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submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by alessandro@lemmy.ca to c/pcgaming@lemmy.ca
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[-] darthelmet@lemmy.world 34 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

I’m working my way through it now. They’re not really much different from the main game. The problem is the bosses in the main game were also pretty frustrating. A lot of absurdly long attack chains where it’s hard to read when you have an opening. Delayed attacks you have to memorize the timing for. Attacks where the enemy either dashes or stretches their model an absurd distance to hit you so it’s hard to get away from them or gauge distances. Damage values that will kill you in a few hits even with high health and armor. Attacks that start and execute so fast that anything with a cast time gets punished.

Outside bosses we have the enemies behind half the corners, we have platforming sections in a game that doesn’t really support that, etc.

I’ve always like their games in spite of a lot of the flaws. The level design, world building, atmosphere, weird writing, etc all are still great and what draws me to the games. In what in what other games can you see: bald scam man, onion man, sunny d man, “dip head in wax”, rolling lightning goats, doot doot boat ghost, etc?

But it feels like in terms of gameplay design it’s kind of stagnated. A lot of the same design patterns for difficulty plus the pressure to keep making the game feel hard to people who have played all their games before has led to them stretching their design about as much as they can. In my first play through of Elden Ring for the first time I gave up trying to play my usual Ooga booga strength build in favor of that stupid comet azure magic combo to just anihate the bosses rather than deal with their bullshit. And in previous games I happily smashed my face against things like Nameless King or Madam Butterfly and Dancer well before I was supposed to fight then.

I think at this point I just want to see FROM do some different things. Sekiro was a nice mix-up on the basic formula and while it wasn’t really my cup of tea, Armored Core 6 felt like a breath of fresh air. The mainline souls style games feel like they’re trying to keep linking the fire over and over.

[-] slumlordthanatos@lemmy.world 17 points 6 months ago

Let's not forget how blatantly the bosses read your inputs. FROM bosses have always done this, but it's never been so obvious; it kinda breaks the "tough but fair" illusion.

My take is that since players have gotten so powerful, bosses had to adapt...but the only ways to make them stronger have upset the balance between "tough" and "fair". Hit boxes for attacks have gotten larger, which hurts readability; attacks that you used to be able to dodge now land, even though it didn't look like it. Bosses hit harder, combo their attacks, and they can even cancel into different combos now.

All of this happened because bosses are balanced around Spirit Ashes and the new insane weapon arts. It's harder than ever to SL1 the game, because if you don't have a good Ash summon or a crazy weapon art or didn't grind for upgrade materials, main quest bosses are stupidly hard. If you did do all of those things, they're almost trivial.

It's weird. The bosses used to be the highlight of Soulsborne games, and now they're the worst part because they're just not fun anymore. Dragonlord Placidusax is my favorite fight, and it's not even close. I either trivialize my way through the rest, or just wanted them to be over. The satisfaction of fighting a worthy opponent is gone, because it's almost always just unfair for the player, or unfair for the boss.

[-] darthelmet@lemmy.world 13 points 6 months ago

Yeah that's basically how I felt. It was binary. The game was unfairly and frustratingly hard when I was trying to play fair and take the game on its terms. And then when I went to cheese everything it was so trivial that it felt empty. Sometimes I think about going back to the game to try to get the "real" experience, but then I remember the frustration and just can't bring myself to do it.

Although part of my reluctance to replay the game has less to do with boss difficulty and more to do with the repetitiveness of the open world. Without the sense of exploration and discovery you get on the first playthrough, the world becomes a checklist of places you need to go to grab stuff for your build with little desire to go replay the other content because so much of it is copy pasted filler. Even going through the DLC now, with it being smaller in scope than the full game, but still pretty huge, I'm already seeing a lot of repeat content.

As much as I appreciate the attempt at putting a twist on the formula, I think the open world was a net negative for the game. The flaws in the reward systems of the previous games were exacerbated by the structure which led you to explore all the boring repetitive stuff on a first play-through because you don't know if the thing you need might be in catacomb #20 and then on subsequent playthroughs you just skip vast parts of the game which aren't relevant to you.

It also just doesn't seem like they have the content output necessary to fill an open world with content that is of a comparable level of novelty and quality to what we'd come to expect from their level design. There's a good dark souls game in Elden Ring, it's just that it's spaced out and everything in between is padding.

The funny thing is, despite all of that, Elden Ring is still one of the top 3 open world games alongside the 2 Zelda titles. But I think that says as much about the state of the industry and genre as much as it does about the skill of FROM's and Nintendo's designers.

[-] Maalus@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago
[-] domi@lemmy.secnd.me 9 points 6 months ago

A lot of absurdly long attack chains where it’s hard to read when you have an opening. Delayed attacks you have to memorize the timing for. Attacks where the enemy either dashes or stretches their model an absurd distance to hit you so it’s hard to get away from them or gauge distances.

That's also my main critique with Elden Ring. There's so many spin to win enemies in the game that will just keep attacking for 10 seconds straight, it gets old so quickly.

I miss the slow and methodical attacks from DS1 and to some extent DS3. DS3 was already a lot quicker than DS1 but most attacks were really well choreographed so I didn't really mind. When an enemy pulled their sword back in DS3 you knew they were about to attack. In Elden Ring they will hold that sword back and hold and hold and hold and then after you rolled 3 times they hit you. It's almost impossible to read an attack on the first try, which feels really unsatisfying.

Not to say I don't like Elden Ring, I do. But out of all From games it's one of the weaker entries.

this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2024
114 points (90.7% liked)

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