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What is the most addicting game you’ve played recently, what mechanic made it most addicting, and how do you feel in the midst of that mechanic?
I got back into Elden Ring a few months ago, fairly hardcore (lvl 1 challenge runs, etc.). The addiction didn't last too long, but it was pretty strong for a solid two months.
People say GRRM was just there to have his name on the tin for marketing, but I don't know how anyone literate can conclude this. The lore of Elden Ring has the most profound aesthetic depth I've ever seen in a video game, and that depth is simply not there in Dark Souls 3 or in Shadow of the Erdtree (the former felt like the Walmart version of Elden Ring, and the latter like the Hobbit compared to the LotR trilogy). To me it's clear the big-brain behind the magic is Martin himself, and, in his own words, "when the sun has set, no candle can replace it."
Mechanically, the game is challenging for casuals, but it's fulfilling to play well. The defining design principle is that actions should be deliberate and if you get hit, it is your fault, and there is something you as a mortal human (ie., not Serral) could reasonably have been expected to do to prevent it.
The challenge that baited me into learning the game seriously was "Can you beat the Tree Sentinel as a lvl 1 wretch?" It's available right from the start of the game, and at first it seems impossibly hard, but it actually isn't once you learn the fight. At first, you'll die over and over again in the first ten seconds, and the challenge seems like something only a demigod could do; but with a bit of practice, you start to notice that all the attacks have predictable behavior, and eventually, not only does it seem doable, it feels downright easy.
The story is not told in a traditional fashion, and if you wait for the game to tell you the story, you'll miss it entirely, because the game never does. Rather, you're expected to pay attention to the detail of the world by piecing together snippets of information you retrieve from item descriptions. This sounds annoying, and it is until you get used to it. But once you get used to it, you'll be like "huh, I wonder what that Shaded Castle is all about. I never paid any attention to the items or people there, I wonder if there's anything interesting?" And there is! (If you want to know, the guy who's supposed to be ruling the castle is a weak simp who's been booted out of his own palace, which is now ruled by a foreigner who threw all the beautiful artwork in the trash, and the entire place is now flooded in poison and overrun by screeching subhumans. Gee, what could the game have been trying to tell us? Everything in Elden Ring is like this, and you can absolutely waltz through the game without noticing any of it if you don't pay attention.)
Finally, Elden Ring is one of the only games I've ever played where I genuinely believe the team's visual designers are more cognitively gifted than its programmers. I don't mean the game is has Realistic Graphics, which I don't care about (I usually prefer stylized graphics to realism, e.g., the Persona series). I mean the visual design itself is absolutely stunning. For example, the Church of Vows is aligned such that when you look through the front, you see Rya Lucaria Academy, and when you look through the rear, you see the Erdtree, because at this church were married the leaders of these two factions to resolve a great war. Once again, you can play the game and be totally oblivious to this sort of thing; but the game is saturated with this sort of high-IQ, intentional design. It is beautiful, and I have the highest respect for it.
My biggest criticism is that the game is bad at explaining how to play. This was my first souls game, and at the start I found the mechanics frustrating and counterintuitive, and the game's hints are worthless ("Did you know you cannot ride your horse indoors?" Yes, thank you for that profound insight, now how do I use the skill in my right-hand weapon?). And even aside from that, there are a zillion small design issues and bugs. But these problems fade into irrelevance in the light of the glory the game achieves. Its heights are so high. It is the only game I've ever played that feels like it successfully transcends the middle class nature of video games and ascends to the same tier of artistic achievement as good literature.
The reason people say this is pretty simple, it's that Elden Ring's setting, to the DS veteran, mostly is just more of the same as has been done the last three times. It's just hard to really see Martin's stamp. You can of course claim that he has done it better, but this is quite subjective. There are a lot of arguments about that already, and everyone has their own opinion. ER is undoubtly a good game, but most of your post could be written equivalently for any DS game, including even the aesthetic design (well, maybe not DS2, as much as I think it is somewhat underrated) and, funnily enough, even Martin's quote. Partially for this reason I got bored with ER halfway through the game, though I'll certainly pick it up eventually again. As a DS veteran you just can't shake the feeling that you have already played this game 3+ times, with near-identical story beats, setting and mechanics.
I mean I tried Dark Souls after Elden Ring. I just don’t see it, man.
The collapse of a great society sentiment is there, yes, but the difference in depth and subtlety is the difference between a post on /r/collapse and Meditations on Moloch.
See, for example, this reddit explanation of the unique vertical level design of DS1. Imo none of the other entries, including ER, have done it quite as masterfully, even if they clearly were inspired by it. Which is fine; They have done other things better.
Edit: Btw, DS3, since you mentioned it, is probably my least favorite of the bunch. DS2 at least tried a bit more to do its own thing. DS3 returned to the roots, yes, but in the process feels the most like a rehash of DS1, but invariably worse since a copy never reaches up to the original. That's imo one of the reasons why ER was deliberately given a different name, marketed as something different and has at least some clear deviations in the design, such as the open world.
There is also the element in which, since the DS entries are explicitly intended to be different iterations of the same loops, makes them work together better than alone. See this post which in my view - despite me agreeing that DS3 is a weaker entry! - entirely misses the point of the DS3 design: By the time of this iteration, the cycle has been going on too long, the fire has been lit too often, so that the sacrifice has to be ever greater for but a sliver of the greatness achieved earlier. The message is clear: This time around, just lighting it yet again will not be sufficient. You have to find another way. It's deliberate.
Edit2: I also think, since, as you mentioned, a lot of the design choices are easy to miss & somewhat subject to interpretation, DS games are especially susceptible to the tendency to always like the first game of the bunch you played. You'll always be more willing to look into all the details, all the theories, etc. the first time around. The more you play, the more you tire of it, so you'll miss more and more on average.
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