Join Rob, Ren, and Patrick as they answer listener questions submitted to Patrick's new "question bucket google form." Have you ever wondered if Patrick's ever had hypothermia? If Rob would rather spend a life at sea or a life underground? How about if Ren likes power tools or hand tools better? Get the answers to all these and more on this mailbag episode of Waypoint Radio!
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bvn95a/the-waypoint-radio-crew-answers-your-questions-live-on-twitch
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Aw, don’t make fun of Ren for having a story and personality and roleplaying trajectory for her character. That’s play! If it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t enjoy the game, or a lot of games, half as much.
Ren mentions how wild and varied Faith is in Elden ring, and I think that’s really one of the most important parts of understanding what makes Elden Ring distinct from other From games and, honestly, distinct from most other media produced in our culture. Elden ring presents a genuinely polytheistic universe. Truly different metaphysical and embodied philosophical forces exist in tension. Some occupy different positions than others, some(but not all!) of them are limited by history and contingency, some are more similar than others, but they are deeply different and plausibly any of them might next be ascendant.
Dark Souls presents a hegemony in decline. Bloodborne presents a naive world encountering an alien divinity. Sekiro presents an essentially ecological system being exploited. Elden Ring is multipolar, fractally multipolar, with divisions within divisions and affiliations across divine borders. There is no hegemony, despite several attempts. There is genuine competition, genuine choice, not a question of two poles or of opposition and support. It’s not only unique among From games for doing so, it’s part of a depressingly select group of modern media period. New Vegas, incidentally, is another.
We exist in a centralized bureaucracy, a monotheistic society, and a hegemonic empire. Devolution, independent radicalism, a mutually independent and alien other, definition outside of rather than in relation to the center, not acknowledging a center at all, giving sacrifice to one god and then another and the enemy’s god as well as the foreigner’s - these are modes of thought we are not trained in, and modes of thought desperately necessary. Elden Ring touches them, and it’s key to understanding what makes it special. Choose your gods, your gods, in this world, and know what divinity is.
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