conciselyverbose

They very clearly are ARPGs. Not all ARPGs are Diablo clones with isometric graphics and big showy splash damage.

What distinguishes souls-likes from other ARPGs with similar gear and stat mechanics is the fact that your skill level is a core element of progression. Carefully designed enemies define a souls like. Calling a game without them a souls like is like calling a game without realistic physics a racing sim. It doesn't matter what the developer's intent is. If your physics are arcade-y, you're not a racing sim. You're just a racing game.

I'll go with the Supreme Court pornography definition. If it feels like an indie game that's good enough for me.

I don't care if it's 3 people who did the work in a public library because they didn't have the capacity to rent a workspace or 3 people 100 layers of corporate ownership underneath a mega-corp. Did the small team's vision get executed with the only constraints being budget and creativity, or did it get dictated by someone else to meet some corporate goals?

But I will say, specifically in terms of awards, that removing anything with big bucks behind it at the time of development (and arguably if there were serious publishing resources after the fact) has merit, because it's so easy for money to corrupt the results.

Destiny 1 was so good, too. The gunplay is awesome. But the rest fucking tanked it.

I was also very interested in Sony doing the Last of Us Factions. It was a bunch of fun, unique game modes (with a weird meta "game" on top of it I ignored). All the reports that it was either set back or reworked or whatever because Bungie didn't think it was GaaS-ified enough fucking killed me. Now I don't know if I'll even be interested if it does happen.

Your morals wouldn't be changing.

Your behavior would.

That's kind of cool. I'd need to combine a lot of different sources to get a number, though. I use all of Libby and Hoopla from my library, a scribd subscription (sorry, everand, I guess now), Audible, and Apple Books to handle my audiobook needs (and more for ebooks, though I have less time for that).

I haven't done the math on "value" read, but I do 15-20 hours of audiobook (because 2x speed) on work days. It definitely can make finding new reads a challenge.

The defining trait of the genre is polished, deliberate combat.

Without that it's just a generic ARPG.

Better than you'd expect, because most of the power draw on most Android devices is the screen. I'd recommend keeping airplane mode on when you aren't using it, because that's probably the next biggest, but on my Max it's generally pretty seriously long, both in terms of reading time and sleep. Admittedly that's a lot bigger, so a bigger battery, but I go through stretches of a lot to almost no activity, and it might be a month since I last touched it, just sitting on a shelf. I pulled it out at 25% just now.

The benefit of Android (beyond choosing your reader app for content you own) is that you can use other apps that don't give you DRM free content you can move around. Libby and Hoopla are two that many US libraries support that will allow you to borrow books entirely for free, I use scribd which is a paid subscription service for a different library of books, and other platforms for purchasing content that is locked down (I don't agree with it; but it's a reality), pretty much everyone relevant has an android app. Same with magazines, news, and sports content that's shorter but more time sensitive. And if you choose to pirate, you can do that right on the device as well in a lot of cases. After experiencing Android on an ereader (even though I can't stand it on a phone), there's very little chance I buy one with anything less again. It takes some tweaking here and there, but there's just too much I would have to give up to go back.

Absolutely not.

Games as a service has never once resulted in high quality, well designed and polished content. The incentives are too broken. It is not capable of doing so. The model inherently removes the time required to do the bare minimum.

If every frame isn't carefully considered, it is not a souls like. The entire definition of the genre is built around deliberately approaching enemies that are extremely polished mechanically. There are some cases where the windows to act are small, but if you're frame perfect, you will always win. Games as a service effectively guarantees that there isn't time to ensure that consistent behavior, making it something entirely different.

Learning enemies is the core gameplay loop of a souls like.

Content churn is antithetical to everything the genre stands for.

No. It's a weird article saying that having a continued development roadmap is a bad thing. Apparently they think interacting with the community and trying to continue to make the game better is the same thing as games trying to continually monetize an audience with churn.

A phobia is defined by being irrational.

Simply being terrified isn't a phobia if you have a valid reason to be terrified.