If you back a product, you get the product. This means well-funded scalpers cannot back up huge volumes and hoover up too much of the available decks and boosters. This has been a problem with other TCGs that used Kickstarter in the past, and it is good to see it is being avoided here. 

There is also a hugely high-value Beta Box that will be available to all at a certain level, in this case, the Netrunner Starter Kit, and that box will be absolutely filled with Epic Rare illustration variant cards. Oftentimes, campaigns will use cards like these to force people to buy more packs for the chance to get them, but for this game, all you need to do is decide if you wish to invest at the right level, and they are guaranteed. The cards are not being added to deck pools; they are just going straight into your Beta Box. The Beta Box also includes items like a playmat, some metal cards, and card sleeves.

The bigger question is how this game survives over time, and mostly it does so by having rewards like these at an appropriate price point. It might sound crazy, but too many games annihilate their own futures in the campaign stage by inflating the value of cheap tiers way beyond what is reasonable to maintain, then instantly need to turn around and Kickstart again.  

Cyberpunk has long been my favorite tabletop roleplay playground, and I’m eager to see what becomes of this card game over time. Can it stand with the titans, or will it fall by the wayside?

What’s happening, Destructoid?

Kyle Ferreira has been spending some time with The Guild series, and has been having a good time. - “It feels rough around the edges. Some of the features feel half-baked, and some of the businesses are truly awful to run. Sometimes the stock rules in your businesses work fine, and sometimes they don’t. There’s a fair bit of frustration in your average playthrough. That said, there’s nothing quite like it out there. Some games come close, but The Guild 3 is a truly unique playthrough you won’t get anywhere else, and for that simple reason, I think most folks should experience it at least once.”

Andrej Barovic has been keeping an eye on Crimson Desert, and while the game certainly has some issues, post-launch support isn’t one of them. - “While the game launched to some controversy, its developers have been so punctual with updates that there is barely any bad blood between them and the players anymore. Even those in the broader gaming community who screamed at the top of their lungs that the game is rehashed trash are now silent. Numbers keep increasing, review scores keep climbing, and Parl Abyss continues to earn more and more respect, even from CD‘s biggest naysayers.”

Scott Duwe has been playing Samson, and it is definitely a video game. - “From the original creator of Just Cause, Samson feels like an attempt to revive the vibe of these digestible crime-driven action games with some pretty cool ideas, but poor execution within makes it feel like not much more than a missed opportunity.”

And that’s it for this week!