Feel free to replace “friends” with “anyone you know in real life” or even online groups you trust or are close with.
“They”:
and my own personal experience; most games I have bought in the past 10 years have been off of recommendations from r/gamingsuggestions before Reddit went to crap and Lemmy came into existence; and even moreso when it is a personal friend recommending things to me.
Mods, feel free to nuke if this feels too close to advertising or better-suited for [email protected] (my own community); I mean it more as a discussion piece but I don’t run the place.
EDIT: The “not” in the title is optional; I’m asking about both successful and failed recommendations.
This is kind of tangential to the question, but an incredibly irritating former friend would not shut the fuck up about Elden Ring for months after it came out and kept telling me to get it. I told him I didn’t like souls-like games and he said ER was “different” without explaining how. I still haven’t played it, even with recommendations from other people I trust. Same guy ensured I’ll never play Death Stranding, too.
I don’t understand why people keep saying Elden Ring is so different from Dark Souls, because it’s really not different at all. I say this as someone who enjoys these games: if your issue with Dark Souls was the base gameplay loop and not the map, Elden Ring will not fix that.
Both of these games are very well made, but they both cater to a special type of gamer.
Elden Ring being incredibly well designed as an introduction to souls-likes, it still has the mechanics and difficulty like most of From Software’s games, with slight variation. If you’re not a gamer who likes overcoming a challenge, the game is likely not for you.
Death Stranding I think is quite the unique game, but much thanks to its weirdness. It has a lot of curious elements to it, but its incredibly story heavy. With different difficulty options you can make it a very casual experience, but it can be quite slow at times still. If you don’t like several dozen hours of cutscenes, the game might not be for you.
I personally see Elden Ring as the second-most “Dark Souls” game after Dark Souls 1. It’s the first of the FromSoft soulslikes with an open world afaik, and while Dark Souls 1 doesn’t have an “open” world, exactly, everything is so well-connected that it feels like an open world to me.