Nobody needed to kill him. They just didn’t need to care especially whether he lived or died.

Which, to be clear, is no less damning an indictment of the system. Anyone in custody has their safety and wellbeing at the mercy of the legal system. Any death on their watch is unacceptable.

It didn’t, though. He didn’t lose an ounce of material support after he said, on camera, “take the guns first, go through due process second”.

The game does tell you this, pretty explicitly, in a note you can find in the Manse. Once you find that, it’s pretty easy to work out that you need to parry the only “attack” they have.

I saw all the messages about “you can’t fight, only run”, got to the Manse, and wondered if I’d missed something. Turns out, I had; I completely skipped all the Aged Ones without even realizing it. I had to double back and go out of my way to find the only threat in the entire area. Really deflates the tension.

Fun fact: if you try to cheese that boss from the nearby plateau where the boss can’t reach you, the basilisks will spawn up there as well. More of them spawn there than in the boss arena, in fact.

Or just stop pretending that the “open world” means anything. I don’t mind a game that has a bunch of branching, linear paths from the starting point. I do mind a game that has a bunch of branching, linear paths but pretends that it’s actually some kind of interconnected, open world.

Here’s a hot take: Shadow Keep is made worse by trying to cram three separate, linear dungeons in the same physical space. It just means each path has to keep making awkward allowances for the other two.

Worse, Shadow Keep (and the DLC as a whole) trains you not to try to plan any route beyond a micro scale, since several of the places you can see in your immediate vicinity are actually completely unreachable from where you are. They look like they’re nearby, but they’re part of a different area you can only access by traveling halfway across the continent and doubling back.

But the verticality doesn’t do anything. Cerulean Coast and Hidden Grave might as well be on opposite sides of the world, since there’s no way to get from one to the other.

And that’s true basically everywhere. Shadow Keep isn’t a large, interconnected dungeon. It’s three separate, linear dungeons that happen to overlap geographically. The bottom third of the map can’t be accessed from the middle third; you have to go almost all the way north and double back.

It makes the map an active detriment in trying to plot a general route, since the geographic proximity of two areas has no bearing whatsoever on how you actually get from one to the other.

Except that the key is completely unnecessary, and I didn’t even figure out it was supposed to be how you get to the verdigris discus until hours after I’d already found that talisman.

In fairness, who can keep track of the differences between Morgott, Mohg, Margit, Malenia, Millicent, Maliketh, Marika, Miquella, Miriam, Miriel, Midra, Messmer, and Moore, especially when at least two of those are actually the same person?

Or Rennala, Rellana, Ranni, Renna, Radagon, Radahn, Roderika, Rogier, Rykard, and Rya, especially when at least two of those are actually the same person?

Renna and Ranni are the same person, and it makes no sense for Ranni to introduce herself with a fake name when we have no context for either of them. Same for Margit/Morgott. Rya is also Zorayas, but at least it makes some sense for her to use a fake name, and she looks completely different when she drops her false identity.

Yura and Shabriri use the same model and are in fact the same body, but they’re different characters. Hyetta and Irina are visually indistinguishable, but they’re different characters and appear to have no connection to each other whatsoever. D and D are two separate characters with the same name (or at least they both go by their shared first initial).

And don’t get me started on Godrick/Godfrey/Godefroy. Two of these share a character model. Can you tell me which two, without looking it up?

Basically, names and faces are so unreliable in Elden Ring that I don’t blame anyone for giving up entirely on trying to keep them straight.

Your “reward” is basically just their drops and a (slightly) safer path through the area. I say “slightly” because I made it through to the Manse on what seemed like the obvious path and had to actively double back and go out of my way to find any of the Aged Ones. So I think they’re already slightly less of a threat than they were probably intended to be.

My favorite part is that part of that area supposedly requires the imbued stone sword key you can get early on. I have never found the gate that uses it, and I found the verdigris discus talisman anyway.

You’re only breaking the game’s mathematical progression, and if you can beat Dancer before you’re supposed to, then you don’t need the extra weapon upgrades that early anyway. You still have to back out and go fight the other lords to make any plot progression happen.

Because killing Dancer early doesn’t accomplish anything. You’re not skipping anything, you haven’t changed the order of main events in the game, and you barely get any extra rewards. All you get is access to a short, linear path that doesn’t go anywhere until you’ve done the stuff you were supposed to do first.

Let’s compare to DS2. In that game, you can claim the four lord souls in any order. You can get to the Shrine of Winter before you can open it, but the game very explicitly tells you why it’s shut and when you’ll be able to get to it. The Shrine of Winter is not gated behind a boss, it’s one of three paths out of the Shaded Woods crossroads, and the path dead-ends almost immediately if you can’t use it yet. If you can’t finish the area, then the game never wastes your time by letting you enter it, and it gives you two other paths that offer meaningful progression.

Now imagine moving the Shrine of Winter to the entrance to Black Gulch instead. This way, you can’t fight the Rotten until you’ve beaten Lost Sinner, Freya, and Old Iron King, even though you can do the other three in any order. If you try to go through the Gutter first anyway, because you don’t know this, then the game roadblocks you arbitrarily. All the time and effort you spend climbing down through that area feels like a waste. That path at the end of the Gutter doesn’t go anywhere else, so you have to backtrack (or warp out, since you can’t actually climb out of the Gutter otherwise).

Your “reward” for trying to do things out of order is a big stop sign at the end of a long path. That’s worse than just dropping the pretense and accepting a more linear structure from the start.

I also recently learned that they have consistently supported gay marriage and gay rights, even when those ideas have been very unpopular in Japan.

It makes it feel more linear, not less, by slapping you in the face with how much it’s restricting you. If the door to Dancer didn’t open until you were teleported into that room after killing the penultimate lord, then I would have no problem with it. But giving me half of a linear path and arbitrarily cutting it off because I haven’t ticked all the right boxes is bad, especially when it’s done in such a clumsy way.

Conservatives think the only purpose of power is to punish.

The first three areas you mention are all from the DLCs, not the base game. They’re also all entirely optional, since they don’t gate access to the main bosses of their respective DLCs.

Is it, though? It gets a lot of praise for being interconnected, but it sucks to actually play through. And the fact that you need to backtrack through it means it’s worse in both directions. The poison snipers who attack you on the way up cannot be allowed to respawn, for instance, because they’d be impossible to get past on the way down. So the challenge is also lessened on the way up, since you can just make a suicide run to kill one of them and have a permanently easier time on your next attempt.

The fact that the master key is basically a universally recommended item is not a point in Blighttown’s favor.

I’m just baffled as to why the game would let you fight Dancer and get to the area behind her early, just to slam the door in your face partway through and force you to beat every other lord of cinder first. Would anything actually change for the worse if you could fight the princes earlier?

There’s literally a locked door with a key that spawns on a body right in front of it, but only after the other lords are dead. If you play in the intended order, it seems entirely pointless. If you try to play in a different order, it’s unclear what you’ve done wrong. It feels genuinely bad, especially coming off the freedom of progression of DS2.

I feel like DS3 and Bloodborne get a ton of credit for innovations that started in DS2. Whether that’s part of the reason for DS2’s poor reputation or a result of it, I have no idea. DS2 is my favorite of the Souls games by a long shot, and I feel like it’s unfairly maligned.

Can you name two of them? I’ve only heard of the one, from 2014.

They are, yes. They regularly work with other animal welfare agencies like the ASPCA and the ALDF, plus the ACLU and the Center for Food Safety. Any case you’ve ever heard of where a major organization was sued over mistreatment of animals (or where a law against whistleblowing in the animal testing industry was struck down), it’s a safe bet that PETA was involved in breaking the story and funding the proceedings.

“PETA kills animals” is an astroturfing campaign run by the Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF), a lobbying and advertising firm representing the meatpacking industry.

There was one case in 2014 where two PETA employees were rounding up stray dogs and cats in a mobile home park, at the request of the park’s owner. They also accidentally captured one pet chihuahua (who had no collar and was not secured or attended) and euthanized it, along with the other strays they had rounded up. Every time you hear about PETA stealing and euthanizing pets, it is a reference to this single incident. The aforementioned CCF has been largely responsible for amplifying this event and tying PETA’s image to it for the decade since.

To the tune of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Nah, I wouldn’t think that. The people raising a stink over “Pizzagate” or whatever never actually cared about protecting children. They were just using “think of the children” as a rhetorical cudgel to attack anyone they didn’t like.

And all the genuine activists have been basically forced off the platform formerly known as Twitter by Musk’s awful policies, which have made the entire site a right-wing shithole.

If knowledge of a law is a requirement for breaking that specific law, then yes, the prosecution must prove that the defendant had that knowledge at the time as an element of the offense.

See, for instance, Cheek v. United States, which determined that good-faith misunderstanding of tax law can be used as a valid defense against criminal charges for misfiled taxes. This is because the criminal element specifically requires willful violation of tax law, and understanding is a necessary part of that willfulness. You can’t willfully break that kind of law if you genuinely believe you are following it correctly.