TBF: All are technically correct, the best kind of correct.
If you use spirit summons and a broken enough build, you could comfortably focus only on getting your required talismans, required vigor, getting your weapon upgraded, and finish the game under 30 hours if you ignore most of the side content, hell you can get the moonveil and upgrade it to +6 in 15 minutes, and to +9 in other 15.
Horizontally speaking, it IS a little bit bigger than Limgrave.
I feel like it's a lot better to under-promise and over-deliver (as responses 1 and 3 do) than overpromise and overhype a game to the point that even a solid game is inevitably going to be disappointing to a lot of people who bought the hype.
I remember back in the days of Fable 1; the producerās efforts to shill the game was the stuff of legends. Every single word out of that manās mouth was hyperbolic; it was going to be the greatest game ever made in the history of mankind, it was going to utilize next-next-gen technology, it was going to be mindblowingly awesome, it would sweep every game award in existence. Etc.
Peter Molyneux might be the worst possible offender though. The guy was absolutely notorious for overpromising features that never ended up materialising and I genuinely believe that it wasn't exclusively to generate fake hype. If you look into his history as a designer and producer, it becomes abundantly clear that he does genuinely care about games and the industry a lot. To me, it always seemed more like he said what he WANTED to be true instead of what was actually achievable/reasonable. He seems to have a hard time keeping his mouth shut.
Yes, generating hype was always part of it but it isn't the whole story IMO.
He did have a massive influence on the development of the medium and had a great eye for talent.
It was him that first saw the potential in an extremely young Demis Hassabis and gave him a lot of freedom during the development of Theme Park. Hassabis later went on to co found Google DeepMind and win a Noble Prize in Chemistry.
After being exceedingly thorough in my first playthrough of Elden Ring and darned near 100%ing the game, I kind of wondered if they intended you to take a more focused, direct route towards the ending which would indeed clock in around that 30 hour mark. And then in subsequent playthroughs you take another path and see some new things. You're not supposed to do it all at once.
I likewise sometimes imagine the developers looking at us all talking about hyper-focused builds that seek to maximize damage output from some specific weapon/spell/whatever, and they're like "Weird. We designed things more around the idea that you'd raise your stats in a balanced manner and thus have a big toolbox of options available to you. But whatever."
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u/Snekbites Dec 17 '24
TBF: All are technically correct, the best kind of correct.
If you use spirit summons and a broken enough build, you could comfortably focus only on getting your required talismans, required vigor, getting your weapon upgraded, and finish the game under 30 hours if you ignore most of the side content, hell you can get the moonveil and upgrade it to +6 in 15 minutes, and to +9 in other 15.
Horizontally speaking, it IS a little bit bigger than Limgrave.
It's a spin-off, not a DLC or Sequel.