DISPATCHES MARCH

Curse correction

Although I really like your magazine, I disagree with some of the opinions on your pages about cloud gaming. The Edge curse seems to have sealed Stadia’s fate and I’m sorry to see the harsh words about this cool gaming system from both your editors and readers. As a huge fan of Stadia, I enjoyed the convenience and simplicity of the service. I had no issues with the stream quality (I’m lucky to have a good network at home), and the business model was perfect – I mean, wallet-friendly – for my gaming habits. I just wonder what happened to the gamers? The players who were famously early adopters in the past now stick to physical media, wanting to play on actual hardware in their homes – and completely reject anything on the cloud.

I honestly don’t care what system runs my favourite games: I play on PS4, on my phone, and also on the cloud. The advantage of the latter is that you have access to games without any commitment or investment in expensive hardware. It happened with Stadia and also with Xbox Cloud – playing Immortality or Pentiment without buying an actual Xbox was a no-brainer for me, and another win for cloud games. I hope that the failure of Stadia will not dissuade Microsoft and Amazon from pursuing their streaming dreams, and I still believe it’s the future. If Steam once succeeded in convincing players that digital libraries are on par with physical media, sooner or later the same will happen to cloud gaming as well.

Zsolt Murányi

Was it the Edge curse that did it for Stadia? Or was it Google’s decision to not include a Netflix-style package of games in a cloud service with aspirations of being Netflix for games? Hmm, a real brainteaser, that one. Regardless, Stadia’s demise won’t kill off

Microsoft’s ambitions any time soon, even if cloud gaming still doesn’t yet fit with how most people want to consume games, including the majority of Edge readers. As always, we’ll keep open minds for the future.

Perfectly portable

I have been musing on the recent rumour that Nintendo has cancelled a ‘Switch Pro’ model and the ensuing dismay in some quarters that we are stuck with an ‘underpowered’ console for the next year or more. Until about a year ago I would have agreed with that sentiment. But since I purchased a new Xbox, I have adjusted my relationship with the Switch. For its first few years I played it almost entirely docked and saw it as my main (indeed, only) home console, which I would sometimes take on the go. Now I think of it as a handheld console I sometimes dock.

And I wonder if Nintendo has been on a similar journey in the five years since launch. If we regard it not as Nintendo’s SNES or N64, but rather as a Game Boy or PS Vita you can dock, then it reframes the debate around graphics and computing power. The fact that it is still shifting millions of units and that its games, despite technical compromises, continue to be immensely popular suggests that many others feel the same way.

So: an underpowered home console or an on-par handheld? I know this debate has been around as long as the Switch, but I increasingly find myself agreeing with the latter interpretation.

Joe Crook

Yep, while it feels frankly rude to play Xenoblade Chronicles 3 undocked, we use our Switch OLED almost exclusively as a handheld. Still, it might be time for a refresh; Steam Deck is getting perilously close to supplanting it in our affections.

“Playing Immortality or Pentiment without actually buying an Xbox was a no-brainer”

Turtle power

I must commend the developers of The Cowabunga Collection, whose Watch mode I have been enjoying. Having played games since the Atari era, I really enjoyed watching the Game Boy games. It’s a great document of how the medium has progressed.

I must admit, as I get older I tend to lose patience with difficulty spikes and don’t see games through to the end. And I think about all the skill and artistry that goes into making games that aren’t seen through to their conclusion. So thank you, Digital Eclipse, and here’s to more companies including Watch mode in their games. Kevin Turner

Ring out

In 30 years of playing games I don’t think I’ve ever been as dismayed by videogame journalism as when reading the panegyrics about Elden Ring throughout this year.

As far as I can tell, Elden Ring is FromSoftware’s seventh consecutive game in which a man with a sword jumps around in the dark. Yet we’ve been relentlessly bombarded with writing (propaganda?) telling us, without a shred of evidence, that Elden Ring is seminal, groundbreaking, landscape-shifting, a masterpiece, etc, etc.

Assertion without argument is merely fanboyism, and not a single argument has been advanced in any review to justify those glowing descriptions being applied to Elden Ring. I still don’t know what Elden Ring does that no game has done before, or what it does better than other games. Reading the reviews carefully, however, it seems that its epochal achievement is the ability of the player to run away from an enemy and go in the opposite direction in an empty field. Seminal, indeed.

Moreover, Elden Ring is fundamentally boring. Its cover art is boring; its title screen is boring; its menus are boring; its music is boring and has been done ad nauseam; it’s utterly humourless; and its art style is lifted from 20-year-old Lord Of The Rings films.

It seems to me that the thing that Elden Ring has going for it is that it’s a zeitgeist game. We’re living in an age of stale, dreary popular culture, where Superman’s suit in films is no longer allowed to have bright colours, and where Netflix produces a conveyor belt of dimly lit dross (it has a show called You that in one scene features characters talking in a library with bad lighting. Who has ever been to a dark library, I wonder?) – all made on the fallacious premise that darkness equals seriousness and quality. The Impressionist painters forever destroyed that premise, and Nintendo and others have done the same in the videogame industry.

Speaking of Nintendo: Elden Ring has been compared frequently – and, I think, lazily – to Breath Of The Wild, but they are two completely different games, and the comparisons simply aren’t justified. Nowhere is this more evident than when you hear their respective music; listen to

Breath Of The Wild’s Revali’s Theme and then tell me that Elden Ring comes close to Breath Of The Wild on any level, least of all in the depth of its artistry.

Another disturbing hint of fanboyism lies in the fact that minimal comment has been passed by reviewers on Elden Ring’s technical shoddiness. Criticisms are regularly levelled at other games over their graphics, framerates, load times and the like, yet Elden Ring can get away with having relatively dreadful graphics and little technical polish (I’ve loaded up the game many times only to see a bush pop up out of nowhere by my side, for example). In addition to this, the fact remains that regularly dying and having to sit through a loading screen is simply not fun.

And that word ‘fun’ lies at the very heart of my critique here. Not a single review of Elden Ring described the game as fun, and multiple reviews seemed to be bending over backwards to not have to admit that the game isn’t enjoyable to play. Indeed, in his assessment of

Elden Ring for The Guardian, Simon Parkin treated us to a sensational homily about what videogames are, without mentioning that they should be fun. So, then, games are now a place where there is no expectation of enjoyment. Let that sink in.

Ramsen Warda

The odd visual hitch? Sure. But humourless? Anyhow, if we were finding ourselves frustrated by having to sit through a loading screen because of regularly dying, we would simply not die regularly. But fair point about a lot of the telly arriving nowadays. There is simply so much of the stuff that surely there just isn’t enough talent available to make it all good. OK, let’s move on to something we can agree with a little more readily.

God of more

As I close in on my second month of playing

God Of War Ragnarök around other hobbies and my duties as a parent, I thought I’d write in to talk about games respecting your time. I’m loving a lot of what I am playing with

Ragnarök, but every time I pick up the controller I think to myself, ‘Was this necessary?’ The game feels to me like it really needed an editor. I almost got the platinum Trophy in the 2018 game, and I don’t remember feeling that once then.

One of the final straws came after doing a level with what felt like hundreds of small and trivial combat encounters followed by door puzzles, and Atreus said out loud, “Really? Another door puzzle?”

Almost every sequence feels double the length I would expect, padded out with meaningless enemy encounters and repeats of the same puzzles over and over. I’m loving the story, and the gameplay is great, but there’s just so much here that I feel I’m pushed to mainline the story and skip the side content. Sam Harrison

Last-minute winner

You always publish long letters. How about short ones? Poinpy = GOTY.

Daniel New

Yes, how about those? Have a T-shirt.