Fair assessment. Though I’m not all the way through yet, I do know there is a massive amount of lore in the game, and a lot I’ve already personally read through in game. One big place a lot of people seem to miss with Souls games as far as the lore is item descriptions. Each item has a basic description, then a way more detailed description on a separate menu (PS5 you hit the square button to get the detailed description). The items you get along the way are a huge part of the lore.

Between that and talking to Gideon and a few others, I feel like I have a good baseline. I expect a lot more to come in the areas I’m about to tackle.

All that said: I’m a huge RPG fan and love a story-driven game. But that is not at all my motivation for playing any Souls game. It’s all about the gameplay; that super rewarding game loop that they have mastered.

Also doing Elden Ring, but I’ve also done every souls game up to it. This game is Dark Souls through and through, but with the open world and a few slight mechanical additions. Otherwise it’s the same.

The thing with souls games is the world kind of tells the story, and gives you bits and pieces to puzzle together along the way. The idea is to just do the damn thing and soak it all in along the way.

I’m about 60hrs in and also don’t totally know what’s going on, but can see more pieces coming together. But remember, souls games are very much journey over destination.

If you want to see a master class in environmental storytelling, though; play Bloodborne.

The UI or DE (desktop environment) is actually interchangeable no matter what diatro you’re on. But KDE is kind of moving ahead as the favorite it seems. The you have Gnome, which is what vanilla Ubuntu comes with… And that has spinoffs like cinnamon that come with Mint.

A few distros have really made the user experience pretty damn simple. I personally love EndeavourOS as it seems to be the best of all worlds for me personally. But for any of my non techy friends, I suggest or personally set them up with Mint more often than not Mint is a far better experience overall than Ubuntu in my opinion. But I greatly prefer the package manager (yay) in EndeavourOS.

Certainly a good solution, but the vast, vast majority of people would not even begin to understand what you said here in any level, much less implement any of it themselves.