Tag: brilliance
Best Of 2022: How Stormveil Castle Embodies The Brilliance Of Elden Ring
From the very outset of Elden Ring, if you proceed in the direction the game points you, you’ll arrive at the gates of Stormveil Castle. Upon first look, Stormveil’s crumbling battlements and crazed knights are well-known territory for Souls fans. However, its familiar features and foes are more than a rehash of the Souls games that came before it.
Stormveil Castle is a celebration of how far From Software has come since the days of Demon’s Souls. Sown with secret paths, missable foes, and brutal group-fights, Stormveil is not only a microcosm of Elden Ring, but also one of the best overall video game levels of 2022.
Guarded by early-game roadblock boss Margit the Fell Omen, Stormveil is clearly intended as a lengthy tribute to the first world of Demon’s Souls, the Boletarian Palace. Besides the obvious visual similarities, certain sections of Stormveil are seemingly ripped directly from Demon’s Souls–particularly the part where you navigate the castle wall’s narrow footholds and explore a broken wall rife with exploding barrels and winding staircases. The inner courtyards also bear an undeniable resemblance to the later levels of the Boletarian Palace, especially in the open stretch before you hit the ultimate boss of the level, Godrick the Grafted.
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Amazon’s Lord Of The Rings: The Rings of Power is great, but the games need to reach PS2-era brilliance again
It’s been over 20 years since we first set off from The Shire with Frodo and Sam on their quest to destroy the Ring of Power, and despite a series of lacklustre Hobbit films doing their best to extinguish it, the passion still burns hot as the fires of Mount Doom for that quintessential trilogy of fantasy epics. In the times before and since those releases, with the exception of Tolkien’s other literary works, fans have relied heavily on video game interpretations to continue their direct relationship with the characters, settings, and stories of Middle-earth and the One Ring.
But, after a series of spin-offs and non-canon additions slowly boiling the purity of the IP down to directionless mediocrity, it’s critical that future iterations endeavour to recapture the familiarity and emotion that comes with being part of something that you believe in before it’s even begun. That’s right — I’m talking about movie tie-ins. Look, you might scoff, and I wouldn’t blame you for doing so considering tie-in history, but Electronic Arts mastered this in the early noughties with their direct film-to-game releases of The Two Towers and The Return of the King, and it’s about time that we reached for the same dizzying heights of success.
A lot of the complication revolves around licensing, and we don’t want to get too bogged down in that. But to summarise, The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and the rest of Tolkien’s works fall under an extremely complex network of rights that gives even Goldeneye a run for its money. But the fundamentals can be worked out when it comes to game development. The Tolkien Estate, at one time, held all the rights to all of Tolkien’s works. Over time, these rights have changed hands and have been split into different sections, ultimately resulting in Lord Of The Rings and The Hobbit falling under one banner, whilst the rest of his works (such as The Silmarillion and The Unfinished Tales) fall under another.