Agree entirely. The point that irks me the most is about the netcode. There is no logical reason you should take status buildup when the game realizes you took no damage.
It is absolutely unacceptable to design for local publication, when the parameters of your design demand a global approach. Peer to peer should have been tossed out in the initial parameters for this game, but sadly here we are, trapped in a hell-scape of bad user experience.
@@campernocamping1 P2P is fine if it's Rollback netcode optimized to be like GGPO, which Japan has only recently started to adopt. Souls game use Delay* based netcode, which shouldn't be used anymore as it can't work over long distances. * well, it looks to be more what Tekken 7 does, which is use rollback tech to emulate delay... which is even more silly. and i suspect is the source of all the weird interactions
It's HELLA upsetting watching all the great pvp potential go to waste...I'm still salty that the OPEN WORLD souls game was cut to 4 players when the much Smaller gamers had 6
I mean, you kind of answered your own question there. Fromsoftware has never been incredibly tech savvy with their engine, so making the game bigger ultimately meant sacrificing player count. It's easier to sync more players in a smaller game.
I don't know why so many people are dismissive of the fact souls PvP COULD be good, I mean what would be taken away from the game if they just had more polished multiplayer interactions at the very least? Why are so many people against the idea of people just being able to do souls PvP????? Also this video was very well narrated and I can tell you are very passionate about this subject
I don't think there's anyone that doesn't want netcode fixed, I think people are just scared of balancing for pvp, making the pve experience worse. I really think they should have separate balancing on items and stats. That should alleviate the fear
@@aiellamori Really dont see that concern either, as it stands in fact I would say PvE would benefit too from not being 1-2 shot by later game bosses. But also for some people thats the entire challenge. And you dont play with 1 build or item across every PvE run so not much it would be ruined by balancing. Or is this a really roundabout way of saying people dont want to lose the ability to BHS
@@aiellamori except it doesn’t. You’re asking a company that can’t even make their games run properly over a course of 10 years to now split the development team to focus on PvE and PvP. Now take into account the entire team can’t even make PvE balanced. Now take into account with just PvE being the main focus, PvP is still garbage on top of that. The community just needs to be honest: Dark Souls is a good series made by a low grade studio that has shown time and time again that they either refuse or simply can’t handle AAA development. You’re simply asking too much of them.
@@WeinerTouchy whatever you wanna say man, I'm not even trying to defend anything, I just know why some people would not like sweeping balance changes that reduce the usefulness of stuff to 0
Yep, two months of waiting. I was hoping it was going to be a big balancing patch that would deal with some of the trash in this game and instead they did almost nothing. For those of us on PC we can't even go back to play DS3 either since the servers are still down like half a year later.
@@olorinhaha6073 Fuck, I was just wondering if DS2 was worth a quick dip in PvP but I guess that kills that. Shit that really makes that whole Elden Ring PvP thing even worse, I had no idea this was our ONLY SOURCE OF PVP this entire time.
It does, but we don't know if the proportion of loyal customers who are retained by pvp is greater than the number of potential customers who prefer pve. It seems that the pvp community is not growing (rather it is decreasing with ER), it's made up mostly of more or less experienced players who have been invading since at least one of the previous games, while we will hardly see many new players hooked by this current iteration. The pvp population does not increase, or increases very little, but the pve population has grown exponentially and it is to them that FROM will sell its products as a priority.
@@danielmontilla1197 I'm sorry but the entire reason that pvp players aren't as prevelent as pve players is easily correlated to the neglect to it's systems. I'm not suggesting that it would be of equal or greater proportions, but the disparity would be greatly reduced.
It's just painful. We all want it to be good. All of us who participate in PvP are willing to compromise a lot. But they keep taking from us. First it was solo invasions, then it was invasions at all, because you're lucky if you find them. And now, we've waited 3 months for a patch that did nothing but take away a tool to deal with something that now has no counters. We're taking more and more shit because we love this game. But how long until this game reaches an acceptable balance?
Not even that, but even co-operators often do wish the pvp was good because AT LEAST, in the cases like elden ring where opt out is not a thing, at least it'd make the interruption potentially enjoyable, but no, it's just not the case. I genuinely hope multiplayer mods like the co-op mod actually show fromsoftware that people do enjoy the souls multiplayer, but are largely unsatisfied with the treatment the company gives it.
Props to Best Souls 2 for being the only game without phantom status buildup, and all it took was a completely separate game engine. I often see people claiming that they don't care about the PvP, and that PvE shouldn't be "ruined" for PvP balancing's sake which is a pretty common sentiment - it's fine as it is, leave it alone, don't touch it and mess it up. Except the PvE in this game is broken as all hell. Flails and Axes both being so universally bad as a weapon class isn't a PvP problem, it's a PvE problem. More often than not the two are related issues. When the basic Club is literally just 15-20% worse in damage than any other hammer in the game, that's not just a PvP problem, it just becomes a totally useless weapon. There are so many others that are just like this, in so many other weapon classes - not even weapons that are obviously meant to be bad like the Broken Straight Sword/Hilt, just... random stuff that's worse than other weapons with nearly identical movesets. People aren't just asking for BHS to be nerfed because they're sweaty PvP nerds but because they believe it fundamentally breaks the game just like the game would be broken by a sword with 300 base damage. Between the broken OP weapon arts and the uselessly UP weapon arts going side by side, the dominance of dual wield status effects, and so much more - even two handing weapons is bad as Scott has made videos on before, you literally get like 3% more motion value damage over 1 handing and 10% more poise damage. Again compare this to DS2 where twohanding often had 20% motion value damage and the poise damage went through the roof. These are just simple changes, obvious changes, and it's insulting that From refuses to even balance the PvE experience that they clearly favor so much over their PvP, much less the actual PvP itself.
@@toastybatch565 I'm of the opinion that every weapon should be viable in some way. DS2 did many things wrong but being able to bash people with a ladle and for it to do fair damage was amazing. ER feels rushed like Ds3 was. Hope they do a proper balance overhaul because it seems like they've put less effort into PvP balance than even what they did with Ds3.
@@Day100 As from balances the difficulty by the choices the player makes, the purpose of the weapons isnt to be balanced. Theyre trying for pvp, which often results in less effective buffs against players and weapon arts that are easy to dodge, but in pve only broken stuff like swors of night and flame gets patched. How boring it would be if radahns greatswords would as strong/weak as a dagger.
You know this is an rpg and youre supposed to get the better stuff later on? Do you flame a jrpg for the basic weapon being weaker than the excalibur? Nonsense. Lategame weapons need to be far better (in pve) than the basic ones.
@@Stevemastersreason Then how come the Uchigatana, one of the starting weapons and one you can find in one of the first optional dungeons, is one of the best dex and bleed weapons? From games aren't like your typical RPG's, a lot of starting or basic weapons are viable all the way through, it's mostly items you find as enemy drops that might look good, but for some reason or other just don't have the performance you'd expect.
It’s a legitimate tragedy that Elden Ring PvP turned out so bad. I got into Dark Souls very late in 2019 and even with the stupid hitboxes and bad connections, covenant interactions in DS3 were some of the most fun I’ve had in any video game ever. Elden Ring’s combat mechanics set the game up to be the best PvP experience in the series but FromSoft has done everything in their power to reverse all the good decisions made over the course of the Dark Souls series and emphasize the broken aspects that were always aggravating to begin with.
Yeah, I think DS3 was the start of PvP getting killed off. They made invasions awful but put a bunch of effort into the dueling/arena stuff. ER just takes the next step - I mean it's basically just DS3 on juice.
@@monsieurdorgat6864 Invasions never flourished as much as in ds3, so i dnt understand your comment. Ds3 backstabs were fcking broken, rendering everything heavier than gs useless in skilled pvp.
Ds3 invasions got nothing on elden ring, over leveled phantoms almost always a 3v1 and all 3 do a billion damage with magic or aow then throw horrible connections or net code in there and yea not fun pvp when u have almost no chance unless u play perfect and get lucky with connection
@@Stevemastersreason bs weren't broken. Once I understood how it worked I got bs'd like a dozen times over 600hrs. New players who'd swing an ultra 2 times while their opponent is ten feet away staring at them are the only ones who suffered. Edit: what hurt large weapons in "skilled" pvp was they are outmatched by the existence of pkcs. In average invasions tho, their godly.
@@Stevemastersreason I don't think you'll ever understand if you think invasions flourished in DS3 lol. It was actually the game that got most of the old invasion community to quit. th-cam.com/video/Tgnsx3dgx1I/w-d-xo.html th-cam.com/video/noXPpneWOYY/w-d-xo.html th-cam.com/video/QcjJPUetr-0/w-d-xo.html th-cam.com/video/c9LteYl-I-8/w-d-xo.html th-cam.com/video/KDUnwfx0LNA/w-d-xo.html No one knew who ChaseTheBro or SaintRiot was until they filled the vacuum left behind by the old invasion people quitting and trying (sometimes failing) to become variety streamers. But people who aren't sweaty and actually enjoy fun wanted out of DS3 invasions.
Deathloop did it’s darnedest to introduce the invasion system to a Dishonored-style first person stealth shooter. I ended up playing the shit out of that for the like, one week before it entirely died. Way more than I played the real campaign. There were serious issues that will never be fixed cause the game just didn’t do that well, but hell if it wasn’t seriously good fun a lot of the time. I’d love to see more successful attempts at this type of multiplayer
I loved the PvP in that game. The amazing cat and mouse element to it felt so special and unique. Sadly matches took forever to occur and after a while you realize it’s just more effective to go in guns blazing with a shotgun.
@@thebimaker5814 Yup. Needed some tracking options to better deal with camping/hiding too, but the core idea was so much fun, especially with the powers. The matchmaking was just a result of the player count :(
I played it a month ago and got a lot of invaders, so maybe it got revived. However the connection was always really bad, and that really ruined it for me,
Problem that most devs don't want to tackle is that asymmetric PvP games very quickly become Prison Social Experiments, with divisive factions that genuinely hate each other. Scott remarked about this in DbD too - it's just a big issue with asymmetric PvP games.
@@monsieurdorgat6864 Fromsoft games feel like an extreme case largely because it's involuntary to be invaded most of the time. Don't get me wrong I feel like invasions help to balance the dip in difficulty that comes from teaming up, especially with high level phantoms but I can imagine a lot of people raging after getting deleted by bleed builds when they were just fucking about with their friends. And since there are more people co-oping there's naturally gonna be a larger group pissed off about invasions being a thing than those who are in support of them.
I would love to see PvP-centered covenants. That's the biggest thing that I missed from Elden Ring and I'm very curious as to why it wasn't added. There are tons of opportunities to add covenants and, hell, you run through the questlines for them: Bloody Fingers, Recusants, Lord of Frenzy... It would just be so easy to add.
Bringing back the blues of DS1 and DS2 (invaded the homeworld of a red) would offer morally just invasions, reds (who obviously want pvp) would get solo invasions, and co-op players would have less reds to worry about as some reds would switch to being blues. Literally everyone wins without messing with their design choices.
@@maudley lmao "morally just" invasions... You do realize most normal invaders invade into gank squads, right? I think your more salient point is opening invaders to be invaded solo. Nobody would complain about that, and opening up the invade-able player base without the Taunter's Tongue would be nice. That would make sense, but only if it was in the dungeons. Open world solo invasions would be almost impossible to implement correctly unless Fromsoftware got their shit together on synchronizing the horses. I have no love of ganks (I know DS3 fans love getting ganked), so my ideal solution would be to have the taunter's tongue only be usable without summons, and would only open your solo game to normal invasions, not infinite invasions. Ganks don't get their food, invader PvP people can play with each other more often, etc.
I'd be down for covenants if they were simply different matchmaking criteria. For the love of god, though, it would be awful if they blocked items behind covenant tiers. That was always a bad idea.
@@monsieurdorgat6864 You misunderstand me. Yeah, the bulk of overworld invasions are against invaders, most co-op players just summon at the boss wall, and it's even less likely with the co-op mod released, but being a red will always carry the possibility of invading someone who doesn't want to engage in pvp. It doesn't matter whether you or I agree with that point of view, they are part of the playerbase, so if we're going to unite the playerbase on anything like that we need to throw them a bone when we can, especially when it doesn't get in the way of anything else. Do you disagree? I came to the same conclusion regarding open world solo invasions. I think only having them through blue invaders may be a good way to handle it, but there may be more ways that they could be implemented without disrupting other player groups, like tying them to rune arcs. Perhaps both. Definitely needs more discussion. As for ganks, it's another valid way to play. I think the play is to give positive reinforcement for not scummily ganking rather than punishing them or taking out gameplay features recklessly like that. Perhaps there could be another way to avoid ganks, like tying ganking to a covenant? or just add blue invaders and design that around avoiding ganks. Does anything about that suggestion take away from your experience? If so we can work on it. If we can get some compromise going we could unite the community for the first time ever, and I think that's a worthy goal.
Thank you for addressing the elephant in the room. I'm new to Souls games and, as shocked as I am at Elden Ring's terrible PvP implementation, I'm even more shocked at how many OG Souls players reflexively defend it. We need more veterans like you calling it out, as whiny noobs like me are easily dismissed with a "git gud" drive-by. Keep it up!
can confirm. I created a build centered around poisoning the host and just running away and repeating and it was the most fun I had. so not fighting was the best experience Ive had fighting. go figure.
The big issue with veterans not calling this out is similar to Bethesda games. Everyone knows Bethesda games will have the build quality of something that was built with duct tape and string; you expect those games to be a buggy, glitchy mess, even on release. So when they release a new, buggy, janky thing, everyone's just like "oh Bethesda, you did it again, silly guys." We do the same for FromSoft games. Before buying, you KNOW for a fact that their PVP - while fun - will be horrendously unintuitive and complicated. And most people just say, "Oh silly FromSoft, you're always so bad at this." But because so many people just take that for granted, FromSoft never worries about the criticisms, because most hardcore players give them the pass.
This kind of mirrors the situation with traditional fighting games from japanese developers. It's common for them to have poor netcode, in part because japan is smaller and has better internet infrastructure than somewhere like the US. A lot of problems get solved for you when you can assume the network is pretty reliable and under a certain threshold of ping. Even then, they should still be aware of these core issues after so many years, so it seems like they probably just don't care enough to fix them.
Oh man, it nearly took the FGC to REVOLT to get some of these devs on the rollback netcode train. Japanese devs being stubborn is no joke. Tekken FINALLY put frame data in their game but they still made people an extra $4 for it.
This is the real answer. Souls multiplayer works great in Japan - you can go watch videos of it and see that their low latency makes it a lot more consistent and enjoyable. There's a menu option in the later games to segregate multiplayer pools into two categories: 'Japan' and 'the rest of the world.' It would take an immense fan effort to change this. FromSoft probably does not want to put in the effort and money to create the network infrastructure for better global multiplayer, and Miyazaki's entire vision for these games revolves around difficulty (including invasions) reinforcing the themes of the PVE experience, not being a dedicated competitive PVP system.
Japanese developer. That's all you need to know when you wonder why something in obvious need of change doesn't change. In a Japanese company nothing changes until someone at the top makes it a priority.
I lived in Japan for two years and it is true that on average the internet speeds in Japan are very good. The various multiplayer games I played while living in Japan had no lag at all. However, From Software games are played by people all over the world, so they need to have dedicated servers and invest more in multiplayer. Please improve the netcode, Miyazaki-san!
It's exactly that the problem. I play final fantasy xiv, and some jobs are actually impossible to play at high level if you don't have low ping. But square enix doesn't give a shit because japan players have basically 0 ping, so for them the game is flawless. Japan devs just don't care about anything outside their country
It's not just the PvP, not just the invasions being bad. Every other aspect you can think of, there's a problem; one good concept or mechanic for each bad one. And the interesting things that could be built upon in the next game is dropped instead. It feels like Pokemon of all things. For instance: Covenants. Introduced in Dark Souls 1 and it had neat ideas, like receiving increased power for certain spells by indulging more in that covenant. Then Bloodborne released and pretty much disregarded all of that; instead it focused more on having feuds between each Covenant, so even if you're summoned as a co-operator, you could become an adversary instead, a really neat idea that could've also been developed further. Instead, with Dark Souls 3, the only covenant that has that potential is the Mound-Makers, and even then you're better off aiding other covenant invaders or standard Black Phantoms, because if you kill them, the Host and their Cooperators will run you down much more easily. Elden Ring removed the consequences of covenants (of which there were few) and it's just as Demon's Souls was, with Blues that can come in to rescue hosts. Fromsoft could've instead followed through with Dark Souls 2 (Covenant of Champions) and Bloodborne (Lumenwood Kin and Blood Beast runes), and made covenants an actual important pact, with upsides and downsides, as well as PvE impact. But no, instead we got watered down mechanics with Elden Ring. They could've reworked World Tendency into something more pallatable, because it's a really interesting concept, but no. They could've introduced Wex Dust to at least make it more easier to find matches when the online population dies down, but no. They could've added back the Small White Soapstone to help random players with specific encounters (think Lansseax or runebears in the Mistwood), but no. They could've added perfect blocking, which is a skill-based mechanic, that could be used against every single enemy, instead of considering the parry the same thing, which can only be used against a relatively small amount of enemies, but no. They could've done so, so much, so many things that they have already done before, and have seen the community want, ask, and do before, but no. From Software would rather make a very simple but very safe game with a lot of audiovisual appeal in order to appeal to a wider market, rather than doing their best, using all the knowledge they've learnt over more than a decade, and making something daring yet excellent. It just feels like a cash grab - a great game, to be sure, absolutely - but somehow not as impactful as previous games. I was hoping that Elden Ring would've been that something daring yet excellent, due to its longer development cycle and apparent higher budget. I still hope that it can become that something with updates, but it doesn't seem likely, due to From's history. And I still hope that Elden Ring raised enough revenue as to finance a new game, one that can be that aforementioned something excellent.
I didn't read any of that but Elden Ring is the highest rated FromSoft game therefore all your complaints are meaningless and biased. What is a fact is that ER is 10/10 game of the year and it sold bajillion copies.
I wonder if having a PVP element in a game discourages people for waiting for the game to go on sale? Personally for a lot of single player games I am waiting for I will hold off until a sale unless I am super invested in the product, but for games with competitive multiplayer elements I am less likely to wait because I want to take advantage of a younger multiplayer scene, especially with a unique gameplay mechanic.
@@Sohelanthropus FF14 is fine, it plays a lot like a single player game until you reach dungeons. You can take your time to enjoy it at your pace without caring for the veteran players.
@@ohexenwahno5652 yeah but I also despise not being a tryhard at the games I play lol, if I'm playing a game I gotta be good at it and engage with the endgame
Generally yeah, games are most successful right after a launch. Not just because people want in on the hot new trend, but if there's multiplayer, it's a time where you're guaranteed to see a huge player count. Extending that appeal for PVP over the long-term is the real challenge. But that's also why DS3 was so good at doing this, while Elden Ring has completely flopped after a few months.
@@Sohelanthropus sounds like your issues As you age, your patience on joining new thing dissipate very quickly, not to mention god knows what other things you do, work, motoric issues, other hobbies & name whatever That's why we kinda go back playing older games instead, because those are things we understand & have attachment to
Scott should stop getting his multiplayer experience strictly from games like this and Dead by Daylight where he outclasses 99% of the playerbase and graduate to fighting games.
One thing I was really excited about Elden Ring is that it was my first time playing a FromSoft game where I could actively participate in the PvP at the same time as everyone else. I've done invasions and been invaded in the other souls games but this was different. I got to try duels, invasions and had some amazing times. But to see what the PvP in Elden Ring has turned to (one shots, BHS & RoB spam, AFK farming, etc) is disappointing. I'm also sad that it isn't getting the attention and love it deserves and it breaks my heart to see PvP on PC die with the seamless coop mod coming out. I hope that one day FromSoft give the PvP in Elden Ring a good polish and if/when it happens I'll be jumping right back in.
It's the first From game I've been there from day one, it's been a unforgettable experience. Yet it has the worst pvp in the series. Imagine having a toybox this big yet everyone uses a variation of three or four set ups. It's sickening. What no one ever brings up is this. The series going mainstream did this to us.
I really like knowing how other players got into souls pvp, most of the time everyone's first interactions with invaders were unforgettable: In demon souls when i first got invaded it was by a guy with Scrapping Spear that broke all my shit, that moment scared and amazed me so much (also annoyed me, breaking players shit wasn't a fun concept never from and we're glad it got taken out, ) that a player could come antagonize me, so i tried doing it and for some reason i tried putting red signs around (didnt really know how to actually invade at the time lmao) and after doing it on latria i got summoned as the old monk once and damn, a game where i can play a villain in someone else's story is such a fun and unique concept, taking a character build vs others creates such interesting stories and in elden ring with the moutain of toys it was so fun theorycrafting builds (but unfortunately after we had an initial blast with the game the rashes started showing). People use the "They're a cunt that invades people to grief others arguments" and i GET where they are coming from, these people are always there, but i can 100% confirm to you that the overwheing majority of the players just want that completely unique experience, while the griefers will simply find the next game to troll... Anyways, thx for the video Scott, your work is always appreciated, be it BHVR or Fromsoftware we all just wish the companies listened a little bit to us 😭.
Also sorry for that guy i went against as the monk tho, it was my first playthrough of any souls game and i was a pussy that turtled w/ spear + adjudicator shield + regen ring, the fight took a whiiiile.
Both of these are great comments. I just wish Fromsoft loved their weird quirky PvP system in ER as much as they did when they first came up with the idea in Demons Souls. It’s bizarre thinking that Demons Souls Remake, a game that basically got one patch, and to this day has no downscaling for password summons, somehow has a more functional and dynamic 6 person multiplayer system with better netcode than Fromsoft’s latest offering.
I got invaded in blighttown during my first DS1 run. Couldn't see where they were and as soon as they got close the used the fus ro dah miracle and sent me off a cliff to my death. I played the rest of the game in offline mode and never really touched pvp in fromsoft games since.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but someone invaded you in Demon's Souls, broke your stuff, reduced your HP, made world's tendency go down, removed your ability to participate in ANY multiplayer activity, made you lose souls and made red and deadly phantoms appear, and yet you still were like, "hey, this is awesome, I want to do it to other players too!" If you'd get beaten up in a dark alley, you'd still be like, "hey, this is so cool, I want others to experience it as well!" ? And you wonder why invaders get so much hate. My first invasion was in DS2 in Drangleic castle where a guy pushed me off the ledge with Force. it didn't turn me to Dark Side. On contrary, I've put a lot of effort to destroy invaders and make their life miserable ever since, and now my effort is bearing fruit because there's A LEGION of people like me. You guys brought this upon yourself.
The way I see it, pvp will never be skill based or even somewhat functional unless it becomes its own game mode. So many tools available to the player break core game mechanics while also half of them being completely useless against human intelligence. At that point you lose the uniqueness of playing your own build etc. The game simply doesn’t work with pvp. It’s unfortunate but PVE and good PVP can never coexist. Adding a separate game mode is the best thing we could get.
That is a non issues. Pve optimized build fairing worse in pvp was always the case in Souls (and other games for that matter). The issue is switching those optimizations. Because how ER is structured and how big it is making new build is a chore and a half. And farming is worst in the series, drops of upgrade materials and eq pieces are so low they call for dedicated farming build. Making farming/buying materials easier would make it less troublesome to switch builds.
@@Nobody32990 You are just wrong. Having to dedicate an entire playthrough to survive the polarizing meta of pvp is not balance. I don’t care if that’s how it’s always been that’s what makes it bad. And it doesn’t even go both ways, many good pvp builds do great in pve. The game may function like a 3d fighter and low skill levels but any good player with decent reactions can 100% counter many, many styles of play. Which in a balanced and skill encouraging environment builds should not hold nearly as much weight as they do. You should be able to play how you want and make do with enough skill. Souls pvp is just bad and , making adjustments to the game based off pvp performance that negatively affects pve is just a bad decision making. Hence why the game will always be pve focused without separate modes.
What's worse is that a half functioning pvp could still create fun moments, as it has done for many people. What completely destroys any semblance of fun pvp are the players. A large amount of playerbase has this need to exploit the hell out of any problems with the pvp to gain an advantage, fair and unfair. Such as abusing overpowered weapons, glitches, "twinking", cheating until there's nothing left except a few people getting easy wins using those broken systems and being toxic to others. People will always optimise the fun out of games for easy victories and with this many broken aspects you can't have many fun match ups.
Ironically, DS2 had the best pvp despite being the one game in the series that Miyazaki himself didn't work on. I might also be a little biased because it had two of my favorite weapons out of the whole franchise in Bone Fist and Puzzling Stone Sword, though Santier's Spear also can't be ignored. Not to mention every weapon had a guard break which was borderline guaranteed to open someone up regardless of what shield they were using. Probably also helped that at some point bleed had gotten nerfed into the ground and hardly anyone was using it.
Bleed in DS2 is a lot weaker when compared to elden Ring. In DS2 it sucked pve wise but in pvp it was better because not only did it do damage, it also slowed your stamina recovery considerably. Like that's such a creative way to implement a status ailment.
@@lexkek5625 I actually found bleed to be a bit scary in Ds2 and one of my favorite builds. While it wouldn't deal much in the damage department bleed also applied a few other effects that helped. It would reduce max stamina for a short time as well as reduce movement speed and agility (which means less s and slower heals) This meant once you bled someone you could play ultra aggressive and punish people heavily. It was amazing. God I miss Ds2 PvP
The main thing about the netcode is that it applies just as much to the pve and co op, which fromsoft seems to be putting a lot of bias towards. But instead of fixing issues they tack on little things like no solo invasions and it doesn't make any sense. Arguments (bad arguments, but arguments all the same) can be made that pvp isn't important in these games, but when the co op is also so heavily damaged, it really puts fromsofts motives into question.
Yeh, poor netcode ruins Coop just as much as PvP. Whenever I tried to Coop in DS3, it'd be so laggy that if you had aggro there was no way to properly dodge attacks. And if it got real bad, boss just becomes a sitting duck easy to slap around.
True. I literally just got out from a coop session in elden ring and after reducing this envoy's health to 0, I still got smacked by it with it's toot horn.
Back in Demon's Souls, DkS1 and DkS2 days, i can accept Welfare servers, poor balance, etc. The company was tiny, so that's fine. But how the fuck has nothing improved after Bloodborne, DkS3 and Sekiro? Fromsoft is a big dev now, and they've made a fuckload of money, so why the shit do we have the same kind of pvp with zero improvement as we were still in 2009? Like HELLLLLLLLLO???
ER is my first souls game and I fell in love. Did 3 play throughs and then started dueling and very quickly I ended up spending more hours on duels than pve. I’ve never had a multiplayer experience like this where I can customize my character and create infinite builds. After doing literally 3000+ duels over the span of a few months playing almost every day, I’ve become intimately aware of the core mechanics and thus it’s flaws. This game will never be balanced purely because of the infinite build options and that’s what makes it great, the variety. What has killed pvp is that 90% of the community issues and complaints could be easily implemented without reworking any of the systems of the game, simply changing some variable values would do the trick. Make bhs cost way more fp and stamina so you can’t spam it, and while it’s still strong, it’s an easy fix that doesn’t require any major changes. A flat pvp dmg reduction of 15-25% would also be easy to implement and would help increase the ttk. Carian slicer should do max 200 dmg instead it does 600 on a normal mage build. Even if they don’t want to put a lot of effort into balancing, there’s no excuse when so many of these issues could be fixed so easily. The net code would require much more investment to fix so I understand that not being touched, but pretty much everything else is unforgivable. I’m so sad I joined the community in its darkest hour, and I’ll never get to experience the glory of souls pvp that I’ve heard so much about. Still love this game, and I’ve had a ton of fun pvp’ing or else I wouldn’t have sunk so many hours into it, but disappointed that the pvp community basically got spit on by fromsoft this time around. If the Arena’s DLC or a giant pvp balancing patch doesn’t come ASAP, the game will truly die.
DS2 is actually a great example of what you described where, 'B-team' (devs of DS2, as 'A-team' of Miyazaki was working on Bloodborne) made sure to keep doing those fine tuning patches. Every new meta build was patched out after a month, since it is pretty simple to change some variables with balance. Now, keep playing Elden Ring if the online stuff is fun for you.... but if stuff gets frustrating I def recommend going back and playing the other games ( Demon's Souls, Dark Souls1-3, Bloodborne ). These are all great in their own way. And perhaps after going through them all, Elden Ring will be patched again ;p
They will release a big balancing patch around the arena DLC to push sales after which they will wipe their hands clean of balancing . They are only in it for the money PvP generates
@@ravinkrishnan3183 that’s what I think will happen too. It depends on how long it will take tho, if pvp stays like this for 6 months or longer, I think the player base would’ve truly died off before then.
I would reckon the reason they don't fix their netcode, is because they simply can't. Whatever they might be doing for netcode might be buried under a decade of spaghetti code, with any attempt at unraveling it making the whole thing fall apart. If Fromsoft is reliant on reusing old game assets, I can only assume they are reliant on using old codebases too. And something about their old codebases could just be really flawed and truly not worth the monumental effort it would take to fix or replace.
Didn't they just hire another studio to remake Demons Souls in a new engine? All of these sales and they can't be arsed to start over with a good game engine for their new title?
@@SlenderSmurf They didn't hire Bluepoint, it's Bluepoint who got the license from Sony (not even from FromSoft, who only gave the approval) to work on the game and sell the remake. When you buy the remake you're giving money to Bluepoint and possibly Japan Studios and Sony, not to From.
@@kommentier9884 that's not really a fair comparison. That seamless co-op mod doesn't handle same tasks or the same volume that elden ring proper does. Plus, that co-op mod has its own litany of connection/sync issues, which is understandable. Modders usually get a pass anyways because they don't have to go through the same QA cycles a published game does. Nobody expects mods to work perfectly or even well when they release.
@@SlenderSmurf starting from scratch like that is an absolutely massive undertaking. It's not an issue of not can't being assed, as much as it is tossing out well over a decade of previous work that cant be transferred. Even if fromsoft adopted bluepoints work regardless of that, that is still an entirely different codebase that likely has an entirely different techstack & middleware, in an entirely different engine, made by different people that likely have an entirely different production pipeline, & likely enginered in an entirely different programming language that people at fromsoft do not know. Getting an entire studio to shift gears and relearn everything to fit a new engine & production pipeline is a monumental undertaking that is not worth the cost.
The first video I saw from Scott’s channel was him explaining the lag in Dark Souls pvp which was about 5 years ago. Many years later I looked up a Huntress guide for DBD and found his video which was what got me hooked on his YT and Twitch. It’s funny how I somehow keep getting back to him for guides on janky games.
Something I don’t understand is why DS1 had such a long lasting pvp community, even though the total fan base was way smaller, and the technical and balance aspects weren’t great. I literally played DS1 pvp for 4 years and it basically didn’t die off until DS3 came out. Now it feels like ER has died already and it’s only been a few months.
Well for one there was no weapon level matchmaking & no password matchmaking so the community as whole became close knit since players were becoming friends with the random phantoms they met along the way. Now we’re all just in our own little circles. There were other things to like the ability to invade infinitely up that kept activity going for a long time.
I think it also had to do with the fact that dueling was a very small component of the game, and so the people who played never had the delusion that the game was fair or balanced, but we played it anyway. Now people are spread across more titles, with less patience for unfair gameplay.
There are way more reds, relatively, to players that can be invaded, since they took out solo invasions and most alternative covenants. The experience is also rather awful as there's so many powerful crutches as well as builds to get cheap instant kills. Since it's so awful, people try to avoid it, doing things like summon in front of boss doors, which makes the invasion pool even smaller. This is a feedback loop, and not the only one. There's also the arms race of invaders and gankers using extremely broken builds. That is also a complex and nuanced issue. And now, after months of it being trash, one patch that took a few steps forward, and a mod that disables invasions entirely (again feeding back into invader imbalance) releasing, we have a patch that takes it a step back. That is how we got here.
Few reasons: 1) the pvp was really unbalanced... but once you learned some of the tech (toggling, omniroll) you could fight pretty much anything 2) there was a relatively chill and pretty cool community of dudes for the "hardcore" pvp crowd 3) DS2 just didn't have the same feel so a lot of PVPers either also played DS2 or just kept playing DS1
@@danlorett2184 DS2 was amazing lol. But in all fairness, the backstab tech of DS1 went pretty deep. It's just not the kind of learning curve most people would appreciate.
I'm kind of impressed. They managed to combine the worst aspects of pvp from previous titles, make them even worse, and add new problems on top of that. Now we have: - DS1 poise - DS2 phantom range - DS3 quickstep - spell/wa spam - status buildup on dodges
watched your vid on elden ring PVP, saw the part about the weird half second lag and wanted to check out this video, absolutely lost it when i heard the words "miyazaki shuffle"
If emergent pvp is the thing that makes PvP special, more effort needs to be made into smoothing out (and facilitating) the emergent gameplay. Instead, it's like they're afraid to add any structural support, because it might somehow confine or restrict the nebulous snowflake ideal of completely freeform pvp. And the end result of that is that pvp doesnt receive the gameplay structures it needs to progress into a more healthy, vibrant part of the game - one that's up to par with the community that enjoys it. Whether we're talking about systems that promote interesting encounters (ie new formats for invasions to happen), or the reward structure (where covenant rewards?), FROM acts like they're afraid to develop the system at all. I genuinely thought that arena + fleshed out covenant rewards would be a minimum bar for FROM to deliver at launch with Elden Ring, but while the PvE aspect is spectacular, the pvp system/structures actually feel like a step back.
I honestly don't even think it's that sadly, like it being a design choice per say. I think FromSoftware just doesn't care about PvP period and it become the first thing on the chopping block to remove. DS3 for example had a Battle Royale mode in development, which if it came out with the game woulda predated PUBG funnily enough, but was dropped. I suspect Elden Ring, with all these very clearly covenants, cut all the multiplayer stuff in crunch leaving the skeleton we have now. Which is sad, cus even though DS1 had a much shorter development cycle than ER, it had more unique multiplayer content. And I fully agree that adding these in proper is just as important as opening up those arena doors.
As a somewhat new soulsborne fan i've honestly only had good interactions during invasions and either extremely tense or just stupid and funny encounters when i get invaded while playing with friends. I dont know what regular pvp is like but i honestly love how random and unique invasions can be, and i dont want that gone from future souls games
Finally, applause for addressing the real problems with the PvP of the entire series including this game instead of just "Bloodhound Step." All of the annoying adherents complain about "kazools" who need to "gut gudd" and blind or ignorant to the real issues that keep people away (one of those reasons being the PvP community in general). There's a very good reason the co-op mod is so popular and it's not because the people using it don't have a big enough horse epeen but rather they don't want to be partaking in such dumb contests in the first place, with all the shitty server and connection problems From has zero interest in improving to go along with it.
I’d definitely argue that no matter how much you want it to be invasions aren’t PvP, they are PvEvP or however you’d like to think of that, the combat is great and unique but invasions are you choosing to take a detriment to prove you can be a challenging enemy in another persons path. You are looking for a variety of combat while providing a variety of experiences to the hosts.
@@jeremyrm7 Prob cuz most people look at it from a duelist perspective. But I'll tell you what I find incredible From didn't remove, overleveled phantoms. I'd tell them to Google the definition of cheating. My problem is that I'd invade this people 3 out of 5 times and it's 10 times more unfair than dark souls thanks to the dumb poise they decided to add
I think they took a huge step backwards in pvp from DS3 to ER. so much potential for covenants given the lore, various purposes to invade, guard, curse worlds, etc. DS1 had a great, under appreciated system for tying in pvp w/ the lore and main game.
That's actually my biggest negative with the game. Covenants are not only great for roleplay, but also for adding unique multiplayer mechanics like what DS1 had. Elden Ring clearly has pseudo covenants going on all over the place, and it almost seems more like they had to cut it all last second for crunch or something. This really should be something added in with an Arena update, so that the game has a proper multiplayer ecosystem.
Ds3 was already a massive step backwards when it came to pvp from ds2. No interactions with covenants, covenants that don't work properly (takes hours to be summoned as darkmoon), can't invade areas where the host defeated bosses, and getting connected more to gankers than solo hosts. All elden ring did is take one normal step backwards and finish what ds3 started.
@@JayWalkZ I really enjoyed DS1 the most. I hated that ALL equipment in DS2 had durability. literally had to change out rings in middle of fights b/c they broke.
@@tawilk ds1 has durability on weapons too. The only difference is that in ds1 you had to buy a repair kit to repair your weapons durability early in the game whereas in ds2 you didn't and your weapons durability resets whe you rest at a bonfire. Edit: oh you meant equipment such as body armor and rings. Nvm. Disregard what i said.
Very interesting video. As someone who actively avoids the PvP of darksouls, including jumping off ledges as soon as I see the message appear, it’s always nice to hear people who enjoy it talk about it passionately. Personally speaking, I don’t think Miyazaki ever truly cared about PVP. He’s always been a “mechanics for story telling” kind of designer. Humanity, cooperation, invasions, covenants, they were all ways for him to tangibly tell a better narrative, from what I can tell. Now, they’re more like obligations because people want them but the people making the games don’t have interest beyond that obligation. Complete speculation but that’s what seems the most consistent reason why it’s always there, but nothings improved. I can’t say I cared about Elden ring enough to research anything about it, but I really couldn’t remember an in game reason why invasions are taking place in Elden ring. There’s no covenants, there’s no real reward when I was playing. It was just there.
Since i'm a PvE veteran, i really don't care about balancing of a game that's specifically made for PvE...however, throughout these games, it would seem that Hidetaka always had a secondary PvP element interwoven in the story..so i understand your take. Personally, i just think they try their best, but since it's a one time payment for these games, with no monetization not even for server space, so i just think they do the bare minimum as to not get totally hated, and they just move on since there's no monetary incentive other than just "doing it for the fans" :) However in the case of Elden Ring, this will not be excused, because they expected to sell 4 million copies, and they sold 13+...so they have extra god damn money to make a small group of devs that fix bugs and ballance sheit...i mean doing over triple the expected sales...there's kinda no excuse for them this time, so i'm with you guys. And yes, if there's no excuse after 13 years of this terrible code...please explain to me why they still don't have moving mouths on our character when saying "hey", when drinking flasks or taking damage or anything, blank expression which is even worse in Elden ring with the addition of shouts and sound for them your character looks weird af having closed mouth during a shout in a 2022 game...i was watching a game from fucking 2005 yesterday and it had moving mouths that were accurate :)) n Fromsoft doesn't care about that.............THEY DO HOWEVER care about animating the frenzied flame merchant's fingers to hit the correct notes on his guitar :D that deserved attention but not god damn important stuff i guess.
Just want to throw in my two cents about pvp. I'm not sure the validity of this, but if I remember correctly the point of invasions is that it provides the host with an extra challenge, and in effect the invader is treated like an enemy that is supposed to be defeated (so ultimately the invader is supposed to lose). Also, since invasions kind of require that the host is still playing the main game, wouldn't that mean that the only type of pvp that maintains the player base (in the long run at least) are duels? Finally, I think that the reason why pvp takes a backseat is because it ultimately fails to meet the core parts of souls borne games, those being (imo) the high but ultimately fair difficulty (which would contain variables in invasions, as difficulty varies based on the invader's skill) and the themes of death and change in the lore. The reason why pvp is kept us likely because it's just something that's expected so they have to throw it in. That being said aside from a couple things it looks like Elden Ring seemingly perfected the fromsoft formula, so I wouldn't be surprised if there only minor tweaks to the single player experience in the next game but massive changes to the multi-player
The thing is all older souls game had dedicated pvp areas. So people would just go to certain areas to get invaded. Covenants also helped matched people that wanted to pvp together. I’m Elden ring we have none of that so it’s kinda a kick in the face
@@juddakooda9520 im hoping the (most likely coming) dlcs will have a focus on multiplayer and bring covenant related things. There is already strong reason to believe arenas have all but been confirmed at this point
Invasions made a lot more sense in Demon's Souls, where the overall tone was more oppressive, so having some enemy just show up and kill you out of nowhere fit better (not to mention that happened anyway in darker world tendencies), and they leaned into that experiment with the Old Monk fight. Dark Souls folded it in okay with the covenants, and Bloodborne did some cool stuff with making the possibility of invasion an NPC that would be spawned if you co-oped, invaded, or entered the base game nightmare areas, but you could kill them to prevent it, but it honestly felt like it was there because it was always there rather than because it really fit the design of the games. Honestly with Elden Ring there's such a huge design contradiction between the massive open world and the transient nature of invasions that they were forced into compromising the former (preventing horse riding) to avoid making invaders irrelevant. Even in the legacy dungeons there's so much room for players to run around that it limits forcing interactions with invaders. This was becoming an issue in Dark Souls as well, as the less linear level design compared to Demon's Souls led to more restrictions on host movement during invasions, but the wide open design of Elden Ring really brought that issue into sharp focus.
Online multiplayer is by far the most difficult technical aspect for a dev. The network engineers who can do that make over $200k, because they are in that much demand. I would imagine it’s difficult to find these ppl, but I would bet they have been trying to hire more of them. I doubt the problem is from being lazy and not caring, there’s some other stuff going on behind the scenes.
You can't tell me it's that difficult for such a large company to implement multiplayer features that far older and smaller games have done on a much smaller budget. The game is peer-to-peer based, they wouldn't have to set up servers for everything to go through. Give me one reason why the regions for matchmaking are still just Japan and 'not Japan' other than they just don't care enough.
@@richcatclipsofficial5098 It is that difficult. Programming Multiplayer is much harder than you would think. You may not believe me, but you have to try to make it so every aspect of the shared world is exactly the same, for each player individually, all happening simultaneously. It’s much more complicated than it seems and even most experienced game devs have no clue when it comes to this. They have the money to hire more, but no everything can be solved by just throwing money at it. Think of the disasters that many triple A companies have done over the years, and they had no shortage of budget to spend. Also From is just recently growing into this.
@@alcoyot They're not "just recently growing into this", they've had 13 years to make a better pvp experience. There is just no excuse for some of the things that hamper pvp, like the example I gave. It would be extremely simple to ensure that players are matched based on proximity, but apparently Fromsoft just doesn't care and thinks it's fine for players in America to invade players in China with 350 ping.
Worst part is that theres no excuse for the atrocious Netcode anymore. GGPO and Strive netcodes are the living testament that online gaming can be done right if you put in the effort to give your playerbase the best possible experience.
I’ve been saying this about the status effects for years, dual vykes spear builds are what killed my interest in elden rings pvp… it’s just so insane that they include different damage modifiers yet they never once considered to add a player modifier that reduced madness buildup? Honestly it really does feel like there’s only a handful of people at fromsoft who care about the pvp.
bloodborne pvp is entirely balanced, the key to good balance is just make everything overpowered and bloodborne did it best (they also only had like 20 sumn weapons but we ignore that)
I tried to get into souls PvP so many times...I don't care that I lose 9 fights out of 10. But there's a difference between tough and unfair mechanics. Enemy sword hitting me while being waaay out of its range? Sure, you can say that it is a mechanic and I just have to learn it. But it's just an excuse for a bad design/system/whatever you want to call it. I love souls games and the community around it, but many players refuse to say a single bad word about these games. So whenever there is something that is badly designed, they just add it to the list of things that are supposed to raise the difficulty.
Definitly agree with this. Fromsoft pvp is such a unique and fun pvp experience yet for some reason so many horrible imbalances hold it back. I dream of the day we see fromsoft pvp that isnt plagued with the same issues that’ve existed in the series for over a decade.
I was using exitlag to see if I could get better ping and the program showed that elden ring have only 2 main servers, one is US oregon01 and second US the dalles01. this maybe one of the reasons why mp experience is so bad
The problem is that the regional restrictions have always been "In Japan" and "Not In Japan", so the p2p connections can be from basically anywhere in the world, unless you are in Japan.
I want to be invaded in all my games, honestly I want to do some majora's mask wedding quest or Romania ranch questline and have a red link drop in, throw a bomb at me, and kill me while I fail the quest because of it
The excuse of x game had this issue and it took y time to fix just is nonsense to me and it’s really the only argument I ever hear. As you said this is the 6th game with PvP and invasions, things should be getting better not worse
I am a web developer, not a game developer, but how do i see it from my perspective the good technical aspect of multiplayer in stable and responsive and lag-less fashion is impossible to achieve for them on engine they currently have. Maybe i am wrong but i see pvp interaction ( or any multiplayer interaction ) as a extention what i do daily in making and maintaining a comprehensive web services. Just with a bit different architecture in communication between two sides, in a web app, service, page one side sends requests and the other sides accepts them and sends responses and if all is well in communication the system works. They probably do the similar thing but only sending a bunch of requests at once with hopes that some will get through, without such rigid checks if it is recieved on the other side so you get ghost hits and discrepancy between positions of two players. Otherwise it would be unplayable because not all communication between two peers will get through. For it to be better a whole restructuring of the game engine would be needed or even a new engine. That being said, i hope they will balance the pvp and would be satisfied with that. Ghost hits, lag, discrepancy in distance is annoying but i can get used to it because i dont believe it can be much better as thing stand, no matter how much effort they put into it. I think they add pvp and any multiplayer because engine is rudimentary capable of it so why not but they are aware they can not make it much better because of the tehnical nature of the very fundations of those games, that is the engine. I think that a good weapon and spells balance alongside with increasing health gain multiplier for the vigor by 30% across the board ( for players and npcs and enemies in pvp and pve ) would help pvp.
I would have traded half the lands between for pvp to be better… take moutaintop of the giants, concentrated snowfield, and every lame dungeon out of the game, and fix the pvp- suddenly elden ring really is the best game ever made.
"honey? you havent touched any of your crucible knights, ulcerated tree spirits, alabaster lords, burial watchdogs, fallingstar beasts, 2 astels, and numerous near identical catacombs?" *"CAN WE PLEASE HAVE SOME GOOD PVP!"*
Thanks for making this Scott. As an almost OG DS1 PvP lover who has persisted every title through Elden Ring… I originally had hope that their very creative, groundbreaking janky experience, would become something refined and masterful. It’s essentially been copy-pasted from one release to the next. My personal conclusion is that they do not and never have understood the potential, due to it being seen as immersion and complimentary to the pve world rather than a standalone entity.
If I were working for fromsoft, I would propose to have a place in elden ring with dedicated servers for pvp where you could do regular duels, 2v2, 3v3 and maybe even a complete free for all, the arena behind the giant jar in caelid would seem nice.
Dark souls PVP enthusiasts don't even enjoy Elden Ring's PVP, and yet they expect PVE players to welcome invaders for the plethora of fun experiences they claim to provide. I completely agree with this video, and were they to fix all this shit, I probably wouldn't hate the invasion mechanic as much as I do.
Sniper Elite 5, the newest one, released this year in 2022, has a very Dark Souls-esque invasion mode built into it, actually. Only other game with something like Dark Souls invading pvp.
Holy shit, thank you for making this video. I've been echoing these thoughts for years and it's so frustrating to hear people just say "Well, it's not a PvP game so you shouldn't expect it to be better." The fact of the matter is From Software is a company aiming to sell a product and if there's a part of that product that's bad, it's only going to hurt them. Adding PvP and not putting any effort into making it function well only serves to hurt the game. If they don't care to make it work, they shouldn't have included it at all. I can forgive Demon's Souls, Dark Souls 1, and even Dark Souls 2 for some of their jankiness, but past that, it's no longer acceptable. They're not the same small quirky studio like they were back then. They're much bigger, have more recognition, and more experience. They need to be held to a higher standard. It feels like people are still living in 2011 and are just willing to accept mediocrity because "It's From Software, that's just how they are," which I find to be ridiculous. The game doesn't need to be perfect, but it can certainly be better than this.
That’s exactly how I feel. Like if you’re gonna half ass the pvp don’t even add it. I’d rather not have it than to just keep expecting something good and being disappointed every time
Thanks for putting this all out there. I agree, and even as player who primarily does single player and co-op, the bad balancing and crappy connectivity/netcode has been a big frustration for years. I just want it to be better. I think if the PvP wasn't so janky in every game, I'd feel more encouraged to do it. Dark Souls 1 PvP could have been great, but the Backstab mechanic pretty much single-handedly ruined it. They could have patched the game to make a system more like DS2's or DS3's backstabs (even if that change was PvP exclusive) and it would have been an absolute game changer. But no. They didn't do shit.
These games are single player games with an asymmetrical mutiplayer element. Things are not supposed to be equal and balanced. Why their network is laggy and what not is a question for the ages and the only actual question to ask.
i have said it time and time again, Myazaki is 100% not into pvp but they will add it for the sake of players, they even gave a try to a no pvp game and it succeeded all the same. When hidetaka Myazaki took a more back seat spot in dark souls 2 the game had way better PVP and summon system as a whole. Their patches on DS 3 and elden ring proves that they really just want to make an excellent game and release it, which they're excellent at there is nothing like playing these games and i say that after i played almost all souls like games. they don't fix VERY obvious issues, forget balancing...they went to fix bugs and they didn't fix some of the worst bugs in the game (2 minute dc and helmet swaps) i truly believe that if there was no backlash or community disappointment, they would just release the game as it is and never update it until a DLC drops. Their balancing is probably only behind blizzard in terms of how bad they balance their games, obviously this game is not PVP based game no matter how many times people try to convince others that it is, but its still unique and fun...also as you said, there is no excuse anymore with the sales of elden ring that they don't have dedicated coders, balance team etc. as a Fromsoft fan since DS 1 and i say that proudly, even though complaining about PVP is like complaining about the minigame "grognak the barbarian" not working correctly in fallout 4, its still sad, as their mini game is amazing and fun to play but DAMN do they make it hard to remain in enjoyment with it because of how much they don't care about it. i understand that business wise they earn NOTHING from PVP aside from small youtube leadaway for people to see the game, but yeah...i'm still disappointed that they don't care, at least we agree on something...DS 2 will forever be the best pvp. i'll still breathe the copium that the next patch will fix things but since DS 3 i stopped having high expectations of PVP. I understand your decision...but i will hope that you will be back after they do some good balancing...Copium.
I'm with you there. Came to check on it after I heard of a recent patch, but looks like progress is nonexistent. Not just Elden Ring either, 5 months later and still no servers for their other games on PC. RIP souls pvp, I'll miss you.
If this taught me anything, it's to never buy into the hype for any game. Including fromsoft games. ER after the open world charm wears off, feels incredibly underwhelming after beating the game. The PvP is just so much worse than ds2-ds3 pvp, and as someone who mostly plays these games for PvP it felt like a huge disappointment.
The pvp is absolute shit but I’m sure you really can’t say you didn’t get your moneys worth with the PVE even with just one play through. The replay value definitely suffered from the pvp though
I wonder if some devs at Fromsoft are wondering about making these games Coop only. PvP is interesting, but I feel that the invasion-haters are louder than before. Which is funny considering invasions are less frustrating than ever now that it’s Coop invasions only.
Yeah but when they do get invaded it’s by some min/max build that can 1shot and has more flasks than them, so it’s just a bad experience. It’s too bad cause a good pvp fight is exhilarating.
4:30 Being primarily a single player game is not ample justification for poor craftsmanship. In any field of design, creating good work does not solely mean dedicating your energy to the parts of the design you like. For example, if I am commissioned to design a poster, and I design a poster with a fantastic background illustration, but poor typesetting. It results in a great graphical experience, but a very poor informational experience. My point being, prioritizing what you like to work on as a designer is ignorant of the fact that design is always done in service of an audience, real or imagined. And to prioritize your needs as a designer over the needs of your audience, will always produce a half-baked experience. As an aside, I'd like to state that if it was not for the pvp community in Das1 it likely would have never had such longevity.
I'd have thought it's obvious. It's treated like an after-thought because it IS an after-thought, to the majority of the community. I know we like to think we matter and we prop up the community after the pve players stop but we're just lying to ourselves to make ourselves feel better about caring about something more than most. The other half of the people who continue playing long after the majority stop are the speed runners, who play offline, and who do the same thing except they complain when they fix stuff as opposed to us complaining when they don't balance shit or fix exploits.
PVP in Souls is an afterthought. It was slapped on because PVP capability sells titles to people who don't give a shit about anything else but proving their e-peen exists.
It all begins and ends with the netcode. They don't care enough to upgrade and make it actually playable so I'll never even bother because it's just not an enjoyable experience for me regardless of how incredible the idea is.
I was a pretty good invader in DS 3 during the early years, I had so much fun! I started giving up when I realized that no matter how good you play, all the odds will be against you: outnumbered, over leveled phantoms, infinite summons, friendly fire between invaders...... The final nail in the coffin came someday in 2019~2020 when it was ALWAYS me against usually 5 (with a summoned invader in the gank squad) abusing everything you can imagine: crossbow glitch, estus cancel, estus refilling, seeds popping up every time.... I tried some invasions in Elden Ring,but nah..... didn't went too far. From Software is against invasions. That or they think that everyone invading plays like Jeenine and other professional invaders.
My guess is FROM would love to improve the netcode for PvP but are at the limit of what is possible technically given how the rest of the game is coded. To get the netcode for a peer-to-peer fighting game right, and this is a very difficult problem, every system needs to be designed from the ground up with the purpose of optimizing for PvP, but Elden Ring was not designed that way. It would probably require them to redesign massive parts of their engine to fix the problems that have existed for 13 years.
I think if they added cool rewards for PVP I would play it more...It sucks when you beat 3 players by yourself legitimately with no cheese plays, it should give you something cool...Stat boosts or unique weapons and armor
There's not much to really offer though. Stat bonuses would be game breaking in a lot of ways, and become a hinderance to balance. A cooler idea would be something like Fortnite's battle crown. If you can chain successful invasions, you build up a counter that numerically shows your skill, one number up for each kill, but if you die once, you lose it. Imagine someone summoning into your world and it flashes a giant 50 above their head. Your whole crew would be like "OH SHIT THIS GUY'S INSANE." It'd be a fun way to show skill level without making anything complicated, and people would love to grind out invasions to see how high they could get their streak. And for people getting invaded by dangerous players, it'd feel like a huge accomplishment if you could break their streak, either alone or as a team; it'd be way hype.
@@heychrisfox We had that in Dark Souls 2. When your win-loss ratio in the arena reached certain positive thresholds your red Phantom got a glow effect applied to it which further increased down the line.
@@thatguywiththeguitar7203 I disagree, locking content behind online (which remember, isn't free on console) would go against pretty much everything that makes FromSoftware one of the best companies existing today.
@@SimoneMrg Covenant items were also always farmable offline, so no its just missing content right now in elden ring and it doesnt matter if console players are offline.
It’s cool to hear a pvp fanatic kinda shit on it. I actually don’t think it’s that bad. It’s not great either. But it IS conceptually great. It seems maybe pvp just stems from Miyazaki finding new ways to test/punish players. Maybe that’s truly it’s entire purpose.
I think many people view EldenRing as a live service game. But in my opinion, PvP is a bonus to this huge game. I feel the same way about EldenRing as I do about The Last of Us. Single player, plus multiplayer. Nor is this a game like Dead by daylight, Dead by daylight is clearly a PvP based game. If they want to develop a better and more continuous PvP scene for EldenRing they would have to start from the beginning as a live service game. Of course that's no excuse for Fromsoft not making more PvP balance patches, but I feel a little sorry for Fromsoft who is doing well with just the game itself + DLC in the terrible situation that AAA studios are greedily squeezing money out of even single player games these days. I am mainly a PvE player, so I don't have many complaints, but I understand that it is not enough for those who are mainly PvP players. My native language is not English, so there may be some grammar and words that are wrong, but this is my opinion.
Wait there actually IS a separate modifier for PvP damage??? What is it tuned up or something??? The solution to balance the combat isn't even THAT difficult, it wouldn't even take that long, especially not if they hired a separate team. Basically go through the PVP balance testing process and give every piece of equipment in the game, weapons, armour, rings/talismans, spells, give them all two stat tables that can be toggled at the press of a button so as not to overload the screen, showing stats against mobs on one screen and people on the other, it would require the same calculations as working out mob damage annoyingly, but I feel like asking for more than that is a pipe dream. Of course things like invasion balancing are far more nuanced, but this would absolutely fix the severe, overarching problem of insane damage right now.
I agree. It's really sad, it's gotten to the point where it would be nice if fromsoft had worthwhile competition on some level that understood this aspect of their games and cared about it. Sadly, I think Elden Ring has proven that the formula just doesn't work for a long term experience without the multiplayer, we have by far the biggest, arguably best pve experience fromsoft has ever made, with the largest initial numbers it's ever had but the game is effectively in it's dying stages faster than any other game in this spiritual series. I think it's gonna be a solid 5 years or so before anyone who gives a shit does anything that comes from the understanding of what has made souls pvp a good thing in the series if fromsoft doesn't do anything about it now. Kind of sucks.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Dark Souls 2 not have things like the hit sound during rolls and status build up without being hit? There are so many mechanical things DS2 has that the other games don't, so I assume it didn't have those either. Netcode issues were still there but DS2 had these really small differences like your status bar not filling up when you get an increase in your resistances, and you can exit DS2 with alt+F4 and the game will save your progress just fine. Not that there's much to be gained from it, because I think the ultimate issue with the gameplay aspect of PvP is how limited we really are. I think the inability to free aim ranged attacks forces a lot of sub-optimal design choices. I mean, would we have Stars of Ruin if you could aim magic with a reticle instead of locking on and letting the spell itself do the work? And when it comes to melee, I feel so much of the ebb and flow relies more on trickery and trapping your opponent into having no options, versus just being really good at swinging a sword. I know I'm talking about fundamental stuff here, but that's the issue IMO. This series of games is built on a foundation from 2009. Maybe it will always be flawed, because Demon's Souls was flawed.
Dark Souls 3 after all the dlcs and patches had my favourite PvP and all it needed was a few minor things fixed and it would've been perfect. But I don't want to give up on Elden Ring PvP, it has so much potential, and there are so many awesome builds and playstyles you can do, so much more than the souls games. Also yeah remember me? I was the one calling out mages and quickcasting on your last vid lol 😂 nice to see you again scotty
Not necessarily a justification, but: I feel Elden Ring has been somewhat rushed by the end. Just think about the fact that the NPC quests were not completely implemented until a later date/patch. I personally would have waited a year more to have them polish all those rough edges, add in all that they meant to add, and have a true gem on hand... But, it is what it is, I guess. This might have also led to more variety in PVP modes, as some of the cut content seem to suggest (see "Effigy of Malenia" etc). Since the lack of Covenants also is part of the issue, from my point of view... Of course, this doesn't solve the problem of the main "formula" for PVP still being what it is (unupgraded weapons can partially solve the 1HKO problem but, ofc that's not realistically feasible outside of community-made custom tournaments; you can't expect people to comply when you invade), nor it excuses the poor netcode (nothing does, we are not talking of a small indie company here). Though, I also feel like that From is not that keen on experimenting after DkS2 "partial backlash" (e.g. Soul Memory, etc.) and just left it as is - with a bit more care put over 1P-invasion/"VS twinks" tutelage. I'd like to see them try again on that front, since new isn't always bad.
Definitely didn't need another year, maybe a few more months but the game was still in pretty good shape at launch (Much better than most other AAA games)
Dark Souls 2 was BY FAR the best game in terms of its PvP, the main issue it had was its quite dull map design and slight net code issues, but it was amazing in terms of balance. Essentially every class of weapon was usable at a competitive level - new things were being discovered years later. The PvE wasn't bad either - I didn't enjoy it as much as DkS1, but I enjoyed it far more than DkS3. That was the only game in the series which felt as though a reasonable amount of effort had gone into its PvP, and I find it too much of a coincidence that Miyazaki wasn't involved. Every game he directs chastises PvP to a higher degree. Removing the ability to invade solo hosts was sacrilege. I won't be buying the next game he directs.
Agree entirely. The point that irks me the most is about the netcode. There is no logical reason you should take status buildup when the game realizes you took no damage.
My theory is the game actively rolls back the damage if it detects rolls. If they did that with statuses you'd get phantom stunned.
It is absolutely unacceptable to design for local publication, when the parameters of your design demand a global approach. Peer to peer should have been tossed out in the initial parameters for this game, but sadly here we are, trapped in a hell-scape of bad user experience.
still in ds2 was fixed...
Yep especially in elden ring, why tf do ya take status buildup when ya ain't getting hit 🤔
@@campernocamping1 P2P is fine if it's Rollback netcode optimized to be like GGPO, which Japan has only recently started to adopt.
Souls game use Delay* based netcode, which shouldn't be used anymore as it can't work over long distances.
* well, it looks to be more what Tekken 7 does, which is use rollback tech to emulate delay... which is even more silly. and i suspect is the source of all the weird interactions
It's HELLA upsetting watching all the great pvp potential go to waste...I'm still salty that the OPEN WORLD souls game was cut to 4 players when the much Smaller gamers had 6
you can have. plenty of 2v3 ganking going on
@@tawilk that is literally a lie, i bet you to take a screenshot with 5 players on your screen
@@tawilk There{s a 4 player limit in ER.
I mean, you kind of answered your own question there. Fromsoftware has never been incredibly tech savvy with their engine, so making the game bigger ultimately meant sacrificing player count. It's easier to sync more players in a smaller game.
They have said that having more players in the open world is a RAM contraint from the last Gen systems. That's why no horse either.
I don't know why so many people are dismissive of the fact souls PvP COULD be good, I mean what would be taken away from the game if they just had more polished multiplayer interactions at the very least? Why are so many people against the idea of people just being able to do souls PvP?????
Also this video was very well narrated and I can tell you are very passionate about this subject
I don't think there's anyone that doesn't want netcode fixed, I think people are just scared of balancing for pvp, making the pve experience worse. I really think they should have separate balancing on items and stats. That should alleviate the fear
@@aiellamori Really dont see that concern either, as it stands in fact I would say PvE would benefit too from not being 1-2 shot by later game bosses. But also for some people thats the entire challenge. And you dont play with 1 build or item across every PvE run so not much it would be ruined by balancing. Or is this a really roundabout way of saying people dont want to lose the ability to BHS
@@aiellamori except it doesn’t.
You’re asking a company that can’t even make their games run properly over a course of 10 years to now split the development team to focus on PvE and PvP.
Now take into account the entire team can’t even make PvE balanced. Now take into account with just PvE being the main focus, PvP is still garbage on top of that.
The community just needs to be honest: Dark Souls is a good series made by a low grade studio that has shown time and time again that they either refuse or simply can’t handle AAA development. You’re simply asking too much of them.
@@yungmalaria I just don't wanna see anything made entirely useless, we've seen it in the past
@@WeinerTouchy whatever you wanna say man, I'm not even trying to defend anything, I just know why some people would not like sweeping balance changes that reduce the usefulness of stuff to 0
I do miss the 6 player cap, that’s for sure.
Dam ds3 has 6 player cap? Dam i thought it was 5
@@quangdungpham6276 4v2’s were legitness ):
@@mynamejef7963 I normally got 3v2 in ds3 lol
@@quangdungpham6276 I normally 3v3d at pontiffs. Amazing times
Seeing the absolute half-stuck bandaid of a patch that 1.05 was, I can totally see why you made this video, Scott.
Yep, two months of waiting. I was hoping it was going to be a big balancing patch that would deal with some of the trash in this game and instead they did almost nothing. For those of us on PC we can't even go back to play DS3 either since the servers are still down like half a year later.
@@DefinitionofFailure Wait, they're STILL DOWN?
@@Magic-Man YES STILL FREAKING DOWN WHYYY Id go back to DS3 and DS2 in a heartbeat especially with Wex Dust and Blue Sentinel
@@olorinhaha6073 Fuck, I was just wondering if DS2 was worth a quick dip in PvP but I guess that kills that. Shit that really makes that whole Elden Ring PvP thing even worse, I had no idea this was our ONLY SOURCE OF PVP this entire time.
1.05 made me crestfallen af
You cannot convince me that maintaining an active pvp playerbase doesn't positively influence dlc sales
I would not be suprized if they sell less then a third for DLC sales
@@BluMan506 you're on one sir. That's laughable.
It does, but we don't know if the proportion of loyal customers who are retained by pvp is greater than the number of potential customers who prefer pve. It seems that the pvp community is not growing (rather it is decreasing with ER), it's made up mostly of more or less experienced players who have been invading since at least one of the previous games, while we will hardly see many new players hooked by this current iteration. The pvp population does not increase, or increases very little, but the pve population has grown exponentially and it is to them that FROM will sell its products as a priority.
@@danielmontilla1197 I'm sorry but the entire reason that pvp players aren't as prevelent as pve players is easily correlated to the neglect to it's systems. I'm not suggesting that it would be of equal or greater proportions, but the disparity would be greatly reduced.
@Captain_Morgan Shhhhh... The DS3 fans haven't been around that long. They don't remember when it was bad!
It's just painful. We all want it to be good. All of us who participate in PvP are willing to compromise a lot. But they keep taking from us. First it was solo invasions, then it was invasions at all, because you're lucky if you find them. And now, we've waited 3 months for a patch that did nothing but take away a tool to deal with something that now has no counters.
We're taking more and more shit because we love this game. But how long until this game reaches an acceptable balance?
I just gave up on it. Elden ring was a completely single player experience for me and it was great.
Not even that, but even co-operators often do wish the pvp was good because AT LEAST, in the cases like elden ring where opt out is not a thing, at least it'd make the interruption potentially enjoyable, but no, it's just not the case.
I genuinely hope multiplayer mods like the co-op mod actually show fromsoftware that people do enjoy the souls multiplayer, but are largely unsatisfied with the treatment the company gives it.
Maybe you should stop putting up with this
it never will
i've uninstalled it, will keep playing bloodborne till they fix this crap.
Scott Jund is one of the men of all time
On a scale of 1-10, he is definitely on it, no denying it.
He is the most of all time
In the male hierarchy from beta to sigma he's definitely in the hierarchy
Of all the words that could be used to describe Scott Jund, some of them apply
He's definitely got a score in %
Props to Best Souls 2 for being the only game without phantom status buildup, and all it took was a completely separate game engine.
I often see people claiming that they don't care about the PvP, and that PvE shouldn't be "ruined" for PvP balancing's sake which is a pretty common sentiment - it's fine as it is, leave it alone, don't touch it and mess it up. Except the PvE in this game is broken as all hell. Flails and Axes both being so universally bad as a weapon class isn't a PvP problem, it's a PvE problem. More often than not the two are related issues. When the basic Club is literally just 15-20% worse in damage than any other hammer in the game, that's not just a PvP problem, it just becomes a totally useless weapon. There are so many others that are just like this, in so many other weapon classes - not even weapons that are obviously meant to be bad like the Broken Straight Sword/Hilt, just... random stuff that's worse than other weapons with nearly identical movesets. People aren't just asking for BHS to be nerfed because they're sweaty PvP nerds but because they believe it fundamentally breaks the game just like the game would be broken by a sword with 300 base damage. Between the broken OP weapon arts and the uselessly UP weapon arts going side by side, the dominance of dual wield status effects, and so much more - even two handing weapons is bad as Scott has made videos on before, you literally get like 3% more motion value damage over 1 handing and 10% more poise damage. Again compare this to DS2 where twohanding often had 20% motion value damage and the poise damage went through the roof. These are just simple changes, obvious changes, and it's insulting that From refuses to even balance the PvE experience that they clearly favor so much over their PvP, much less the actual PvP itself.
Not every weapon needs to be viable on its own… cheers for the dark souls 2 love, though. It is way over hated.
@@toastybatch565 I'm of the opinion that every weapon should be viable in some way. DS2 did many things wrong but being able to bash people with a ladle and for it to do fair damage was amazing. ER feels rushed like Ds3 was. Hope they do a proper balance overhaul because it seems like they've put less effort into PvP balance than even what they did with Ds3.
@@Day100 As from balances the difficulty by the choices the player makes, the purpose of the weapons isnt to be balanced. Theyre trying for pvp, which often results in less effective buffs against players and weapon arts that are easy to dodge, but in pve only broken stuff like swors of night and flame gets patched. How boring it would be if radahns greatswords would as strong/weak as a dagger.
You know this is an rpg and youre supposed to get the better stuff later on? Do you flame a jrpg for the basic weapon being weaker than the excalibur? Nonsense. Lategame weapons need to be far better (in pve) than the basic ones.
@@Stevemastersreason Then how come the Uchigatana, one of the starting weapons and one you can find in one of the first optional dungeons, is one of the best dex and bleed weapons? From games aren't like your typical RPG's, a lot of starting or basic weapons are viable all the way through, it's mostly items you find as enemy drops that might look good, but for some reason or other just don't have the performance you'd expect.
It’s a legitimate tragedy that Elden Ring PvP turned out so bad. I got into Dark Souls very late in 2019 and even with the stupid hitboxes and bad connections, covenant interactions in DS3 were some of the most fun I’ve had in any video game ever. Elden Ring’s combat mechanics set the game up to be the best PvP experience in the series but FromSoft has done everything in their power to reverse all the good decisions made over the course of the Dark Souls series and emphasize the broken aspects that were always aggravating to begin with.
Yeah, I think DS3 was the start of PvP getting killed off. They made invasions awful but put a bunch of effort into the dueling/arena stuff. ER just takes the next step - I mean it's basically just DS3 on juice.
@@monsieurdorgat6864 Invasions never flourished as much as in ds3, so i dnt understand your comment. Ds3 backstabs were fcking broken, rendering everything heavier than gs useless in skilled pvp.
Ds3 invasions got nothing on elden ring, over leveled phantoms almost always a 3v1 and all 3 do a billion damage with magic or aow then throw horrible connections or net code in there and yea not fun pvp when u have almost no chance unless u play perfect and get lucky with connection
@@Stevemastersreason bs weren't broken. Once I understood how it worked I got bs'd like a dozen times over 600hrs. New players who'd swing an ultra 2 times while their opponent is ten feet away staring at them are the only ones who suffered.
Edit: what hurt large weapons in "skilled" pvp was they are outmatched by the existence of pkcs. In average invasions tho, their godly.
@@Stevemastersreason I don't think you'll ever understand if you think invasions flourished in DS3 lol. It was actually the game that got most of the old invasion community to quit.
th-cam.com/video/Tgnsx3dgx1I/w-d-xo.html
th-cam.com/video/noXPpneWOYY/w-d-xo.html
th-cam.com/video/QcjJPUetr-0/w-d-xo.html
th-cam.com/video/c9LteYl-I-8/w-d-xo.html
th-cam.com/video/KDUnwfx0LNA/w-d-xo.html
No one knew who ChaseTheBro or SaintRiot was until they filled the vacuum left behind by the old invasion people quitting and trying (sometimes failing) to become variety streamers. But people who aren't sweaty and actually enjoy fun wanted out of DS3 invasions.
Deathloop did it’s darnedest to introduce the invasion system to a Dishonored-style first person stealth shooter. I ended up playing the shit out of that for the like, one week before it entirely died. Way more than I played the real campaign.
There were serious issues that will never be fixed cause the game just didn’t do that well, but hell if it wasn’t seriously good fun a lot of the time. I’d love to see more successful attempts at this type of multiplayer
I loved the PvP in that game. The amazing cat and mouse element to it felt so special and unique. Sadly matches took forever to occur and after a while you realize it’s just more effective to go in guns blazing with a shotgun.
@@thebimaker5814 Yup. Needed some tracking options to better deal with camping/hiding too, but the core idea was so much fun, especially with the powers.
The matchmaking was just a result of the player count :(
I played it a month ago and got a lot of invaders, so maybe it got revived. However the connection was always really bad, and that really ruined it for me,
Problem that most devs don't want to tackle is that asymmetric PvP games very quickly become Prison Social Experiments, with divisive factions that genuinely hate each other. Scott remarked about this in DbD too - it's just a big issue with asymmetric PvP games.
@@monsieurdorgat6864 Fromsoft games feel like an extreme case largely because it's involuntary to be invaded most of the time. Don't get me wrong I feel like invasions help to balance the dip in difficulty that comes from teaming up, especially with high level phantoms but I can imagine a lot of people raging after getting deleted by bleed builds when they were just fucking about with their friends. And since there are more people co-oping there's naturally gonna be a larger group pissed off about invasions being a thing than those who are in support of them.
I would love to see PvP-centered covenants. That's the biggest thing that I missed from Elden Ring and I'm very curious as to why it wasn't added. There are tons of opportunities to add covenants and, hell, you run through the questlines for them: Bloody Fingers, Recusants, Lord of Frenzy... It would just be so easy to add.
Bringing back the blues of DS1 and DS2 (invaded the homeworld of a red) would offer morally just invasions, reds (who obviously want pvp) would get solo invasions, and co-op players would have less reds to worry about as some reds would switch to being blues. Literally everyone wins without messing with their design choices.
@@maudley lmao "morally just" invasions... You do realize most normal invaders invade into gank squads, right?
I think your more salient point is opening invaders to be invaded solo. Nobody would complain about that, and opening up the invade-able player base without the Taunter's Tongue would be nice. That would make sense, but only if it was in the dungeons. Open world solo invasions would be almost impossible to implement correctly unless Fromsoftware got their shit together on synchronizing the horses.
I have no love of ganks (I know DS3 fans love getting ganked), so my ideal solution would be to have the taunter's tongue only be usable without summons, and would only open your solo game to normal invasions, not infinite invasions. Ganks don't get their food, invader PvP people can play with each other more often, etc.
I'd be down for covenants if they were simply different matchmaking criteria. For the love of god, though, it would be awful if they blocked items behind covenant tiers. That was always a bad idea.
The fact that you don't get invaded by recusants as you go through volcano manor is a fucking tragedy of missed opportunity.
@@monsieurdorgat6864 You misunderstand me. Yeah, the bulk of overworld invasions are against invaders, most co-op players just summon at the boss wall, and it's even less likely with the co-op mod released, but being a red will always carry the possibility of invading someone who doesn't want to engage in pvp. It doesn't matter whether you or I agree with that point of view, they are part of the playerbase, so if we're going to unite the playerbase on anything like that we need to throw them a bone when we can, especially when it doesn't get in the way of anything else. Do you disagree?
I came to the same conclusion regarding open world solo invasions. I think only having them through blue invaders may be a good way to handle it, but there may be more ways that they could be implemented without disrupting other player groups, like tying them to rune arcs. Perhaps both. Definitely needs more discussion.
As for ganks, it's another valid way to play. I think the play is to give positive reinforcement for not scummily ganking rather than punishing them or taking out gameplay features recklessly like that. Perhaps there could be another way to avoid ganks, like tying ganking to a covenant? or just add blue invaders and design that around avoiding ganks.
Does anything about that suggestion take away from your experience? If so we can work on it. If we can get some compromise going we could unite the community for the first time ever, and I think that's a worthy goal.
The myazaki shuffle into a charged yoinky sploinky is a true combo
DS2 is the only Souls game where I actually consciously worked on pvp builds to see how they'd play out. It just felt better than 1 and 3.
Thank you for addressing the elephant in the room. I'm new to Souls games and, as shocked as I am at Elden Ring's terrible PvP implementation, I'm even more shocked at how many OG Souls players reflexively defend it. We need more veterans like you calling it out, as whiny noobs like me are easily dismissed with a "git gud" drive-by. Keep it up!
The pvp is fun only if you don't take it seriously at this point
can confirm. I created a build centered around poisoning the host and just running away and repeating and it was the most fun I had. so not fighting was the best experience Ive had fighting. go figure.
@@ohexenwahno5652 I don't take it seriously, but I draw the line at wasting my time. Too many of these fights just feel random, even when I win.
The big issue with veterans not calling this out is similar to Bethesda games. Everyone knows Bethesda games will have the build quality of something that was built with duct tape and string; you expect those games to be a buggy, glitchy mess, even on release. So when they release a new, buggy, janky thing, everyone's just like "oh Bethesda, you did it again, silly guys." We do the same for FromSoft games. Before buying, you KNOW for a fact that their PVP - while fun - will be horrendously unintuitive and complicated. And most people just say, "Oh silly FromSoft, you're always so bad at this." But because so many people just take that for granted, FromSoft never worries about the criticisms, because most hardcore players give them the pass.
It has become a cult, that's why from doesn't have to worry
This kind of mirrors the situation with traditional fighting games from japanese developers. It's common for them to have poor netcode, in part because japan is smaller and has better internet infrastructure than somewhere like the US. A lot of problems get solved for you when you can assume the network is pretty reliable and under a certain threshold of ping. Even then, they should still be aware of these core issues after so many years, so it seems like they probably just don't care enough to fix them.
Oh man, it nearly took the FGC to REVOLT to get some of these devs on the rollback netcode train. Japanese devs being stubborn is no joke. Tekken FINALLY put frame data in their game but they still made people an extra $4 for it.
This is the real answer. Souls multiplayer works great in Japan - you can go watch videos of it and see that their low latency makes it a lot more consistent and enjoyable. There's a menu option in the later games to segregate multiplayer pools into two categories: 'Japan' and 'the rest of the world.' It would take an immense fan effort to change this. FromSoft probably does not want to put in the effort and money to create the network infrastructure for better global multiplayer, and Miyazaki's entire vision for these games revolves around difficulty (including invasions) reinforcing the themes of the PVE experience, not being a dedicated competitive PVP system.
Japanese developer. That's all you need to know when you wonder why something in obvious need of change doesn't change. In a Japanese company nothing changes until someone at the top makes it a priority.
I lived in Japan for two years and it is true that on average the internet speeds in Japan are very good. The various multiplayer games I played while living in Japan had no lag at all. However, From Software games are played by people all over the world, so they need to have dedicated servers and invest more in multiplayer. Please improve the netcode, Miyazaki-san!
It's exactly that the problem. I play final fantasy xiv, and some jobs are actually impossible to play at high level if you don't have low ping. But square enix doesn't give a shit because japan players have basically 0 ping, so for them the game is flawless. Japan devs just don't care about anything outside their country
It's not just the PvP, not just the invasions being bad. Every other aspect you can think of, there's a problem; one good concept or mechanic for each bad one. And the interesting things that could be built upon in the next game is dropped instead. It feels like Pokemon of all things.
For instance: Covenants. Introduced in Dark Souls 1 and it had neat ideas, like receiving increased power for certain spells by indulging more in that covenant. Then Bloodborne released and pretty much disregarded all of that; instead it focused more on having feuds between each Covenant, so even if you're summoned as a co-operator, you could become an adversary instead, a really neat idea that could've also been developed further. Instead, with Dark Souls 3, the only covenant that has that potential is the Mound-Makers, and even then you're better off aiding other covenant invaders or standard Black Phantoms, because if you kill them, the Host and their Cooperators will run you down much more easily. Elden Ring removed the consequences of covenants (of which there were few) and it's just as Demon's Souls was, with Blues that can come in to rescue hosts.
Fromsoft could've instead followed through with Dark Souls 2 (Covenant of Champions) and Bloodborne (Lumenwood Kin and Blood Beast runes), and made covenants an actual important pact, with upsides and downsides, as well as PvE impact. But no, instead we got watered down mechanics with Elden Ring.
They could've reworked World Tendency into something more pallatable, because it's a really interesting concept, but no.
They could've introduced Wex Dust to at least make it more easier to find matches when the online population dies down, but no.
They could've added back the Small White Soapstone to help random players with specific encounters (think Lansseax or runebears in the Mistwood), but no.
They could've added perfect blocking, which is a skill-based mechanic, that could be used against every single enemy, instead of considering the parry the same thing, which can only be used against a relatively small amount of enemies, but no.
They could've done so, so much, so many things that they have already done before, and have seen the community want, ask, and do before, but no.
From Software would rather make a very simple but very safe game with a lot of audiovisual appeal in order to appeal to a wider market, rather than doing their best, using all the knowledge they've learnt over more than a decade, and making something daring yet excellent.
It just feels like a cash grab - a great game, to be sure, absolutely - but somehow not as impactful as previous games. I was hoping that Elden Ring would've been that something daring yet excellent, due to its longer development cycle and apparent higher budget. I still hope that it can become that something with updates, but it doesn't seem likely, due to From's history. And I still hope that Elden Ring raised enough revenue as to finance a new game, one that can be that aforementioned something excellent.
I didn't read any of that but Elden Ring is the highest rated FromSoft game therefore all your complaints are meaningless and biased. What is a fact is that ER is 10/10 game of the year and it sold bajillion copies.
@@nidarach2702 Game good because $$$
Because if they fixed PvP, then the Miyazaki Shuffle will no longer exist, and that would make Miyazaki sad.
Miyazaki no shuffle. Miyazaki big sad. :(
Deepest lore reasoning
I wonder if having a PVP element in a game discourages people for waiting for the game to go on sale? Personally for a lot of single player games I am waiting for I will hold off until a sale unless I am super invested in the product, but for games with competitive multiplayer elements I am less likely to wait because I want to take advantage of a younger multiplayer scene, especially with a unique gameplay mechanic.
Same, I despise joining a multiplayer community which has had years of age
One of the main reasons I refuse to play FF14
@@Sohelanthropus FF14 is fine, it plays a lot like a single player game until you reach dungeons. You can take your time to enjoy it at your pace without caring for the veteran players.
@@ohexenwahno5652 yeah but I also despise not being a tryhard at the games I play lol, if I'm playing a game I gotta be good at it and engage with the endgame
Generally yeah, games are most successful right after a launch. Not just because people want in on the hot new trend, but if there's multiplayer, it's a time where you're guaranteed to see a huge player count. Extending that appeal for PVP over the long-term is the real challenge. But that's also why DS3 was so good at doing this, while Elden Ring has completely flopped after a few months.
@@Sohelanthropus sounds like your issues
As you age, your patience on joining new thing dissipate very quickly, not to mention god knows what other things you do, work, motoric issues, other hobbies & name whatever
That's why we kinda go back playing older games instead, because those are things we understand & have attachment to
"The incredibly unique formula" me having flashback to Runscape and the horror of seeing a white dot pop on your mini map while in the wildness.
most based man alive?!
no
Scott should stop getting his multiplayer experience strictly from games like this and Dead by Daylight where he outclasses 99% of the playerbase and graduate to fighting games.
One thing I was really excited about Elden Ring is that it was my first time playing a FromSoft game where I could actively participate in the PvP at the same time as everyone else. I've done invasions and been invaded in the other souls games but this was different. I got to try duels, invasions and had some amazing times. But to see what the PvP in Elden Ring has turned to (one shots, BHS & RoB spam, AFK farming, etc) is disappointing. I'm also sad that it isn't getting the attention and love it deserves and it breaks my heart to see PvP on PC die with the seamless coop mod coming out.
I hope that one day FromSoft give the PvP in Elden Ring a good polish and if/when it happens I'll be jumping right back in.
It's the first From game I've been there from day one, it's been a unforgettable experience. Yet it has the worst pvp in the series. Imagine having a toybox this big yet everyone uses a variation of three or four set ups. It's sickening. What no one ever brings up is this. The series going mainstream did this to us.
I really like knowing how other players got into souls pvp, most of the time everyone's first interactions with invaders were unforgettable:
In demon souls when i first got invaded it was by a guy with Scrapping Spear that broke all my shit, that moment scared and amazed me so much (also annoyed me, breaking players shit wasn't a fun concept never from and we're glad it got taken out,
) that a player could come antagonize me, so i tried doing it and for some reason i tried putting red signs around (didnt really know how to actually invade at the time lmao) and after doing it on latria i got summoned as the old monk once and damn, a game where i can play a villain in someone else's story is such a fun and unique concept, taking a character build vs others creates such interesting stories and in elden ring with the moutain of toys it was so fun theorycrafting builds (but unfortunately after we had an initial blast with the game the rashes started showing).
People use the "They're a cunt that invades people to grief others arguments" and i GET where they are coming from, these people are always there, but i can 100% confirm to you that the overwheing majority of the players just want that completely unique experience, while the griefers will simply find the next game to troll...
Anyways, thx for the video Scott, your work is always appreciated, be it BHVR or Fromsoftware we all just wish the companies listened a little bit to us 😭.
Also sorry for that guy i went against as the monk tho, it was my first playthrough of any souls game and i was a pussy that turtled w/ spear + adjudicator shield + regen ring, the fight took a whiiiile.
Both of these are great comments. I just wish Fromsoft loved their weird quirky PvP system in ER as much as they did when they first came up with the idea in Demons Souls. It’s bizarre thinking that Demons Souls Remake, a game that basically got one patch, and to this day has no downscaling for password summons, somehow has a more functional and dynamic 6 person multiplayer system with better netcode than Fromsoft’s latest offering.
I got invaded in blighttown during my first DS1 run. Couldn't see where they were and as soon as they got close the used the fus ro dah miracle and sent me off a cliff to my death. I played the rest of the game in offline mode and never really touched pvp in fromsoft games since.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but someone invaded you in Demon's Souls, broke your stuff, reduced your HP, made world's tendency go down, removed your ability to participate in ANY multiplayer activity, made you lose souls and made red and deadly phantoms appear, and yet you still were like, "hey, this is awesome, I want to do it to other players too!"
If you'd get beaten up in a dark alley, you'd still be like, "hey, this is so cool, I want others to experience it as well!" ? And you wonder why invaders get so much hate.
My first invasion was in DS2 in Drangleic castle where a guy pushed me off the ledge with Force. it didn't turn me to Dark Side. On contrary, I've put a lot of effort to destroy invaders and make their life miserable ever since, and now my effort is bearing fruit because there's A LEGION of people like me. You guys brought this upon yourself.
@@Reloaded2111 peak interpretation moment where i say that i love dogs and you make it so as if i hate cats, get blocked 🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡
It is honestly quite amazing that there is a dedicated pvp scene at all.
The way I see it, pvp will never be skill based or even somewhat functional unless it becomes its own game mode. So many tools available to the player break core game mechanics while also half of them being completely useless against human intelligence. At that point you lose the uniqueness of playing your own build etc.
The game simply doesn’t work with pvp. It’s unfortunate but PVE and good PVP can never coexist. Adding a separate game mode is the best thing we could get.
That is a non issues. Pve optimized build fairing worse in pvp was always the case in Souls (and other games for that matter). The issue is switching those optimizations. Because how ER is structured and how big it is making new build is a chore and a half. And farming is worst in the series, drops of upgrade materials and eq pieces are so low they call for dedicated farming build. Making farming/buying materials easier would make it less troublesome to switch builds.
@@Nobody32990 You are just wrong. Having to dedicate an entire playthrough to survive the polarizing meta of pvp is not balance. I don’t care if that’s how it’s always been that’s what makes it bad. And it doesn’t even go both ways, many good pvp builds do great in pve. The game may function like a 3d fighter and low skill levels but any good player with decent reactions can 100% counter many, many styles of play. Which in a balanced and skill encouraging environment builds should not hold nearly as much weight as they do. You should be able to play how you want and make do with enough skill.
Souls pvp is just bad and , making adjustments to the game based off pvp performance that negatively affects pve is just a bad decision making. Hence why the game will always be pve focused without separate modes.
What's worse is that a half functioning pvp could still create fun moments, as it has done for many people. What completely destroys any semblance of fun pvp are the players. A large amount of playerbase has this need to exploit the hell out of any problems with the pvp to gain an advantage, fair and unfair. Such as abusing overpowered weapons, glitches, "twinking", cheating until there's nothing left except a few people getting easy wins using those broken systems and being toxic to others. People will always optimise the fun out of games for easy victories and with this many broken aspects you can't have many fun match ups.
Big brain take: let based ds2 man handle the PvP exclusively, while miyazaki handles the PvE.
I agree
yes.
Absolutely
Hell no. I don't want to go back to getting stunlocked by a Washing Pole from half a mile away.
@@belolacove I would rather get stun locked by a washing pole for a year straight than have to see rivers of blood and bloodhound step ever again.
Ironically, DS2 had the best pvp despite being the one game in the series that Miyazaki himself didn't work on. I might also be a little biased because it had two of my favorite weapons out of the whole franchise in Bone Fist and Puzzling Stone Sword, though Santier's Spear also can't be ignored. Not to mention every weapon had a guard break which was borderline guaranteed to open someone up regardless of what shield they were using.
Probably also helped that at some point bleed had gotten nerfed into the ground and hardly anyone was using it.
Yes
Bleed in DS2 is a lot weaker when compared to elden Ring. In DS2 it sucked pve wise but in pvp it was better because not only did it do damage, it also slowed your stamina recovery considerably. Like that's such a creative way to implement a status ailment.
Except Miyazaki did work on DS2. What are you smoking? He's the president of the company, of course he had his hand in it.
@@odinigh286 Except he didn't because he was busy overseeing the development of bloodborne. He didn't have any hand in developing DS2
@@lexkek5625 I actually found bleed to be a bit scary in Ds2 and one of my favorite builds. While it wouldn't deal much in the damage department bleed also applied a few other effects that helped. It would reduce max stamina for a short time as well as reduce movement speed and agility (which means less s and slower heals)
This meant once you bled someone you could play ultra aggressive and punish people heavily. It was amazing. God I miss Ds2 PvP
The main thing about the netcode is that it applies just as much to the pve and co op, which fromsoft seems to be putting a lot of bias towards. But instead of fixing issues they tack on little things like no solo invasions and it doesn't make any sense. Arguments (bad arguments, but arguments all the same) can be made that pvp isn't important in these games, but when the co op is also so heavily damaged, it really puts fromsofts motives into question.
Yeh, poor netcode ruins Coop just as much as PvP. Whenever I tried to Coop in DS3, it'd be so laggy that if you had aggro there was no way to properly dodge attacks. And if it got real bad, boss just becomes a sitting duck easy to slap around.
True. I literally just got out from a coop session in elden ring and after reducing this envoy's health to 0, I still got smacked by it with it's toot horn.
Thank you for this video Scott, and thank you Vaati for the retweet. Someone with Vaait's platform echoing Scott's sentiment is huge.
Back in Demon's Souls, DkS1 and DkS2 days, i can accept Welfare servers, poor balance, etc. The company was tiny, so that's fine. But how the fuck has nothing improved after Bloodborne, DkS3 and Sekiro? Fromsoft is a big dev now, and they've made a fuckload of money, so why the shit do we have the same kind of pvp with zero improvement as we were still in 2009? Like HELLLLLLLLLO???
ER is my first souls game and I fell in love. Did 3 play throughs and then started dueling and very quickly I ended up spending more hours on duels than pve. I’ve never had a multiplayer experience like this where I can customize my character and create infinite builds. After doing literally 3000+ duels over the span of a few months playing almost every day, I’ve become intimately aware of the core mechanics and thus it’s flaws. This game will never be balanced purely because of the infinite build options and that’s what makes it great, the variety. What has killed pvp is that 90% of the community issues and complaints could be easily implemented without reworking any of the systems of the game, simply changing some variable values would do the trick. Make bhs cost way more fp and stamina so you can’t spam it, and while it’s still strong, it’s an easy fix that doesn’t require any major changes. A flat pvp dmg reduction of 15-25% would also be easy to implement and would help increase the ttk. Carian slicer should do max 200 dmg instead it does 600 on a normal mage build. Even if they don’t want to put a lot of effort into balancing, there’s no excuse when so many of these issues could be fixed so easily. The net code would require much more investment to fix so I understand that not being touched, but pretty much everything else is unforgivable. I’m so sad I joined the community in its darkest hour, and I’ll never get to experience the glory of souls pvp that I’ve heard so much about. Still love this game, and I’ve had a ton of fun pvp’ing or else I wouldn’t have sunk so many hours into it, but disappointed that the pvp community basically got spit on by fromsoft this time around. If the Arena’s DLC or a giant pvp balancing patch doesn’t come ASAP, the game will truly die.
DS2 is actually a great example of what you described where, 'B-team' (devs of DS2, as 'A-team' of Miyazaki was working on Bloodborne) made sure to keep doing those fine tuning patches. Every new meta build was patched out after a month, since it is pretty simple to change some variables with balance.
Now, keep playing Elden Ring if the online stuff is fun for you.... but if stuff gets frustrating I def recommend going back and playing the other games ( Demon's Souls, Dark Souls1-3, Bloodborne ). These are all great in their own way. And perhaps after going through them all, Elden Ring will be patched again ;p
They will release a big balancing patch around the arena DLC to push sales after which they will wipe their hands clean of balancing . They are only in it for the money PvP generates
@@ravinkrishnan3183 that’s what I think will happen too. It depends on how long it will take tho, if pvp stays like this for 6 months or longer, I think the player base would’ve truly died off before then.
I would reckon the reason they don't fix their netcode, is because they simply can't. Whatever they might be doing for netcode might be buried under a decade of spaghetti code, with any attempt at unraveling it making the whole thing fall apart. If Fromsoft is reliant on reusing old game assets, I can only assume they are reliant on using old codebases too. And something about their old codebases could just be really flawed and truly not worth the monumental effort it would take to fix or replace.
Didn't they just hire another studio to remake Demons Souls in a new engine? All of these sales and they can't be arsed to start over with a good game engine for their new title?
But why are modders able to fix it then? Just look at the seamless coop mod.
@@SlenderSmurf They didn't hire Bluepoint, it's Bluepoint who got the license from Sony (not even from FromSoft, who only gave the approval) to work on the game and sell the remake. When you buy the remake you're giving money to Bluepoint and possibly Japan Studios and Sony, not to From.
@@kommentier9884 that's not really a fair comparison. That seamless co-op mod doesn't handle same tasks or the same volume that elden ring proper does. Plus, that co-op mod has its own litany of connection/sync issues, which is understandable. Modders usually get a pass anyways because they don't have to go through the same QA cycles a published game does. Nobody expects mods to work perfectly or even well when they release.
@@SlenderSmurf starting from scratch like that is an absolutely massive undertaking. It's not an issue of not can't being assed, as much as it is tossing out well over a decade of previous work that cant be transferred. Even if fromsoft adopted bluepoints work regardless of that, that is still an entirely different codebase that likely has an entirely different techstack & middleware, in an entirely different engine, made by different people that likely have an entirely different production pipeline, & likely enginered in an entirely different programming language that people at fromsoft do not know. Getting an entire studio to shift gears and relearn everything to fit a new engine & production pipeline is a monumental undertaking that is not worth the cost.
The first video I saw from Scott’s channel was him explaining the lag in Dark Souls pvp which was about 5 years ago. Many years later I looked up a Huntress guide for DBD and found his video which was what got me hooked on his YT and Twitch. It’s funny how I somehow keep getting back to him for guides on janky games.
Something I don’t understand is why DS1 had such a long lasting pvp community, even though the total fan base was way smaller, and the technical and balance aspects weren’t great. I literally played DS1 pvp for 4 years and it basically didn’t die off until DS3 came out. Now it feels like ER has died already and it’s only been a few months.
Well for one there was no weapon level matchmaking & no password matchmaking so the community as whole became close knit since players were becoming friends with the random phantoms they met along the way. Now we’re all just in our own little circles. There were other things to like the ability to invade infinitely up that kept activity going for a long time.
I think it also had to do with the fact that dueling was a very small component of the game, and so the people who played never had the delusion that the game was fair or balanced, but we played it anyway. Now people are spread across more titles, with less patience for unfair gameplay.
There are way more reds, relatively, to players that can be invaded, since they took out solo invasions and most alternative covenants. The experience is also rather awful as there's so many powerful crutches as well as builds to get cheap instant kills. Since it's so awful, people try to avoid it, doing things like summon in front of boss doors, which makes the invasion pool even smaller. This is a feedback loop, and not the only one. There's also the arms race of invaders and gankers using extremely broken builds. That is also a complex and nuanced issue.
And now, after months of it being trash, one patch that took a few steps forward, and a mod that disables invasions entirely (again feeding back into invader imbalance) releasing, we have a patch that takes it a step back.
That is how we got here.
Few reasons:
1) the pvp was really unbalanced... but once you learned some of the tech (toggling, omniroll) you could fight pretty much anything
2) there was a relatively chill and pretty cool community of dudes for the "hardcore" pvp crowd
3) DS2 just didn't have the same feel so a lot of PVPers either also played DS2 or just kept playing DS1
@@danlorett2184 DS2 was amazing lol. But in all fairness, the backstab tech of DS1 went pretty deep. It's just not the kind of learning curve most people would appreciate.
In DS2 u couldnt apply status effects with ghost hits, a true masterpiece
I'm kind of impressed. They managed to combine the worst aspects of pvp from previous titles, make them even worse, and add new problems on top of that. Now we have:
- DS1 poise
- DS2 phantom range
- DS3 quickstep
- spell/wa spam
- status buildup on dodges
watched your vid on elden ring PVP, saw the part about the weird half second lag and wanted to check out this video, absolutely lost it when i heard the words "miyazaki shuffle"
If emergent pvp is the thing that makes PvP special, more effort needs to be made into smoothing out (and facilitating) the emergent gameplay.
Instead, it's like they're afraid to add any structural support, because it might somehow confine or restrict the nebulous snowflake ideal of completely freeform pvp. And the end result of that is that pvp doesnt receive the gameplay structures it needs to progress into a more healthy, vibrant part of the game - one that's up to par with the community that enjoys it.
Whether we're talking about systems that promote interesting encounters (ie new formats for invasions to happen), or the reward structure (where covenant rewards?), FROM acts like they're afraid to develop the system at all.
I genuinely thought that arena + fleshed out covenant rewards would be a minimum bar for FROM to deliver at launch with Elden Ring, but while the PvE aspect is spectacular, the pvp system/structures actually feel like a step back.
I honestly don't even think it's that sadly, like it being a design choice per say. I think FromSoftware just doesn't care about PvP period and it become the first thing on the chopping block to remove.
DS3 for example had a Battle Royale mode in development, which if it came out with the game woulda predated PUBG funnily enough, but was dropped.
I suspect Elden Ring, with all these very clearly covenants, cut all the multiplayer stuff in crunch leaving the skeleton we have now. Which is sad, cus even though DS1 had a much shorter development cycle than ER, it had more unique multiplayer content. And I fully agree that adding these in proper is just as important as opening up those arena doors.
As a somewhat new soulsborne fan i've honestly only had good interactions during invasions and either extremely tense or just stupid and funny encounters when i get invaded while playing with friends. I dont know what regular pvp is like but i honestly love how random and unique invasions can be, and i dont want that gone from future souls games
Valid
Finally, applause for addressing the real problems with the PvP of the entire series including this game instead of just "Bloodhound Step." All of the annoying adherents complain about "kazools" who need to "gut gudd" and blind or ignorant to the real issues that keep people away (one of those reasons being the PvP community in general). There's a very good reason the co-op mod is so popular and it's not because the people using it don't have a big enough horse epeen but rather they don't want to be partaking in such dumb contests in the first place, with all the shitty server and connection problems From has zero interest in improving to go along with it.
I’d definitely argue that no matter how much you want it to be invasions aren’t PvP, they are PvEvP or however you’d like to think of that, the combat is great and unique but invasions are you choosing to take a detriment to prove you can be a challenging enemy in another persons path. You are looking for a variety of combat while providing a variety of experiences to the hosts.
yeah, this is what got me into the pvp and started to love it... i currently hate it tho
@@TheNikos3000 not arguing it doesn’t need changing, I just think people are approaching from the wrong perspective
@@jeremyrm7 Prob cuz most people look at it from a duelist perspective.
But I'll tell you what I find incredible From didn't remove, overleveled phantoms. I'd tell them to Google the definition of cheating. My problem is that I'd invade this people 3 out of 5 times and it's 10 times more unfair than dark souls thanks to the dumb poise they decided to add
Scott Jund always making banger vids
Im shaking and crying rn I cant believe scott would bang his vids
@@kaimacdonald3006 🥺 😢this is fr, im gonna tear up
I think they took a huge step backwards in pvp from DS3 to ER. so much potential for covenants given the lore, various purposes to invade, guard, curse worlds, etc. DS1 had a great, under appreciated system for tying in pvp w/ the lore and main game.
That's actually my biggest negative with the game. Covenants are not only great for roleplay, but also for adding unique multiplayer mechanics like what DS1 had.
Elden Ring clearly has pseudo covenants going on all over the place, and it almost seems more like they had to cut it all last second for crunch or something. This really should be something added in with an Arena update, so that the game has a proper multiplayer ecosystem.
Ds3 was already a massive step backwards when it came to pvp from ds2. No interactions with covenants, covenants that don't work properly (takes hours to be summoned as darkmoon), can't invade areas where the host defeated bosses, and getting connected more to gankers than solo hosts. All elden ring did is take one normal step backwards and finish what ds3 started.
@@JayWalkZ I really enjoyed DS1 the most. I hated that ALL equipment in DS2 had durability. literally had to change out rings in middle of fights b/c they broke.
@@tawilk ds1 has durability on weapons too. The only difference is that in ds1 you had to buy a repair kit to repair your weapons durability early in the game whereas in ds2 you didn't and your weapons durability resets whe you rest at a bonfire.
Edit: oh you meant equipment such as body armor and rings. Nvm. Disregard what i said.
I started invading in DSR and DS3 again and they are surprisingly active.
Very interesting video. As someone who actively avoids the PvP of darksouls, including jumping off ledges as soon as I see the message appear, it’s always nice to hear people who enjoy it talk about it passionately.
Personally speaking, I don’t think Miyazaki ever truly cared about PVP. He’s always been a “mechanics for story telling” kind of designer. Humanity, cooperation, invasions, covenants, they were all ways for him to tangibly tell a better narrative, from what I can tell.
Now, they’re more like obligations because people want them but the people making the games don’t have interest beyond that obligation. Complete speculation but that’s what seems the most consistent reason why it’s always there, but nothings improved.
I can’t say I cared about Elden ring enough to research anything about it, but I really couldn’t remember an in game reason why invasions are taking place in Elden ring. There’s no covenants, there’s no real reward when I was playing. It was just there.
Since i'm a PvE veteran, i really don't care about balancing of a game that's specifically made for PvE...however, throughout these games, it would seem that Hidetaka always had a secondary PvP element interwoven in the story..so i understand your take.
Personally, i just think they try their best, but since it's a one time payment for these games, with no monetization not even for server space, so i just think they do the bare minimum as to not get totally hated, and they just move on since there's no monetary incentive other than just "doing it for the fans" :)
However in the case of Elden Ring, this will not be excused, because they expected to sell 4 million copies, and they sold 13+...so they have extra god damn money to make a small group of devs that fix bugs and ballance sheit...i mean doing over triple the expected sales...there's kinda no excuse for them this time, so i'm with you guys.
And yes, if there's no excuse after 13 years of this terrible code...please explain to me why they still don't have moving mouths on our character when saying "hey", when drinking flasks or taking damage or anything, blank expression which is even worse in Elden ring with the addition of shouts and sound for them your character looks weird af having closed mouth during a shout in a 2022 game...i was watching a game from fucking 2005 yesterday and it had moving mouths that were accurate :)) n Fromsoft doesn't care about that.............THEY DO HOWEVER care about animating the frenzied flame merchant's fingers to hit the correct notes on his guitar :D that deserved attention but not god damn important stuff i guess.
Super impressed with the production quality of this Scott, good shit.
Just want to throw in my two cents about pvp. I'm not sure the validity of this, but if I remember correctly the point of invasions is that it provides the host with an extra challenge, and in effect the invader is treated like an enemy that is supposed to be defeated (so ultimately the invader is supposed to lose). Also, since invasions kind of require that the host is still playing the main game, wouldn't that mean that the only type of pvp that maintains the player base (in the long run at least) are duels? Finally, I think that the reason why pvp takes a backseat is because it ultimately fails to meet the core parts of souls borne games, those being (imo) the high but ultimately fair difficulty (which would contain variables in invasions, as difficulty varies based on the invader's skill) and the themes of death and change in the lore. The reason why pvp is kept us likely because it's just something that's expected so they have to throw it in. That being said aside from a couple things it looks like Elden Ring seemingly perfected the fromsoft formula, so I wouldn't be surprised if there only minor tweaks to the single player experience in the next game but massive changes to the multi-player
The thing is all older souls game had dedicated pvp areas. So people would just go to certain areas to get invaded. Covenants also helped matched people that wanted to pvp together. I’m Elden ring we have none of that so it’s kinda a kick in the face
@@juddakooda9520 im hoping the (most likely coming) dlcs will have a focus on multiplayer and bring covenant related things. There is already strong reason to believe arenas have all but been confirmed at this point
Invasions made a lot more sense in Demon's Souls, where the overall tone was more oppressive, so having some enemy just show up and kill you out of nowhere fit better (not to mention that happened anyway in darker world tendencies), and they leaned into that experiment with the Old Monk fight. Dark Souls folded it in okay with the covenants, and Bloodborne did some cool stuff with making the possibility of invasion an NPC that would be spawned if you co-oped, invaded, or entered the base game nightmare areas, but you could kill them to prevent it, but it honestly felt like it was there because it was always there rather than because it really fit the design of the games.
Honestly with Elden Ring there's such a huge design contradiction between the massive open world and the transient nature of invasions that they were forced into compromising the former (preventing horse riding) to avoid making invaders irrelevant. Even in the legacy dungeons there's so much room for players to run around that it limits forcing interactions with invaders. This was becoming an issue in Dark Souls as well, as the less linear level design compared to Demon's Souls led to more restrictions on host movement during invasions, but the wide open design of Elden Ring really brought that issue into sharp focus.
Online multiplayer is by far the most difficult technical aspect for a dev. The network engineers who can do that make over $200k, because they are in that much demand. I would imagine it’s difficult to find these ppl, but I would bet they have been trying to hire more of them. I doubt the problem is from being lazy and not caring, there’s some other stuff going on behind the scenes.
You can't tell me it's that difficult for such a large company to implement multiplayer features that far older and smaller games have done on a much smaller budget. The game is peer-to-peer based, they wouldn't have to set up servers for everything to go through. Give me one reason why the regions for matchmaking are still just Japan and 'not Japan' other than they just don't care enough.
@@richcatclipsofficial5098
It is that difficult. Programming Multiplayer is much harder than you would think.
You may not believe me, but you have to try to make it so every aspect of the shared world is exactly the same, for each player individually, all happening simultaneously.
It’s much more complicated than it seems and even most experienced game devs have no clue when it comes to this.
They have the money to hire more, but no everything can be solved by just throwing money at it.
Think of the disasters that many triple A companies have done over the years, and they had no shortage of budget to spend.
Also From is just recently growing into this.
@@alcoyot They're not "just recently growing into this", they've had 13 years to make a better pvp experience. There is just no excuse for some of the things that hamper pvp, like the example I gave. It would be extremely simple to ensure that players are matched based on proximity, but apparently Fromsoft just doesn't care and thinks it's fine for players in America to invade players in China with 350 ping.
Worst part is that theres no excuse for the atrocious Netcode anymore. GGPO and Strive netcodes are the living testament that online gaming can be done right if you put in the effort to give your playerbase the best possible experience.
I’ve been saying this about the status effects for years, dual vykes spear builds are what killed my interest in elden rings pvp… it’s just so insane that they include different damage modifiers yet they never once considered to add a player modifier that reduced madness buildup? Honestly it really does feel like there’s only a handful of people at fromsoft who care about the pvp.
Imo I don’t think ER is the best fromsoft game I prefer ds1-ds2-DS mainly for its small unique open world and replay ability
Ita not even just netcode. Changing the interaction style of hit detection during pvp would remedy nearly every issue in most circumstances
Ds2 was the game i played the most. Still had fun in pvp years after release and into ds3
bloodborne pvp is entirely balanced, the key to good balance is just make everything overpowered and bloodborne did it best (they also only had like 20 sumn weapons but we ignore that)
I have a feeling they will have more single player only experiences like Sekiro
the bad ending
I tried to get into souls PvP so many times...I don't care that I lose 9 fights out of 10. But there's a difference between tough and unfair mechanics. Enemy sword hitting me while being waaay out of its range? Sure, you can say that it is a mechanic and I just have to learn it. But it's just an excuse for a bad design/system/whatever you want to call it. I love souls games and the community around it, but many players refuse to say a single bad word about these games. So whenever there is something that is badly designed, they just add it to the list of things that are supposed to raise the difficulty.
Definitly agree with this. Fromsoft pvp is such a unique and fun pvp experience yet for some reason so many horrible imbalances hold it back.
I dream of the day we see fromsoft pvp that isnt plagued with the same issues that’ve existed in the series for over a decade.
I was using exitlag to see if I could get better ping and the program showed that elden ring have only 2 main servers, one is US oregon01 and second US the dalles01.
this maybe one of the reasons why mp experience is so bad
that's crazy I live one state up from their server and I still get dogshit ping lmao
It's peer to peer so the matchmaking server is irrelevant
The problem is that the regional restrictions have always been "In Japan" and "Not In Japan", so the p2p connections can be from basically anywhere in the world, unless you are in Japan.
I want to be invaded in all my games, honestly
I want to do some majora's mask wedding quest or Romania ranch questline and have a red link drop in, throw a bomb at me, and kill me while I fail the quest because of it
"Romania ranch" Lmao, that fucking slayed me
Oh shit lmao
Thx autocorrect
The excuse of x game had this issue and it took y time to fix just is nonsense to me and it’s really the only argument I ever hear. As you said this is the 6th game with PvP and invasions, things should be getting better not worse
Chad Dark Souls 2. It's the best PvP, and one of the better PvE games.
DS2 has the worst PVP
@@belolacove=🤓🐳
I am a web developer, not a game developer, but how do i see it from my perspective the good technical aspect of multiplayer in stable and responsive and lag-less fashion is impossible to achieve for them on engine they currently have. Maybe i am wrong but i see pvp interaction ( or any multiplayer interaction ) as a extention what i do daily in making and maintaining a comprehensive web services.
Just with a bit different architecture in communication between two sides, in a web app, service, page one side sends requests and the other sides accepts them and sends responses and if all is well in communication the system works. They probably do the similar thing but only sending a bunch of requests at once with hopes that some will get through, without such rigid checks if it is recieved on the other side so you get ghost hits and discrepancy between positions of two players. Otherwise it would be unplayable because not all communication between two peers will get through.
For it to be better a whole restructuring of the game engine would be needed or even a new engine.
That being said, i hope they will balance the pvp and would be satisfied with that. Ghost hits, lag, discrepancy in distance is annoying but i can get used to it because i dont believe it can be much better as thing stand, no matter how much effort they put into it.
I think they add pvp and any multiplayer because engine is rudimentary capable of it so why not but they are aware they can not make it much better because of the tehnical nature of the very fundations of those games, that is the engine.
I think that a good weapon and spells balance alongside with increasing health gain multiplier for the vigor by 30% across the board ( for players and npcs and enemies in pvp and pve ) would help pvp.
I would have traded half the lands between for pvp to be better… take moutaintop of the giants, concentrated snowfield, and every lame dungeon out of the game, and fix the pvp- suddenly elden ring really is the best game ever made.
"honey? you havent touched any of your crucible knights, ulcerated tree spirits, alabaster lords, burial watchdogs, fallingstar beasts, 2 astels, and numerous near identical catacombs?"
*"CAN WE PLEASE HAVE SOME GOOD PVP!"*
Thanks for making this Scott. As an almost OG DS1 PvP lover who has persisted every title through Elden Ring… I originally had hope that their very creative, groundbreaking janky experience, would become something refined and masterful. It’s essentially been copy-pasted from one release to the next. My personal conclusion is that they do not and never have understood the potential, due to it being seen as immersion and complimentary to the pve world rather than a standalone entity.
Yeah. It's very depressing. I guess we should have seen this coming when we learned you could only invade co-op players.
If I were working for fromsoft, I would propose to have a place in elden ring with dedicated servers for pvp where you could do regular duels, 2v2, 3v3 and maybe even a complete free for all, the arena behind the giant jar in caelid would seem nice.
Dark souls PVP enthusiasts don't even enjoy Elden Ring's PVP, and yet they expect PVE players to welcome invaders for the plethora of fun experiences they claim to provide. I completely agree with this video, and were they to fix all this shit, I probably wouldn't hate the invasion mechanic as much as I do.
Sniper Elite 5, the newest one, released this year in 2022, has a very Dark Souls-esque invasion mode built into it, actually. Only other game with something like Dark Souls invading pvp.
Watchdogs 2 had a suprisingly fun invasion mode too. I have been enjoying the invasions in SE5 alot, hope it stays active for awhile!
Holy shit, thank you for making this video. I've been echoing these thoughts for years and it's so frustrating to hear people just say "Well, it's not a PvP game so you shouldn't expect it to be better." The fact of the matter is From Software is a company aiming to sell a product and if there's a part of that product that's bad, it's only going to hurt them. Adding PvP and not putting any effort into making it function well only serves to hurt the game. If they don't care to make it work, they shouldn't have included it at all. I can forgive Demon's Souls, Dark Souls 1, and even Dark Souls 2 for some of their jankiness, but past that, it's no longer acceptable. They're not the same small quirky studio like they were back then. They're much bigger, have more recognition, and more experience. They need to be held to a higher standard. It feels like people are still living in 2011 and are just willing to accept mediocrity because "It's From Software, that's just how they are," which I find to be ridiculous. The game doesn't need to be perfect, but it can certainly be better than this.
That’s exactly how I feel. Like if you’re gonna half ass the pvp don’t even add it. I’d rather not have it than to just keep expecting something good and being disappointed every time
Yeah you ever notice how the meaningful pvp patches come out around the DLCs
Thanks for putting this all out there. I agree, and even as player who primarily does single player and co-op, the bad balancing and crappy connectivity/netcode has been a big frustration for years. I just want it to be better.
I think if the PvP wasn't so janky in every game, I'd feel more encouraged to do it. Dark Souls 1 PvP could have been great, but the Backstab mechanic pretty much single-handedly ruined it. They could have patched the game to make a system more like DS2's or DS3's backstabs (even if that change was PvP exclusive) and it would have been an absolute game changer. But no. They didn't do shit.
i like more the ds3 backstab system than in ds2 tho. even if ds2 is my fav for pvp.
These games are single player games with an asymmetrical mutiplayer element. Things are not supposed to be equal and balanced. Why their network is laggy and what not is a question for the ages and the only actual question to ask.
i have said it time and time again, Myazaki is 100% not into pvp but they will add it for the sake of players, they even gave a try to a no pvp game and it succeeded all the same.
When hidetaka Myazaki took a more back seat spot in dark souls 2 the game had way better PVP and summon system as a whole.
Their patches on DS 3 and elden ring proves that they really just want to make an excellent game and release it, which they're excellent at there is nothing like playing these games and i say that after i played almost all souls like games.
they don't fix VERY obvious issues, forget balancing...they went to fix bugs and they didn't fix some of the worst bugs in the game (2 minute dc and helmet swaps) i truly believe that if there was no backlash or community disappointment, they would just release the game as it is and never update it until a DLC drops.
Their balancing is probably only behind blizzard in terms of how bad they balance their games, obviously this game is not PVP based game no matter how many times people try to convince others that it is, but its still unique and fun...also as you said, there is no excuse anymore with the sales of elden ring that they don't have dedicated coders, balance team etc.
as a Fromsoft fan since DS 1 and i say that proudly, even though complaining about PVP is like complaining about the minigame "grognak the barbarian" not working correctly in fallout 4, its still sad, as their mini game is amazing and fun to play but DAMN do they make it hard to remain in enjoyment with it because of how much they don't care about it.
i understand that business wise they earn NOTHING from PVP aside from small youtube leadaway for people to see the game, but yeah...i'm still disappointed that they don't care, at least we agree on something...DS 2 will forever be the best pvp.
i'll still breathe the copium that the next patch will fix things but since DS 3 i stopped having high expectations of PVP.
I understand your decision...but i will hope that you will be back after they do some good balancing...Copium.
This, Miyazaki just doesn't care for pvp, he made an excellent product and then moved on to the next
@@TitaniumSubscriber and there is nothing wrong with that...just a shame we wont get our good souls style pvp.
@@TarnishedEldenKing Didnt ubisoft tried that with for honor? Theres also mordhau. Its not ds for sure but you see them trying.
@@Stevemastersreason i thought for honor / mordhau made entirely for pvp?
@@Stevemastersreason both of those are dedicated pvp games.
I'm with you there. Came to check on it after I heard of a recent patch, but looks like progress is nonexistent. Not just Elden Ring either, 5 months later and still no servers for their other games on PC. RIP souls pvp, I'll miss you.
If this taught me anything, it's to never buy into the hype for any game. Including fromsoft games. ER after the open world charm wears off, feels incredibly underwhelming after beating the game. The PvP is just so much worse than ds2-ds3 pvp, and as someone who mostly plays these games for PvP it felt like a huge disappointment.
The pvp is absolute shit but I’m sure you really can’t say you didn’t get your moneys worth with the PVE even with just one play through. The replay value definitely suffered from the pvp though
It's a sad moment to, in the same hour, see Scott make a video on the lack of longevity in pvp;
As well as Rataskor make a similar video on ER lore
I wonder if some devs at Fromsoft are wondering about making these games Coop only. PvP is interesting, but I feel that the invasion-haters are louder than before. Which is funny considering invasions are less frustrating than ever now that it’s Coop invasions only.
Yeah but when they do get invaded it’s by some min/max build that can 1shot and has more flasks than them, so it’s just a bad experience. It’s too bad cause a good pvp fight is exhilarating.
4:30 Being primarily a single player game is not ample justification for poor craftsmanship. In any field of design, creating good work does not solely mean dedicating your energy to the parts of the design you like.
For example, if I am commissioned to design a poster, and I design a poster with a fantastic background illustration, but poor typesetting. It results in a great graphical experience, but a very poor informational experience. My point being, prioritizing what you like to work on as a designer is ignorant of the fact that design is always done in service of an audience, real or imagined. And to prioritize your needs as a designer over the needs of your audience, will always produce a half-baked experience.
As an aside, I'd like to state that if it was not for the pvp community in Das1 it likely would have never had such longevity.
I'd have thought it's obvious. It's treated like an after-thought because it IS an after-thought, to the majority of the community. I know we like to think we matter and we prop up the community after the pve players stop but we're just lying to ourselves to make ourselves feel better about caring about something more than most. The other half of the people who continue playing long after the majority stop are the speed runners, who play offline, and who do the same thing except they complain when they fix stuff as opposed to us complaining when they don't balance shit or fix exploits.
PVP in Souls is an afterthought. It was slapped on because PVP capability sells titles to people who don't give a shit about anything else but proving their e-peen exists.
It all begins and ends with the netcode. They don't care enough to upgrade and make it actually playable so I'll never even bother because it's just not an enjoyable experience for me regardless of how incredible the idea is.
Heartbreaking but true. There's so so so much untapped potential to be had in this game.
Its crazy. I didnt like ds3 that much but seeing this footage makes me feel a bit nostalgic. Hope the servers come back up. Im done with elden ring.
I was a pretty good invader in DS 3 during the early years, I had so much fun!
I started giving up when I realized that no matter how good you play, all the odds will be against you: outnumbered, over leveled phantoms, infinite summons, friendly fire between invaders......
The final nail in the coffin came someday in 2019~2020 when it was ALWAYS me against usually 5 (with a summoned invader in the gank squad) abusing everything you can imagine: crossbow glitch, estus cancel, estus refilling, seeds popping up every time....
I tried some invasions in Elden Ring,but nah..... didn't went too far.
From Software is against invasions. That or they think that everyone invading plays like Jeenine and other professional invaders.
In my opinion, it's the mentality of people that is the problem. Toxic players will always find a way to break the game no matter what.
you sound dumb as hell
My guess is FROM would love to improve the netcode for PvP but are at the limit of what is possible technically given how the rest of the game is coded. To get the netcode for a peer-to-peer fighting game right, and this is a very difficult problem, every system needs to be designed from the ground up with the purpose of optimizing for PvP, but Elden Ring was not designed that way. It would probably require them to redesign massive parts of their engine to fix the problems that have existed for 13 years.
I think if they added cool rewards for PVP I would play it more...It sucks when you beat 3 players by yourself legitimately with no cheese plays, it should give you something cool...Stat boosts or unique weapons and armor
There's not much to really offer though. Stat bonuses would be game breaking in a lot of ways, and become a hinderance to balance. A cooler idea would be something like Fortnite's battle crown. If you can chain successful invasions, you build up a counter that numerically shows your skill, one number up for each kill, but if you die once, you lose it. Imagine someone summoning into your world and it flashes a giant 50 above their head. Your whole crew would be like "OH SHIT THIS GUY'S INSANE." It'd be a fun way to show skill level without making anything complicated, and people would love to grind out invasions to see how high they could get their streak. And for people getting invaded by dangerous players, it'd feel like a huge accomplishment if you could break their streak, either alone or as a team; it'd be way hype.
Yeah... Maybe we could have clubs that give you special spells and items after you collect enough invasion rewards... Like a covalent or something...
@@heychrisfox We had that in Dark Souls 2. When your win-loss ratio in the arena reached certain positive thresholds your red Phantom got a glow effect applied to it which further increased down the line.
@@thatguywiththeguitar7203 I disagree, locking content behind online (which remember, isn't free on console) would go against pretty much everything that makes FromSoftware one of the best companies existing today.
@@SimoneMrg Covenant items were also always farmable offline, so no its just missing content right now in elden ring and it doesnt matter if console players are offline.
It’s cool to hear a pvp fanatic kinda shit on it. I actually don’t think it’s that bad. It’s not great either. But it IS conceptually great.
It seems maybe pvp just stems from Miyazaki finding new ways to test/punish players. Maybe that’s truly it’s entire purpose.
dark souls 2 meta.
i feel like they will make adjustments in pvp, especially if they add an arena.
seeing ye olde ds3 b roll footage brings me back
I think many people view EldenRing as a live service game. But in my opinion, PvP is a bonus to this huge game. I feel the same way about EldenRing as I do about The Last of Us.
Single player, plus multiplayer. Nor is this a game like Dead by daylight, Dead by daylight is clearly a PvP based game.
If they want to develop a better and more continuous PvP scene for EldenRing they would have to start from the beginning as a live service game.
Of course that's no excuse for Fromsoft not making more PvP balance patches, but I feel a little sorry for Fromsoft who is doing well with just the game itself + DLC in the terrible situation that AAA studios are greedily squeezing money out of even single player games these days.
I am mainly a PvE player, so I don't have many complaints, but I understand that it is not enough for those who are mainly PvP players.
My native language is not English, so there may be some grammar and words that are wrong, but this is my opinion.
Wait there actually IS a separate modifier for PvP damage??? What is it tuned up or something??? The solution to balance the combat isn't even THAT difficult, it wouldn't even take that long, especially not if they hired a separate team.
Basically go through the PVP balance testing process and give every piece of equipment in the game, weapons, armour, rings/talismans, spells, give them all two stat tables that can be toggled at the press of a button so as not to overload the screen, showing stats against mobs on one screen and people on the other, it would require the same calculations as working out mob damage annoyingly, but I feel like asking for more than that is a pipe dream.
Of course things like invasion balancing are far more nuanced, but this would absolutely fix the severe, overarching problem of insane damage right now.
I agree.
It's really sad, it's gotten to the point where it would be nice if fromsoft had worthwhile competition on some level that understood this aspect of their games and cared about it.
Sadly, I think Elden Ring has proven that the formula just doesn't work for a long term experience without the multiplayer, we have by far the biggest, arguably best pve experience fromsoft has ever made, with the largest initial numbers it's ever had but the game is effectively in it's dying stages faster than any other game in this spiritual series.
I think it's gonna be a solid 5 years or so before anyone who gives a shit does anything that comes from the understanding of what has made souls pvp a good thing in the series if fromsoft doesn't do anything about it now. Kind of sucks.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Dark Souls 2 not have things like the hit sound during rolls and status build up without being hit? There are so many mechanical things DS2 has that the other games don't, so I assume it didn't have those either. Netcode issues were still there but DS2 had these really small differences like your status bar not filling up when you get an increase in your resistances, and you can exit DS2 with alt+F4 and the game will save your progress just fine.
Not that there's much to be gained from it, because I think the ultimate issue with the gameplay aspect of PvP is how limited we really are. I think the inability to free aim ranged attacks forces a lot of sub-optimal design choices. I mean, would we have Stars of Ruin if you could aim magic with a reticle instead of locking on and letting the spell itself do the work? And when it comes to melee, I feel so much of the ebb and flow relies more on trickery and trapping your opponent into having no options, versus just being really good at swinging a sword. I know I'm talking about fundamental stuff here, but that's the issue IMO. This series of games is built on a foundation from 2009. Maybe it will always be flawed, because Demon's Souls was flawed.
Apologize to DS2 right now!
Why? I love ds2
@@ScottJund not really meant for you, my man. Just the haters.
Dark Souls 3 after all the dlcs and patches had my favourite PvP and all it needed was a few minor things fixed and it would've been perfect.
But I don't want to give up on Elden Ring PvP, it has so much potential, and there are so many awesome builds and playstyles you can do, so much more than the souls games.
Also yeah remember me? I was the one calling out mages and quickcasting on your last vid lol 😂 nice to see you again scotty
Not necessarily a justification, but: I feel Elden Ring has been somewhat rushed by the end. Just think about the fact that the NPC quests were not completely implemented until a later date/patch. I personally would have waited a year more to have them polish all those rough edges, add in all that they meant to add, and have a true gem on hand... But, it is what it is, I guess.
This might have also led to more variety in PVP modes, as some of the cut content seem to suggest (see "Effigy of Malenia" etc). Since the lack of Covenants also is part of the issue, from my point of view...
Of course, this doesn't solve the problem of the main "formula" for PVP still being what it is (unupgraded weapons can partially solve the 1HKO problem but, ofc that's not realistically feasible outside of community-made custom tournaments; you can't expect people to comply when you invade), nor it excuses the poor netcode (nothing does, we are not talking of a small indie company here). Though, I also feel like that From is not that keen on experimenting after DkS2 "partial backlash" (e.g. Soul Memory, etc.) and just left it as is - with a bit more care put over 1P-invasion/"VS twinks" tutelage. I'd like to see them try again on that front, since new isn't always bad.
Definitely didn't need another year, maybe a few more months but the game was still in pretty good shape at launch (Much better than most other AAA games)
@@badboje6040 good shape being unplayable for a large group of people for several weeks due to terrible performance?
@@ShaCaro that was more of a poor pc port issue, the game itself was in good shape, the port was shoddy but thats typical for fromsoft
Dark Souls 2 was BY FAR the best game in terms of its PvP, the main issue it had was its quite dull map design and slight net code issues, but it was amazing in terms of balance. Essentially every class of weapon was usable at a competitive level - new things were being discovered years later. The PvE wasn't bad either - I didn't enjoy it as much as DkS1, but I enjoyed it far more than DkS3. That was the only game in the series which felt as though a reasonable amount of effort had gone into its PvP, and I find it too much of a coincidence that Miyazaki wasn't involved. Every game he directs chastises PvP to a higher degree. Removing the ability to invade solo hosts was sacrilege. I won't be buying the next game he directs.