Gamers have become conditioned to love every single erosion of integrity from the medium all while making excuses for it in their minds and to others. And their money conditioned devs. If you for a second think that these companies wont get away with it ur fooling yourself

DS3 also being more of a game that relies on fundamental skill might be why the map for it never sticks in my head lol (despite putting in 90 hours)

Getting stuck causes players to explore the world.

Dying causes players to think about what they're doing.

An "impossible" situation causes players to learn how the game works and eventually achieve the impossible.

We need to be able to design *some* games around these fundamental ideas.

It’s been the best teacher

Just last night for the movie, back in CT now

We may have just missed each other at the same theater

I remember 15 years ago being like "... I wanna make a metroidvania... but with combos" and thank god a bunch of people got there first to make me realize "actually no I absolutely do not."

Its so superficially alluring to tack combos to stuff but we have YEARS of it mostly being lame to learn from

On the other hand, when you remove genre conventions & make them unacceptable via homogenization, not only does this remove the positive cultural bias & understanding of the mechanic as a language, it turns it into a swear word, which shrinks design space. Controls already suffered cuz of this