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Without having played a lot of God of War, there are a number of crucial diferences between those games and Dark Souls games - in Dark Souls you can play an absurd number of custom, fine-tuned builds around different stats, weapons, spells and completely unrelated playstyles. You can also make different choices that lead to radically different paths, with different interactions and different ways to deal with situations - you can join or destroy factions as you see fit, and you can even decide whether the world is saved or goes down in flames as you traverse its landscapes and reach the ending.
Now I get that some people around here have a pet peeve with Dark Souls, but comparing it to a game like God of War is quite diminishing (kinda insulting, really), in the same way it is to compare Fallout or Bioshock to Call of Duty, and saying both are "basically a shooter".
I have no issue with Dark Souls, I even like it overall. I think the purpose of the debate was just to see where the line is. How many stats/weapons/builds/playstyles or how much exploration/freedom does there need to be for something that isn't an rpg to become an rpg. Because surely that's just an arbitrary line.
I guess this goes back to the idea of it being very difficult to describe something. You think you know what something is when you see it, but can't really abstract a set of hard rules for it.
There is a certain amount of defensiveness to this discussion. But I do wonder why that is. It feels like it's about demeaning something just because you place it in the same category as something less than. Which is weird, since theoretically everything is part of the broadest category of "things". But I guess there's enough of a distance there, between those "things".
- Joined
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