I was worried how the reception on this video would be but it's been reassuring to see so many people share similar sentiments. But there been one similar line of thought within the negative comments that's perplexing me, wherin some viewers seem to be under the illusion that I want Elden Ring to bend to my tastes, when in reality I'm just observing and lamenting over what's been lost along the way. That's all this video is, really. An untangling of my feelings and experience with these games over the past decade and a half. I wouldn't have spent hundreds of hours playing a game if I didn't really like it for the good it did provide, but that doesn't mean I can't think critically about it too.
Probably a minority but I miss Dark Souls 1's style the most. It was a simple game, very quaint in hindsight, but it clicked with me the most. Not just the gameplay but also the environments and general artstyle. Every game after that just becomes more and more grandiose and anime, and my old tired ass can't keep up with it.
I absolutely agree with each game that comes out. I miss the slower clunky game play of Dark Souls 1. And have generally stopped enjoying the newer souls games. I haven't even played elden ring in months and have almost zero interest in it now.
As a demon's souls fan, dark souls 1 was kind of a dry fart of a renaissance faire!! I play fromsoft games because they're Cool, not because they're a serious grimgrey romp or a tightly balanced experience. When 2 was like a weird fever dream again, I was very pleased. ...this, of course, means I know I'm not exactly in the critical consensus! just my two cents. elden ring gets away with a lot in my books because ultimately it's a game where half the weapons make me go :O is that a fuckin magic model of the solar system i swing around like a mace??
I duck ds1 because of the mechanics and gimmicks, but the world was easy to get lost in. I remember watching feeble kings section on his ds1 lvl 1 run, that lil clip in blight town was exactly how I felt. I'm lost, it's dark, I'm alone, and weak... is this how my ds1 1st playthrough ends? Genuine questions and fears caused by a game lol... good times. I actually felt bad for soldier to, i could finally understand all the love he gets. Bro came thru when you could just randomly chill with him in some of the hardest spots.
I don’t think you’re as alone as you feel. Even most of us who love all the games that have come since hold Dark Souls 1 in a very high place. There’s something special and unique about it that still holds up separately from the rest. I’m an OG Armored Core fan, fan from Demon’s Souls to Elden Ring I’ve beaten them all and each one is special and appreciated for its own specific reason. And the best part about that is it gives me a reason to go back and play the previous games too, not just stick to the newest one.
@@AmnesiacDoe DS1 was a game that did not age well to be honest. Somewhere between a third to a quarter of the game is blatantly unfinished, backstab cheesing makes a lot of the enemies kind of a joke once you figure it out, interface is utterly shit, etc. I beat it at least 3 times, but man, it feels like they are decades behind in some game design aspects, especially the interface. I have no real desire to play it again. I never understood why DS2 got so much hate. Sure, you take an elevator from a poison swamp mine into a Mario 64 style lava castle, but the game also doesn't play like a tech demo and there is, gasp, a 2D grid inventory. Something that Baldur's Gate had in the mid 90's. Not to mention way more build variety and viability. Elden Ring not having a quest log when you can easily be on half a dozen quests at the same time, spread out over a massive world, is yet another head-scratching moment where I have to imagine this game was designed by ascetic monks who have never heard of any video game outside of their monastery before. It was fine in Dark Souls where quests were usually "talk to this NPC whenever you find him on one of the 3 or so paths you can possibly take" with only one or two very obscure quests like saving Solaire's life in DS1 for example. JP developers tend to do this kind of thing a lot; reinvent the wheel as if it wasn't invented 30 years prior, and then forget to add spokes. I gave up and had to look up quest guides simply because I forgot what progress point I was on, and sometimes I forgot which quests I was even on.
I feel like there's a lot of crossover between Fromsoft fans who feel exhausted by the new adopted open world formula and Zelda fans who feel exhausted by the new adopted open world formula. I am personally sick to death of open worlds. Give me a tightly designed, more limited linear world that opens up as I explore, please, with well tuned challenges that can more easily take into account my current character progress.
Right, not like from soft designed the most intuitive and deliberate open world we've ever seen in an action game. One where you don't need countless map markers, pop ups, characters mumbling inane nonsense to themselves, and hud markers to actually make it worth exploring. Not like they baked so much story into the open world design and all the enemies from bosses to mobs. Not like they added new mechanics, features, weapon and build options and more ways for you to interact with that world. But no. Open world = bad. If you are burnt out on open world games why would you buy the open world souls game??? It was literally the main gimmick and sales pitch. If you were exhausted of open world why did you pay 40 dollars when you were explicitly told the dlc was ANOTHER OPEN WORLD TO EXPLORE? make it make sense.
That's funny, because basically all of Fromsoftware's previous games before elden ring were tightly designed linear games. If you don't like open worlds, that's completely fine, but maybe pick from literally any of their other games that isn't an open world instead, nobody's forcing you to play Elden Ring just because fromsoft made it. After making more or less linear games for so long, open world is just the direction they wanted to go in and they did really well at it, but there's no reason for you to put yourself through something you know you won't like. Rather than be frustrated that they didn't choose to make one type of game, why not just celebrate their successes with the type of game they did choose to make, because whilst not everyone likes open world games, a lot of people still do, me included. I think it's unfair to want them to only make one type of game forever when there's so much variety out there
I didn't really fuck with botw but totk is probably one of the only good open world games I've ever played. That being said I've been of the mind that dark souls has never really recovered from how they started designing the games with 3. FROM's more experimental recent games like bloodborne, sekiro and AC6 definitely did more for me than DS2/3 and ER, that's for sure.
I feel like one of the GIGANTIC things holding Elden Ring back for me as a player is the fact that the controls just feel... unresponsive? Or, rather, they just feel antithetical to what Elden Ring wants to be. Like, I could deal with the bosses that have more complex patterns and strange delays to their attacks, and regular overworld enemies that are more complex than early-game ER bosses but give fewer rewards... I could deal with all that and try to struggle through it if, when I press roll and fail, I wasn't punished TWICE - once with damage, and twice with a roll I input 3 IRL seconds ago... usually followed up my more damage. I could deal with it if they had decided to make Roll a dedicated button for once instead of continuing to share it with sprinting, meaning that Rolling happens on button RELEASE instead of PRESS despite the games MUCH more twitch-responsive nature. The game's controls want you to sit back and observe bosses' 37-hit-chain movesets, but the game's design wants you to react and do shit on-the-fly because the bosses' attacks are twice as fast as their startups as well as dragging them halfway across the arena in an instant (meaning there is no way to hang back and learn). Add that on top of the fact that 40 levels in vigor is practically REQUIRED if you want to get any real learning done (since most enemies past Limgrave - let alone bosses - will 2-shot you without it), so going and changing around your build isn't really super flexible, either... I dunno. It feels like Elden Ring wants to be a more slow, considerate game like DS1 and DS2 sometimes, and other times it wants to be the Ritalin-fueled crack-nightmare adrenaline-fest that Bloodborne and DS3 were, and it really grates against itself for it. Do I dislike the game? No, not really. I actually quite like the game as a whole experience. The world feels bleak, but still somewhat lived-in (which was an experience that none of the DS games prior really game me) and the visual and aural experiences are just beautiful. But MAN, there are things that keep it from being my favorite of From's games.
Oh man, the egregious input buffer being carried on in these games despite them being faster is a sticking point for me too, as well as sprint and roll still sharing a button. The latter gets rather aggravating when you die to something you know you managed to read because it's not "I know I pressed the button", it's "I didn't release it fast enough".
@@Emarrel It's such a bittersweet feeling, because when I play it with my friend we have a *WHALE* of a time! We spent like 10 or 15 minutes on Blackgaol Knight just stunlocking him with the greathammer's scoop weapon art and dying if we ever "dropped the combo" so we could try and perfect him! The disparity in build effectiveness didn't matter as much when we could focus on juggling the boss's aggro between us so we could get some breathing room in. But trying to play through alone to get to the points where we COULD play together again meaningfully (i.e. dungeon-like areas with a boss at the end) felt like a slog if I tried to "play it fair" by actually engaging with the enemies or felt like I was just rushing through stuff to get to those areas.
@@Emarrel input buffer is king. Lies of p? I think felt like trash because there was no input buffer. Roll, deflect and hit to heal and then after the deflect, he just stood still despite me pressing heal
It does seem like most discourse is skewed toward the mechanical aspect of teh game rather than the roleplaying and replayability parts which are equally important. you're spot on about a bunch of the cool stuff being gatekept by open world busywork. I beat the game with a sorcerer build on release and it took a dlc coming out to convince me to start a second character (paladin theme, pretty baller so far)
Literally clapped and pumped my fists at the Matthewmatosis line. He was right then, he's still right, and I agree with basically everything you said in the video. Elden Ring is the first Fromsoft game I didn't complete immediately. I actually took a long break from the game about 2/3 the way through because it just wasn't gripping me anymore. Compared to all the Souls games which I've completed at least twice for each. What's funny is that, Elden Ring has cemented what I really want out of From games now. I want them to go full tilt into action rather than RPG if they want to keep this design philosophy going forward. I want more stuff like Sekiro, which had way more replay value for me because, like you said, every time I beat a boss or cleared an area I would go "I want to do that again!" I even beat and replayed the boss-rushes, something I NEVER do in games that offer them, because of the wonderfully varied boss design and fun multi-purpose prosthetic weapons and combat arts you can unlock and upgrade.
I remember watching your Demon's Souls and Dark Souls 1 NG+7 a decade ago and man those videos and the PVP adventure of yours were good fucking times, with how you feel with Elden Ring yeah I agree especially with NG+. I never bothered with those because everything is a chore to collect again.
I feel very similar! Liked Elden Ring enough to put 200 hours into my first character through several ng+s. Tried to start a new one for the DLC and couldn't will myself to keep going. Playing through the DLC on my OG character in ng+something. The open world is very cool and fun to explore but I also struggle to force myself to turn the game on and play for a long time because there's so much to do.
What a validating listen, been more or less giving this same rant ever since the game released. I feel as though Dark Souls' reputation as "the hardest game ever!!1!" was something of a death sentence for From's design philosophy from that point onward, as they felt the need and tried harder and harder to one-up themselves with each subsequent title. I don't think Dark or Demon's Souls were ever particularly difficult to play from a purely mechanical perspective, it was more that they had a unique combination of being mechanically complex while being very demanding as far as understanding and engaging with those mechanics went. Dark Souls is "the hardest game ever" if you don't know how equip load works, if you don't pay attention to your stamina bar, or if you don't allocate your stats somewhat efficiently. But at the end of the day, it isn't particularly difficult to parse and avoid Ornstein or Smough's attacks, and with a little patience most players can get through that fight, and by extension the entire game, within a reasonable amount of time. The draw of those games, for me anyway, wasn't necessarily tied to any mechanical difficulty, but the concept of an adventure through what were some of the most captivating and well-sculpted worlds I had ever seen in a game, that was inherently dangerous and required me to deeply consider every decision I made, both in and out of combat. The "difficulty" (I think "challenge" is a better word), was in learning what to do, not struggling to do it. "What's down those stairs? A scary new enemy, what does it do? How do I avoid its attacks? Should I try to fight it, or come back later? They're too strong, but they're guarding an item. I want that item! I'll bash my head against this until I win, not because I have to, but because I want to. The item is a shitty ring, aw. But they dropped a cool sword, awesome! What's through this door?" I still get this sense of wonder with their more recent titles, but I haven't felt a desire to replay any of these games (unmodded) since Bloodborne. While the exploration is still there, and the worlds are still captivating (if not as well-sculpted sometimes), the process of actually dealing with the obstacles they put in front of you feels much more tedious than it's ever been before. I consider myself to be relatively good at these games, and I also enjoy mechanically challenging games, even to an extreme degree. But I simply do not enjoy the flavor of challenge that From has leaned into in recent years, for all the reasons described in the video. Dark Souls was challenging because you are exploring a dangerous world, Elden Ring is challenging because the devs are trying to "getcha". At the end of the day I'll continue playing their games, I'll continue enjoying them, and I'll continue bitching every time I see an unnatural, arbitrary delay on swings 3 and 5 of a 7 hit combo. I'm always going to miss the more restrained approach they had with their earlier titles, but it is what it is.
@@manbearpigsereal What happened is the community that formed around souls, unfortunately, loudly celebrated how hard the game was first and foremost, and trash-talked every interesting boss that wasn't particularly challenging, like fools idol, micolash, etc. for years, and wanted to meta the games into the ground. What was FS to take away from that except that that's what people want? I feel bad for them.
As a singular experience, ER and the dlc are simply some of the best possible out there. However the focus on exploration of the open world lends itself very poorly for replayability. And the scadutree fragments only compund to that. Great the first go around, a nuisance afterwards. Personally still love ER to death and the dlc overall is incredible, but itll take many years for me to forget enough of the game to make replaying it enjoyable.
....honestly, yeah, I kinda feel what you're getting at here. Fromsoft's games are such a unique and captivating experience, but...I kinda feel like the direction they've been going in has literally been outpacing my reaction times and ability to just, comprehend what's going on. It's the first time playing these games where I've just thrown my hands up and decided I'm just going to summon other players. That will at least be interesting, y'know? The co-op element is still so compelling. But...I dunno if I'd pick up another Soulsborne game if this is the trend. But it's such a rich world you can roleplay so hard in, if you want to. Those characters all look really unique and cool. :D
I know it will never happen, but I would love if From Software brought back the World Tendency mechanic from Demon's Souls. I think that mechanic has excellent potential for replayability and rewarding skilled play. After watching The Electric Underground youtube channel (which I highly recommend, best game related channel since Matthewmatosis imo) and getting into bullet hell shmups, I think World Tendency could work really well as an adaptive difficulty system, similar to Rank in shmups. I you played well during a stage and didn't die, the World Tendency shifts towards White after beating the boss. When the WT shifts towards White, the enemies and bosses become faster and more dangerous, and the level design could also change. You could only change WT in Human Form, and dying in Human Form shifts the WT towards Black. At the start of each stage, you could offer a Stone of Ephemeral Eyes to turn to Human Form if you're in Soul Form currently. Breaking a SoEE would also shift the world towards Black WT. The goal would be to get all worlds to either Pure White or Pure Black WT, and there are only a finite amount of SoEE's to try to do it on a playthrough. If you got all worlds to a Pure WT, a hidden sixth world would be unlocked, and a true final boss at the end of it. If you didn't play well enough and died too many times in Human Form, then you could still get the normal ending, but would have to start the game again if you want to reach the final boss. The nice thing about this is that new players could play in Soul Form for for most of the game and don't have to worry about WT, but experienced player would have to think about WT at all times. It would be very cool if you played well and didn't die in for example 5-1 and 5-2, and suddenly 5-3 is completely different and much more difficult. I think this would all suit the mysterious and unknowable nature of Souls games. For even more risk, you could do what was at the early development of Demon's Souls, and have an item that makes it so that if the player dies in Soul Form, the game deletes your save file. You could have this be a starting item that when chosen cannot be unequipped, kind of like forgoing Kuro's Charm in Sekiro to make the game even harder for yourself.
ER was the only souls game I beat and didn't immediately want to do another playthrough. I beat it at launch, and then didn't replay it again until the DLC came out. You made a good point about the combat being fundamentally the same for the player, all we got for extra mobility in ER is a jump. It seems like sekiro bosses, except we don't have the awesome blocking of sekiro that if done correctly hurts enemy poise. The bosses especially later in the game feel like you just need to roll/jump and wait for an opening, where you can hit them once or twice and then wait again. I replayed 1 again and while that loop is fundamentally the same, the bosses don't have gigantic health pools, usually don't have attacks that kill you in one hit, and most importantly usually have some gimmick to the fight to keep them interesting. Capra is just as much a battle with the areana and the dogs as it is the demon, the uneven footing on gargoyles is fun. I can't really remember an ER boss being gimmicky it's usually just big guy or monster. The open world is also really bad, I hate finding useless crafting materials everywhere. What was the problem with just giving me a green blossom or a purple moss, it's creating a problem out of something that was already fixed.
Ironically enough, I think that Armored Core 6 showed the world what from software could achieve in a game like elden ring if they were able to unshackle themselves of the limited combat system and redundant progression systems. A fantastic, rock solid action game with difficult, but fine tuned encounters. No arbitrary limitation on what equipment you can use, no grinding for levels, no boring item hunting in the open world, just action, and it was great.
I actually feel like ac6 and elden ring share a lot of the same problems, especially the issue of FROM focusing more on boss spectacle expressed in the video.
@Kyfow it's less that the ac6 bosses are insane (especially when you factor in the inherent imbalance of the game's combat mechanics) and more that the series never really had or even needed full on boss fights. The greatest threat you ever had was another AC because they have the exact same strengths and weaknesses as you, except there's an AI behind the wheel and they may just have better performing weapons or even just a health advantage depending on the mission. Games before V had like 2 or 3 genuine bosses, and they didn't generally need any special approaches beyond assessing what they do and altering your play- not playstyle- accordingly. Even the most infamous bosses like zinaida in last raven are just cranked up AC, so you just end up doing what you've been doing but harder.
You understand that Elden ring is an RPG right? None of the systems are arbitrary just because you don't like engaging with them. There is a reason Sekiro isn't considered an rpg after they removed those elements. If you want a straight action game, go play an action game. You don't want an rpg, and this game is so up front about being exactly that. If you couldn't tell what you were getting into, then that's on you, homie.
I really resonated with the points you made in this video. It feels good to see another veteran Souls player also share many of these critiques of the DLC, as I also started with Demon's Souls back on PS3. It really did feel like a huge juxtaposed experience for me. It was both a masterclass in environmental storytelling and open world design, but also with several huge, empty, and confusing to navigate areas. The bosses were often spectacular, complex and interesting, yet somehow felt hollow and a lot less fun and fair to fight, which made me want to cheese bosses far more than ever before, and therefore making many of my victories feel frustrated as a result. My main I bring first into all new content is always an Int character, often with some faith/arcane as well for lots of spellcasting shenanigans. I went in as an intelligence build, excited for new and fresh takes on sorcery and finished the DLC as a reluctantly primarily faith incantation user, as I felt my favourite build was unfun to play and develop in the DLC. Half the number of sorceries as there was new incantations, no new fun variety of exciting sorcery gear or aesthetics, I felt like the game was conditioning me to feel like I was playing the "wrong" type of caster if I wanted to have fun. This DLC both met and missed a lot of expectations. Whether they were fair expectations or not, its hard to tell. All in all, it just felt very... bittersweet, but not in that classic Fromsoft sort of way it employs in its storytelling and worlds, but disappointingly so.
Honestly, the 'checklist' feel is what damns the replayable nature of the game, why I keep feeling like going back to Dark Souls 2, easier to get what I want for a character I have in mind for a run.
100% what kills elden ring replays Gotta spend first hour or 2 gathering all the stuff I know is free and sitting out in open before fighting first boss or else I feel I’m just not optimal. I could just copy/paste my save after doing this to save on time but.. seems dumb to have to do that just for replayability that’s not exhausting. It’s not the games fault I feel this way but.. just the way I look at it. : /
@@claytontucker8088agreed its the one aspect i dislike. Even though i got a bunch of characters A lot of them i make have become more simple and straightforward, they dont require many things to collect anymore.
@@claytontucker8088 It is the games' fault, really. I'd venture to say that Margit exists as a casual filter specifically to condition you into this kind of behavior -- "breadth-first gameplay" I call it, borrowing a term from computer science. Because you're skimming the game world and exploring in a very "wide, but shallow" manner. When I first played this game, I was convinced that a veteran player shouldn't have trouble beating Margit at the beginning based on the pacing of prior games. I did do a little side content first, but he was still unbeatable for me until I came back later after having explored a lot (no, I never used the shackle). I found myself chronically underleveled at each boss. I know because I had to check just to see how other players seemed to be getting through the game. I think I ended up fighting Mohg at something like 40 rune levels below what everyone else seemed to be fighting him at. The game seemed to continually slap me on the wrist for wanting to fight bosses when I first encountered them. No no no, it would say, you have to grind and scavenger hunt for at least a few more hours first. I found myself missing every prior Souls game where I could pick a path and fight a boss, knowing that the designers were intelligent enough to pace progression such that I should be able to beat it when I get there. The progression of the game just felt very weird to me. I've beaten Bloodborne so it is not like I am a stranger to fast and difficult bosses. I've always worried that Miyazaki's games would eventually suffer because of the meme that every single one of his games needs to be harder than the last. No idea why he seems to think that's necessary, but here we are. Monster Hunter suffered from a very similar problem, actually, especially with bosses that have absurdly long and punishing attack patterns, but they have course corrected.
@@claytontucker8088 I agree with you. I suppose I implied that without stating it out right. Perhaps it is possible, but it would require a lot of effort and careful design.
fatrolling in darkmoon knightess cosplay and pvping in fight clubs (GFWL hatemail) was peak. i never cared about my build and despite the tiny and linear map by comparison, it was more immersive as a character, like cat covenant. i feel as though the bosses in elden ring deserved to be in sekiro instead. their attack cadence is so much different than any souls game. mashing roll and running away is typical of souls, but it's so exacerbated in elden ring and its DLC. with so few options, cheese tends to be the main strat and is therefore encouraged, reducing the impactfulness of the fights.
Im enjoying this DLC a lot more than the others, BUT the points being made here are hard to argue against, the bosses except for a few ones, dont feel like Ludwig, Nameless King, King Allant, Artorias, Manus, Fume Knight or Sir Alonne (yes even the despised DkS2 did that aspect generally better). In Elden Ring almost every boss fight induces an anxious state trying to deal with the frantic movements and attacks. Still the dlc is awesome in a lot of aspects
"You're just too bad at vidyagames" and "Learn to cheese, bro" were used to shield Dark Souls 2 from all critique back then and it's about as reasonable or absurd still. I feel like Miyazaki has forgotten his own statement that the point of Demon's or Dark Souls was never to just seek some misguided notion of 'hard', but rather provide a challenging encounter through tough but fair mechanics. Now he's saying something like they designed the content trying to test how much his players could endure. The decision to introduce the Scadutree Blessings is a baffling decision to me. You balance the game for players having these fragments, but now you can't balance bosses after a specific blessing-level in mind for what the player reasonably should have when they fight that boss. I just feel this unbridled "Meh" after almost every DLC boss, like a "Well, that happened, I guess". It's like they're just a chore I have to complete before I can go back to playing the game again. The only boss I remember liking even slightly was Putrescend Knight, but the fight ended too quickly due to him having too little health, unfortunately.
When I first played Elden Ring I really loved my time with it only for it to grow exhausting by the end. I wouldn't call myself a good player but Malenia was the first time I went out of my way to look up strategies on how to deal with them in any of the Souls' games. It felt like a problem I was too stupid to find the solution to. I think you hit the nail on the head when it came to a change in design philosophy. Nothing in the DLC felt nearly as egregious but there were a times I felt I needed to "cheat" because outside of luck avoiding certain moves I did not see a path forward. I still loved the game overall, and I think SOTE has some of the peaks of Fromsoft's entire game catalog. I just don't see myself coming back to it like I would previous entries.
@Emarrel ahh that's good to know, thanks for confirming! Overall that makes me feel alot better about the new upgrades in the dlc, as I don't mind going out of my way once per character (though gotta agree that it would get repetitive across a dozen characters)
I actually like the more slow methodically approach dark souls 1 has it feels more relaxing and it feels fun to learn There not hyper fast They don’t have an unexpected Unreactable combos extenders You know when the boss is done with a combo The problem with Elden ring is when they try to use a combat system meant for slower more methodical and simpler bosses when the game is filled with fast paced hyper aggressive bosses with complex combos I also feel like they should have made the base game of Elden ring more compact and vertical like the DLC There’s way too many sections in the base game where there’s a huge empty space you do almost nothing in
Been following your stuff for a long time, got me into Shibayan and all. After hearing everything here, seeing people stream it over discord, and seeing the ungodly toxic discourse of people who just want you to suffer as much as they did to tick boxes to allow attempting a bossfight which sucks ass, I really don't know if I want to play Shadow of the Erdtree. The endgame of Elden Ring in general rubbed me the wrong way, and it seems like more of the same but worse.
i don't have the DLC yet but most of this reflects pretty strongly how i felt about base elden ring as a whole. after my first win, i never actually managed to get a new character past altus plateau because the game's just too goddamn big and i would inevitably burn out before getting to anything exciting (especially since i've got the brainworm that wants me to clear out Every side area i can, plus the size of the game makes it incredibly hard to remember where to get any of the specific items you might want without looking them all up). i genuinely think it would be a better game if it had 50% of the land area and Stuff in it. riding your horse across limgrave for 10 minutes loses its splendor by the dozenth time you've had to do it and i agree strongly on the boss design philosophy too. to me the shift started becoming noticeable in dark souls 3, and only got moreso in elden ring. enemies that have some moves that come out so fast you can barely react to them, and others timed to perfectly roll catch you if you do roll on reflex. hard-to-distinguish animations with indeterminate capacity for combo extension. it's like they saw how people had so thoroughly mastered dark souls and its systems and timings, and went "no we can't be having that. the point of this series is suffering and pain so we're just going to make bosses more and more unnatural and awkward to fight." and so as trying to learn bosses becomes more and more frustrating and less rewarding, it does incentivize finding the less satisfying ways out - the pre-nerf bug swarm bleed incantation pretty much carried me through the back half of my playthrough. in the entire game there were exactly two bosses that i actually really thoroughly enjoyed rather than being a "thank god it's over," and those were maliketh and hoarah loux, two of the last bosses in the critical path who i thus have only gotten to fight once each it feels like elden ring was a game designed to be played Once. and i mean, considering the majority of people who buy any game are unlikely to beat it once let alone multiple times, maybe from a business position that makes sense as a decision. it is very engaging and pretty and exciting to uncover the world on your first playthrough. but it really comes at a cost to how enjoyable it is to replay and try new builds. i've been playing a lot of bloodborne and some DS2 and sekiro recently, and even knowing there's a big new dlc world in elden ring to go buy, i'd much rather just revisit any of the other games first
My hope is that when the honeymoon period of SotE is over, we can look at the issues raised objectively and not have them completely written off as a lack of player skill or not enough Scadutree Blessings. I love Elden Ring and SotE but it's insane to not hold the game or devs accountable for the genuine shortcomings. Over-tuned and over-engineered enemies and bosses that barely give you time to attack and deal any meaningful damage, but in turn completely drain your HP with one or two hits makes the repetitious nature of the Souls games a massive slog, resulting in myself (and many other I've seen in threads) simply running away from them. Bosses like the Divine Beast Dancing Lion and the final boss are hitbox blenders I find difficult how anyone can find genuinely fun and intuitive. I completely understand that Fromsoft DLC's are typically where the harder and hardest boss fights are, but it feels like SotE took the "Hard but fair" nomenclature and just removed the "fair."
i have to disagree with you, i have fought most of the remembrance bosses so far and they all feel good and live up to the best of the base game(better than previous souls games), not once did i think something was stupid.
I see arguments like this a lot but I actually have no idea what people are talking about when they say this. I'll admit the final boss is very strong, and has at least one pretty bad move. But that aside, I really don't know what you mean. I personally loved the divine beast fight, and I never found myself getting destroyed by any regular enemy, and that's not me trying to say I'm amazing at the game (I'm absolutely not), just being honest. Maybe it comes down to me having explored a lot and getting a good amount of scadutree fragments, but as much as I hate to say it, I feel like this is kind of skill issue territory. Or at least, not knowing how to approach these bosses. I think people forget that this is supposed to be a difficult game, but you're also supposed to adapt your playstyle. Getting destroyed by an attack? Try to look out for a telegraph, maybe try dodging in a different direction/jumping over it instead. Getting hit by the boss whilst you heal? Don't chug every time you get hit, wait for an opening after the attack string is done. Doing zero damage? Explore some more, use some of the items that the game gives you to your advantage.
Despite my great appreciation for Elden Ring, after the DLC, I *really* hope FromSoft takes more leaps like they did with AC6 in the future. A new and reimagined King's Field or Shadow Tower (spiritual successor or sequel) would be phenomenal with everything that they have learned. The Soulsian formula has been exhausted at this point, I think.
i’ve been ranting with a friend about everything you talked about in this video! i’m not crazy!! thank god! it was literally yesterday that i realized that i’m just not looking forward to engaging with any bosses! i love the exploration in the game, but when they’re as you said- goofy bosses with 5-7 long string strikes with minimized retaliation windows- they really do all like. blend together in my mind i too also don’t look forward to fighting anyone on repeats, and bosses then just feel more like vehicles to experience more exploration than a challenge to see if i can overcome in a different context of fighting style is it novel and fun when every boss, back to back, gets a second phase with whirlwind AOEs and an even higher damage ceiling to punish you with so you can’t learn their pattern? i don’t think it is! i just find it really unfortunate that like, instead of feeling like i’m being treated to a new souls-like experience for a series veteran, i’m being winked and nudged at at every opportunity, as though to say “isn’t this so *Dark Souls*? heh. i bet you feel line you really got Elden Ringed” with the intentional delayed hits, the additional tacked-on strikes there exclusively to, as you said, trip the player up. i feel like we lost the plot with this game anyway thank you for this
God you are right people do not roleplay in this action roleplaying game. Your points are pretty close to mine save for i feel like a almost don't like the game. I think about buying the DLC to play it thinking i will probably enjoy it but there is more frustration than accomplishment and I know some of it is brought on by me making themed builds but damn man I felt like being an archetype was fine in 1 and 2 and a bit less in 3 with some annoyances but I did it but here I dunno I just end up thinking about the areas that'll flatten me. Which is a shame since I remember having at least a spellsword and death knight to play around with I even back traded gear cause most of what I like is extreeeeeemely far into the game and felt pointless to play 50 hours to finally get what i wanted to use. Didn't help my first and only completed run of this game was on a Holy based Str Faith character woh is heavy and fatrolls with a greatshield (I always like doing this did it in every game so far) when the normal endgame just shits on the holy damage type in general that might have left a bad taste in my mouth. Oh and Melania just made me stop playing the game for a while after I beat her and I've no plans to do that again. I still might get the DLC or maybe on discount cause I want to love this game it's so close to what I would think is really great but a lot of bosses and encounters are just things that make me go ugh when i think about them instead of how cool they might have been. This was a good video though even if you think what you have to say won't change the discourse of "Elden Ring is a masterpiece 100/10" it is good sometimes to just voice your opinion to just settle the matter in your head and this was a good listen.
Elden Ring is the first fromsoft game that I didnt ever feel the need to replay, I started the series with ds1 and ds2 is my favorite souls game by far. I've always gone back to the other souls games and replay them atleast once a year if not more but after i finished elden ring and got all the achievements I didnt feel like replaying it, I just finished the DLC and I dont think it changes the way I feel about the game. It's an incredible game but it's removed from the original souls games. I am in love with the world and the lore of elden ring but doing another playthrough? I'd rather pick any other souls game.
I feel ER is more the kinda game you play once every 3 years and really get lost in the fantasy again, I do prefer the more linear from games though overall. Something about my OCD makes how messy an ER play through devolves into quite off putting. It is way more satisfying to have a simpler idea of your build and work thru the game from start to finish
All the little tiny caves and evergaols and catacombs are repetitive and get stale pretty quick, and yet they have build critical equipment in them so you have to go hit at least some of them up with every new character.
Thanks for this, you did a good job of putting what I've been feeling into words. I do like Elden Ring, I like it a lot, but it is so overtuned that I'm just not able to enjoy it like I did the previous From entries.
I have spent the last year trying to convince myself to start a new character for the DLC and I just can't do it. I liked exploring Elden Ring but it's something I realized I only wanted to do once.
Yes, indeed. Elden Ring was a game I beat once and didn't touch again. Like you say, it has a replayability problem: the fact that running past minor creatures ends up being what I did too, and the bosses are the checkpoints that mattered; The fact that a lot of bosses are massive and the camera doesn't quite keep up to, along with their movesets -- In my opinion, I think FromSoft really wanted this one to be played by as many players as possible given the tie to LOTR stuff back when they announced it -- so they added some things to make it easier, and give an open world for people to explore: if they failed at West, it is no problem, because they have other 7 cardinals to explore and get stronger or get more used to the game, and then come back. It's a tone shift from FromSoft, and I hope they keep exploring different things and ideas. Hopefully their identity lives up through and we'll get something like we never seen before next.
I always knew this game would resonate more or less with certain people. But Elden Ring is the first ""Souls"" game I just didn't bother finishing. I realized after 30 hours of doing what felt like mindless busy work going through chalice dungeon caves fighting The Most Annoying Bosses that I just wasn't having fun. There is some good in this game but I would rather do something else than slog through the open world junk to get there.
I think the exploration was terrible and unrewarding in the DLC. You would think the DLC (being an experience designed around the assumption that 99% of first-timers will enter it with post-game and fully-geared-up characters) would give players more appropriate loot than just things like Smithing Stone [1], Smithing Stone [2], Crab Eggs and Bone Darts, all of which are some of the pitiful "rewards" you get for checking out shinies in the Shadow Keep in the DLC. Then again, this isn't really a DLC-exclusive issue. The base game has a lot of unrewarding exploration as well. You get as far as Castle Sol and Miquella's Haligtree (two late-game areas) and you're still being "rewarded" with shinies that give you Golden Rune (10) items that provide you a grand total of 5,000 runes. Totally something that is useful for a late-game character. This is despite the fact that roughly a third of all armors and weapons in the game can only be acquired by farming enemies with horrendously low, gacha-tier RNG drop rates. You would think that From Software would have the sense to put these armors and weapons in these shinies as opposed to useless crap like Golden Rune (10) or Smithing Stone (5). But no. You have to suffer through RNG for actual unique loot like the Partizan. You made a great point about Golden Seeds in the base game being associated with landmarks that are easy to identify even from afar. If Scadutree Blessings were the same and weren't so poorly telegraphed in their locations, people wouldn't be complaining about them as much (even if they still would be busy work). I suspect that once the rabid, drooling fanboys get past the current honeymoon period and get past dismissing every DLC criticism as being a "skill issue", we'll be seeing a lot more sober discussion about the DLC. Considering that you are someone who has extensively played Monster Hunter games, I think you would agree with me that those games do a far better job of creating that sensation of "man, I can't wait to fight this boss again!" than Elden Ring's bosses. For example, Primordial Malzeno in Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak is just as combo-heavy as DLC bosses like Messmer and Radahn, but because he is better designed, he feels more fun to fight than these Shadow of the Erdtree bosses. Team Ninja's games also do a far better balance of making the player equally as nimble and as capable as the boss, instead of NuFrom Software's idea of having the bosses be Devil May Cry characters and you being stuck with more restrictive Souls combat. Furthermore, the lack of intuitively-designed enemy movesets (as you put it) that allow the player to sightread bosses in Elden Ring and its DLC just makes playing through it feel so demoralizing and exhausting. Animations are deliberately designed to deceive the player, mislead them and trip them up. So many delayed swings, feints, mad flurries and sucker punches coming from the minds of combat designers far too eager to mess with the player. I felt like the combat designer was always trying his damn best to outsmart me and subvert my expectations. 14:32: "I dread to think of how much my playtime is just riding towards a point of interest while staring at vistas." 15:29: "All the open world has managed to accomplish is encourage me to find ways to engage with the game less." Open world is a mistake. It will always be a mistake. That said, I'm really loving Rise of the Ronin by Team Ninja. Though I love it for its deep, stylish combat, and would not miss its open world at all if this open world went away and was replaced by Team Ninja's more traditional linear level design.
I really tried to avoid bringing up Monster Hunter as part of the discussion myself because I felt it would be pretty cliche at this point despite it being a perfectly apt comparison but yes, you're right. The bosses generally have that "I can't wait to fight this again" sensation because the games are fundamentally designed around repeating boss fights over and over and the games don't set you up for failure. Not only that, the weapons themselves do a better job of giving you a fresh way to engage with them. And yeah, even though I found the act of navigating the DLC a lot of fun (I just like the feeling of mapping stuff out), I'd still agree the item distribution often made reaching somewhere wholly unrewarding. There were a number of times where I'd see the setup for something that seemed potentially interesting, like a reasonably long path leading up to a graveyard with an item guarded by half a dozen enemies only to pick up a... Ghost Glovewort [5] or something equally worthless. And then later I'd find equipment in the most inconspicuous locations possible.
If I had a nickle for everytime I saw a "didn't expect dung" or "why is it always dung?" message at the end of a trail, followed by a mediocre item...well, I'd have more than two nickles, honestly.
I've been fatigued by the Souls series for a long time after playing Demon's and Dark Souls 1 back in the day so it's been interesting to see the discourse around ER as an outsider.
I do love elden ring, but I also resonate really hard with most of your feelings here. I used to like restricting myself from summoning most of the time in From's previous games, but the obnoxious direction their combat design has taken reached a breaking point for me in sekiro, and I decided to not restrict myself anymore. Thank God spirit summons exist, they really make the game more bearable for me. I also feel similar about the open world aspect: it makes your first playthrough magical, but just the thought of replaying the game stresses me out, so I never even got to try many different builds. Now that I'm switching platform to PC for the dlc, I'm kind of dreading the prospect of all the running around I'm going to have to do just to get there... Replaying the first Dark Souls recently to hype myself up has really nailed home how much I prefer those first two games, and it's not for nostalgic reasons. DS3, Bloodborne and Elden ring are all great, but nothing will beat Demons and DS1
Base game Elden Ring started leaning into the unfun bosses in the last third of the game, yet still receiving flawless reviews. It felt like they hadn't reached them, or they just assumed that "brutally hard = fun" which it doesn't. As a result, the DLC appears to have leaned into it more. Difficulty was never the reason people loved the prior games. They were just good games that *happened* to be challenging.
I almost wholeheartedly disagree with this opinion. Look at almost anyone’s favorite boss fight, and they all come from the last third of the game. Elden ring bosses challenge players in a different way than dark souls, but it isn’t so insanely difficult that it becomes unfun for most people. Where dark souls almost never punishes rolling without a thought, Elden ring attacks tend to require more thought from the player on where to dodge. Maliketh for example, has his big aoe which will hit you if you roll anywhere but away on the attack before he uses it, and he has plenty of flips where clever positioning instead of rolling can lead to charged heavy opportunities for an easy stagger. Bosses like Margit teach you from the beginning that enemies can and should be attacked while they are attacking. The DLC doesn’t really provide any new forms of challenge the player must overcome, just a further emphasis on all of the lessons the base game has already taught. And yes, while dark souls has formed an entire community around its extensive world and lore, how many people do you know actually read item descriptions and piece everything together on their own? Compared to the amount of people playing the games on a consistent basis, the lore hunters, much like the pvp community, are a minority. Most people play souls games specifically because they are a challenging experience. It’s fine not to enjoy elden rings approach to difficulty, but given their “flawless reviews”, it’s safe to say that many people do actually find elden ring fun.
@@GlivGluv yeah let’s look the opinion of review bombers that similarly attacked the base game on release. I do wonder how Elden ring could have possibly recovered from literally the exact same attack if the game was actually too difficult.
This comment is literally wrong, as Miyazaki himself said and cemented the primary objective of the souls games are to be hard and rewarding. Like the video creator, how about you just accept the fact, that you are not the audience for souls games? Move on.
The starting character ritual in ER: get the physick, get the sacred tears and regen physick tear from weeping peninsula, buy all the stones you can from merchants along the way, hope your chosen weapon isnt locked behind 30 minutes of running to the other side of the map or even worse... grinding. And then you still have to collect every gold seed and sacred tear along the way, get the bell bearings for upgrades, grab your spells from different corners of the map. Now you gotta do the same for the DLC on every new character with scadutree.
Good video and having a similar feeling as someone else who started back with DeS all those years ago. These games have just become excessive and tiresome and gone in a direction I don't really care about - compared to DeS and the original Dark Souls which I still return to over and over/must have hundreds of hours in each. When the DLC first dropped Artorias was an insanely hard boss that was cool, high intensity and stood out, but it seems the lesson they took from it was that their games should be more like Ninja Gaiden Black when the first two games are more RPG than action game. And then all the increasing size and scope - I already found Dark Souls 2 with the DLCs unbearably long, I couldn't even finish base Elden Ring because it just overstayed its welcome - I got bored by the time I got to the capital. Compare that to Demon's Souls or Dark Souls which you can comfortably beat in a weekend or less as a nice, short revisit. Both of these points I feel can be seen in the boss fights as you mentioned when there are now so many high intensity bosses (or even regular enemies) that its impossible to keep them all in your head. Your point about the people who run through these games naked SL1 with donkey kong bongos which the fanbase then use as a measuring stick felt really interesting to come from you considering how legendary I remember it feeling to watch your SL1 runs back in the day/like watching a 1CC for a shmup whereas now that is considered like.. a baseline level of play in the eyes of the dickriders. Not covered in the video but I also miss when the online in these games was actually fun too considering how much invasion has been nerfed and how you cant use/learn these huge areas like you could in DaS/DeS, but maybe that's also just rose tinted glasses from the GFWL days lol. Glad to see your perspective on this.
I quickly got a bit of a distaste for invasions because the proximity between checkpoints became too narrow or there's just one right next to a fog gate, so it rarely ever feels like you can catch people "in medias res" and get to enjoy that feeling of a battle of attrition or setting up a surprise using the environment.
been watching your videos for the past 11 years and it feels so great to see such a veteran of the series sharing these thoughts. Totally agree with you.
Great video, I resonate with basically everything wmyou said. We as player charcters are still playing Demons Souls, but the bosses are playing Devil May Cry or Kingdom Hearts. And just because Ongbal can no hit everything naked doesn't mean something is good well designed. Its not fun to dodge 6 or more attacks in a row and then only be given .5 seconds to counterttack for minimal damage before having to dodge perfectly again. And god forbid if you get hit because thats a massive chunk of health and probably a knockdown so you lose multiple tyrns for just one very minor mistake in an endurance run of a fight. And the cult of Fromsoft will defend basically anything, saying the game is oerfect the player just needs to adapt or get better.
fair opinion but its false that you get very little time to counterattack, besides maybe the final dlc boss. if you jump, strafe or even crouch instead of roll, the boss openings get tripled on your end
I've had many the same feelings since my first playthrough; there came a point where powercreep dramatically outpaced mechanics and the solutions provided feel like a bandaid to a larger problem. You aren't overcoming these encounters, your tools are, and every victory feels undeserved as a consequence.
Oh my god THANK YOU. I don't completely agree on your points with the attack patterns, but the absolute slog of having to find a Golden Seed clone just to make the DLC manageable was just a terrible design decision.
I hate the argument that "its not dark souls, its elden ring. You can't play it like dark souls" ok, then why does it play exactly like dark souls 3? Spirit summons aren't gameplay, and using op spells and weapon arts just isn't fun. The entirety of a soulslike should ne built on truly learning enemies and places in and out but elden ring just makes that unfun
I honestly think that Elden Ring's DLC has the bosses, that I feel will age the best in the entire franchise. Other than the final boss, which is genuinely modded there's no way, bosses like Metyr, Messmer, Putrescent Knight, Midra, Romina, and the Scadutree Avatar are all bosses that come close to achieving Demon Princes level of perfection, that being said, near the best boss in the franchise. The only issues each of them have, are one or two garbage moves that can easily be patched, and camera issues which is a thing of its own. The only bosses in main game I was excited to fight again, was Loretta and Mogh. They were the only bosses that felt like the high quality Ds3 bosses, that didn't involve me locking my world state (Godfrey and beyond.) Thinking of Metyr, despite the terrible laser attack and AoE blast, everything else is perfection. The music, design, and balance outside the two moves are all amazing. And that's not to mention Midra, probably, no easily, the best boss in the game entirely, and probably top 10 in the series. And then honestly, I think my favourite part about the DLC are the future potential for the NPCs. This DLC has easily the best set of NPCs in the series, bar none. Ansbach, Thiollier, Leda, and Freyja are all easily some of the best NPCs they've made. And to be frank, I enjoyed the final battle with all of them more than I did the final battle itself, outside of the first phase which is genuinely fantastic. I think it's a solid 8/10, which still lines up with the rest of their DLCs.
the trick with Metyr's spinning lasers is to run to the side of the AOE(not right in front) but stay as close as you can to it so the lasers will pass over and behind you.
The whole idea of scadutree fragments is cool. Since the dlc is end game content there is no more real progression to be had for your character so they add a way to get more powerful. The thing that bothers me is WHY DOESN’T FROM JUST MAKE MID GAME DLC? Or early game for that matter?? For some reason it seems like they are allergic to it. Dlc always has to beend game or beyond end game scalimg. If it was just a totally seperate path that you could also start going down during the early or mid game that would be sooo much more fun and it would fix the problem of people having nowhere to take their character’s power level during the dlc.
I agree with most of what you've said here. I don't mind the open world of Elden Ring as much as you, apparently, though. I think the real problem with Souls games is the evolution of enemies, especially bosses. They have gotten harder, but less fair and less interesting and fun. I hate that "soulslike" is just synonomous with diffculty, when it originally was so much more than that.
Elden Ring is probably my favourite in the series alongside dark souls 1. The Elden Ring open world is far from perfect, but From Software made a very good attempt at it. 950+ hours and counting.
Really great video essay! Honestly agree with the majority of your points. Any chance you might just be experiencing fatigue from so much time in the Lands Between versus some fault in FromS’s open world game design/replayability? Not being snide, just genuinely curious.
I appreciate you sharing your thoughts, I’ve been a fan since the ptde invasion/pvp videos. So I share in some experience, I played this dlc on a melee build without summons. I’m really sad to hear you didn’t like the bosses. I agree overcoming them is tedious and sometimes downright frustrating, but I don’t dislike these bosses. I actually love them all so far, they can be one and done spectacles but for me I put my summon sign down only in the dlc to get to fight them over and over. They’re the best in the whole game, some in the whole series imo. And I always ended up using a different weapon setup for each one, I have a pure caster ready to go through the dlc, maybe I’ll get some of your grievances, but as of now I cannot disagree more about the bosses
It's hard to properly articulate exactly how I felt about the bosses. It's less that I disliked overcoming them or think they're objectively bad (bar a couple) but that often they feel like they're made to be obtuse for the sake of it and the learning process itself just feels exasperating at times. For what it's worth, I really enjoyed Bayle, Messmer and Midra in particular and they're probably the only bosses I'd genuinely look forward to fighting again in the DLC. In fact, it's kinda funny how the frenzy boss ended up feeling like one of the most straight forward of the lot. But even Bayle has really awful camera issues exacerbated by a lack of lock-on points like other dragons and a relatively small arena considering its size. Half the time I feel like I'm trying to goad it away from a wall that it charged into. I wonder how many issues could be alleviated if From would just zoom the damn camera out more.
The camera issue has been my main confusion of the dlc. Like the dragon below Baylor lets you target the body and the head while Baylor only a lets you target the head. Feels like such a simple solution to baylor and other bosses like the lion exist already
I actually really enjoyed the Bayle fight but the arena is way too small for the size of the boss and it amplifies a lot of camera issues. It really is bizarre how you can't target different body parts and it stuck out immediately to me too.
I feel you man, i've played the DLC. and Eldenring and the DLC dont feel like the souls games i know from past times. I begun playing Dark Souls back when i found it around 2013-2014 continued with every souls game, where i got sucked into another awesome story and world but Elden Ring, i dont know. It feels, different and the DLC a bit disappointing.
Usually, when faced with difficult bosses, I tend to overreact when I defeat them, sticking middle fingers into the monitor. The thing is, I usually grin with joy while doing so. Radahn... well, after my numerous attempts at bashing my head against him, I just gave up, respeced for 2 seppuku bloodfiend forks, and got lucky to defeat him when my mimic actually came to stab him for once. I did defeat Radahn and Miquella, but my expression was of scoff. There was no joy, no relief, no catharsis. And, what’s even worse, there were no mentions about what happened in Shadowlands in the Lands Between. As if this entire sequence was just a semi-canonic uninspired spin-off with no impact on the main story... Oh, wait!
About your first point; the prospect of re-doing scadutree fragments on future plathroughs being dull or busywork, is short-sighted. To me just knowing where to get them is half the battle, and on a second play through that half of the battle is already won. It’s really not so dull revisiting the various corners of the map for necessary items, because you get to see the sights and fight the fights, all for a good enough reason. I’ll concede that torrent running is dull but with that it goes by quickly with that knowledge of where to go.
I don’t understand what people expect from Elden ring. Dark souls have a linear progression, forcing you to engage with almost all of the content. There are a few optional side areas with essential character upgrades, encouraging you to engage with all of the content in the game, which is good. Elden ring has an open world, with tons of content off to the side. In order to encourage players to engage with even half of the content in the game, they place essential upgrades that encourage you to explore, which is bad apparently. And the boss design point is, well… Why would you even decide to play the game if you’re unwilling to learn their move set? You had ample opportunity from the base game to decide Elden rings design approach wasn’t for you. Don’t want to interact with the jump mechanic at all? Literally nothing is preventing you from this. All jumpable attacks can similarly be dodged, you are simply rewarded less for doing so. It’s almost as if, after 5 games of the exact same boss design, Elden ring wanted to change things up a bit. You need to avoid attacks in specific ways in order to optimally punish bosses, and sometimes to avoid damage at all. If this is such an insane concept to grasp, that maybe after 5 games, Fromsoft wants players to find new ways to avoid attacks, then Elden Ring isn’t the game for you unfortunately. And the idea that there has never been a “meta” aspect to these games is novel. Never played demons souls enough, but it doesn’t take a genius to absolutely dumpster any of the dark souls games with knowledge reasonably acquired after a first run. I mean, one shot setups exists in every game, and you can deal significantly less damage than a one shot and still dumpster a boss. Elden ring provides you with more buffs sure, but it doesn’t take a genius to know buff do more damage. Obviously everyone is entitled to their own opinion, and your experience with the game is valid, but that doesn’t invalidate the experience of the vast majority of players who hold elden ring in much higher regards. The unfortunate truth is that Fromsoft isn’t going to stagnate. They’re not going to make the same linear world, in the same setting, with bosses across an entire series that can all be mindlessly dodged so long as you press button at the right time and nothing else.
The issue with Elden Ring is that the overwhelming amounts of d1ckriding the game gets overshadows some actual valid complaints people have with it. There's always some sort of retaliation or excuse people have, no matter what the complaint is. As if Miyazaki communed with God Himself to create the most absolute perfect game in existence that has no flaws at all and to find issues with it or have a criticism about it means the person in question is objectively wrong and needs to just "git gud." Reusing bosses and putting kaizo-tier traps in dungeons is completely valid because, well "You can just ignore that content." Replays of the game suck because you have a checklist of shit to get just to get your build started, but "You don't HAVE to collect those items." Holding forward while mashing sprint on Torrent is mind-numbingly boring but "Oh, well uhhh the unmatched sense of exploration is there. It's never tedious to find new areas!" I would love to have a job at Fromsoft working on ER because I could just stick a Tree Sentinel in the fight with Elden Beast or something and have legions of parrots just scream that my design choices are some of the best they've ever seen in gaming and make 2 hour video essays about how the lore of the Tree Sentinel being in the Elden Beast fight is that he was the first to scratch his ass with an Elden branch or something. With games like Sekiro and Bloodborne, Fromsoft already proved they can make a game in a similar style but still make it fun and engaging, with actual challenge that isn't artificial. Elden Ring just has you with a Dark Souls moveset + a jump that you can sometimes be aggressive with but is still incredibly wonky to use but in return the developers up the amount of aggression bosses have and lowers the downtime on almost all of their combos, whilst also trying to overcompensate for Spirits and Summons by giving almost every single boss an insane amount of AOE attacks and damage. Most endgame and DLC bosses just defy physics and all logic, jumping into the air and hanging there like a magical reindeer or cartoon character and the only tell you have is muscle memory on when to dodge because there's no discernible way to avoid the attack other than just abusing i-frames. I'm just pulling some excuse out of my ass but I'm sure people's perfectly valid reason for this is some shit like "well these bosses are eldritch and inhuman of course they have stupid unreadable bullshit for a lot of their attacks." I understand it's still all doable. But it's just not fun. Wily Capsule from Mega Man 7 is hard. Doesn't make that fight fun. The Ancient Dragon in Dark Souls 2 is hard, due to it pretty much killing you in one hit no matter what, doesn't make that fight fun. Slave Knight Gael is hard but the fight is fun. Perfecting a Devil May Cry game is hard but that is fun to do. Fun and hard aren't an equal destination. You have to actually make the hard content fun to do. Elden Ring is massively popular, being played by millions of people who are finally eager to jump in to these "LE HARD!!!!!" games for the first time and being wowed with the experience because they heard TH-camrs sucking these Souls games off for so long. A good majority of them don't know the standard these games use to set, they just think the game being hard and getting your ass kicked means the game is good. " Y'know, it's hard but at least I'm not like those heckin' journos getting stuck on tutorials! Ha! Go back to Call of Duty!! I'm playing a real game, ELDEN RING!" Shit like that. Elden Ring is incredibly solid, there are some objectively well designed parts of the game. The peaks this game can get to are really great, especially if you consider the first playthrough. But the lows are some of the worst in the entire franchise. It's okay to like the game, it's okay to have problems with the game as well. It is not a perfect game though. People acting like this game has no flaws and a group of Japanese game developers just somehow magically found the formula for making the perfect video game and 2022 was the year the best video game ever came out and will never be topped are incredibly corny. They're the reason Fromsoft doubled down on the worst aspects of the game for the DLC. Because the loud majority pretty much silenced any and all problems people had with the game. The fact that people actually having issues and criticisms was treated as "review bombing" tells you all you need to know about this game and its following. You're absolutely right, they shouldn't do the same thing forever, and they've proved they can do it in the past. It's just that with Elden Ring, they missed. That's pretty much it. Fromsoft missed. Not hard to come to terms with. At least most Dark Souls 2 fans who love the game and have thousands of hours in it know it's just a piece of dogshit. But whatever.
I wish I was able to say all of this this well. They told everyone up front and in the marketing exactly what this game was. They also specifically said not to expect another dark souls But everyone was so ready to get back to slower fantasy combat from sekiros frenetic parry based gameplay, (Which also had it's fair share of old heads calling it too hard). That they are mad they can't play this like a DS game. Adapt. Explore. Overcome. Thats a FromSoftware game.
A kind of mixed up comment: you say it is fortunate* that from isn't going to stagnate. But then you only talk about one of many problems in the game, and bizarrely, the *most* stagnant part of the game. The chief virtue you highlight is how 'Fromsoft wants players to find new ways to avoid attacks'. But it is clear that nothing has changed in terms of player defence from demon souls. You can still block, parry, and roll (and even get special rolls like catring/bone/bloodhound.) They added jump but as you say, it is redundant since it performs (almost) the exact same defensive role as dodge does. So one *minor* (emphasis on minor) problem with the game is that these defensive tools are the same as they've ever been, they are literally stagnant. They innovated with sekiro, but went back to the old formula. Let's collectively stop thinking about rolling boss attacks, please.
ngl, its extremely refreshing to see someone who isnt infected with the whole "elden ring is a masterpiece" mind virus you can like a game and still see the myriad things it does badly ever since ER released i felt like im being gaslit by the entire community trying to pretend that the cutscene length attack chains with 20 different extenders is an okay design decision or that were basically fighting final fantasy spectacle level bosses with just some dork ass human slapping people with a sharp stick meanwhile the enemy summons yuri lowell to unleash havenly bladewing upon us i just dont understand why they have to go harder better faster stronger with every entry, its okay to have the final boss just be a dude with a sick mustache and a big ass sword i just wanna play the game and not watch the enemy do a ff14 limit break while i sit there waiting until the game decides its finally my turn to throw a singular fireball
@@Izanagi-FLOW A lot of its fans actually don't accept the idea that you can be critical of it though, that's what the comment is talking about. It resonated a little *too* much with those people. You can see some of them at the bottom of this comment section. The perpetual "Elden Ring is a flawless masterpiece" discourse is everywhere on TH-cam and Twitter, in my experience. The biggest DS1 fans are often pretty open about the parts of the game that suck ass, and no one pretends it's cool that Asylum Demon was used three times in that game. But when Elden Ring reuses dozens of bosses anywhere between 3 to 9 times, then the line is "It doesn't even reuse that many bosses" or "There's so much content though, so it's fine." Yeah, normal people who just enjoy the game exist too, but it obviously has a huge defense force that has to cope over any criticism they encounter because they're so subsumed by a fantasy of perfection for the game. And it's not even that these things have to be a bother to them. It's the fact that they act like other players are wrong, ungrateful, or nitpicky for thinking these things suck. Criticize the open world for being a chore to go through on replays, and the defense is "Just skip 90% of the content and only do what's essential for your character" like that's a justification and not merely a player-driven band-aid. People will say things like this and treat it like every non-fun situation is on the player and never the game, because to them Elden Ring is just too perfect to be at fault. It's wack.
Thanks for making the video, I’ve had similar thoughts and I think it’s a shame that a lot of the dialogue revolves around “getting gud” rather than what’s fun. Truthfully, Elden Ring is not a hard game. With enough prep time and game knowledge a player can reduce the mechanical skill required to defeat a boss to nil. Foresight and game knowledge are their own skills and I’m fine with that existing in these games, it always has, and I think it’s a more elegant way of tuning difficulty than selecting “baby mode” or “I have something to prove” mode. But the design of bosses has been tuned to deal with the absurd ways players can prep their way out of these problems and it feels like its left players like me that don’t like using meta weapons and quad buffing before every boss a bit behind.
I was challenged but not driven to cheese Bayle. He's a tough, mildly unfair boss whose greatest attack is influencing your camera. Either his arena is too small for the big boy or his lunge attack has too much forward momentum. Spastic amputee combos don't help the camera either. Gaius on the other hand, can go straight to bad game design hell. He was the only boss of my playthrough that I didn't engage with. The charge attack is unreliable in both your ability to dodge it and how many of its five hitboxes connect with you. I've gotten kissed by one hitbox, slaughtered by 2 or 3 or dodged unscathed despite doing the same action on the same attack. The combos aren't any worse than other ER bosses but Gaius can unleash his nonsense charge at any point. Also did I mention he's a poise monster? Because he's a poise monster, so guard breaks are of little use. There's also a phase 2 that introduces AoE and flashy anime divebomb attacks into the mix. After trying to learn that nonsense for a few hours, I kited him into a wall, summoned Greatshield Soldiers, and hit L2 to win with Moghwyn's Sacred Spear. Oddly, I feel more accomplished breaking this boss with cheese than I ever would have had I engaged with him more "fairly". I can tolerate a lot of junk from FromSoft, DS1 was my introduction to the series, but that boss was the end of my patience.
I feel this way about every game past Dark Souls 1 with Bloodborne and Sekiro being an exception. Combat was never the main strongsuit of Dark Souls games, it was a combination of the tight level design, and layered geography that gave the impression the world was bigger than what it was alongside the Dark Fantasy design/aesthetic. Some bosses we're less conventionally difficult and more like a puzzle you had to solve, now everyboss has a 50 hit attack pattern with slight delayed timing, all the bosses are big people with swords who have anime style attack patterns who all fight the same,. The lore and plot have become synonymous with each other to the point it's indistinguishable so there is less of an 'Go from A to B' simple plot the continues throughout the game with a new 'A to B' plot line to move forward and now it's a small bit of exposition at the beginning with a goal but never any understanding why. Dark Souls 1 at least had enough of a rudimentary basis that logically it made sense why you would have some agency in the world where there was a reason for your existence in the world in the following games its shaky and best and unexplained at worst. Open world doesn't give that same grandiose impression of DS1 because there is nothing that sparks the imagination where you realize an open world is just flat expanses of dull traversable plains with some copy past legacy dungeons thrown in. Dark Souls 1/Demon Souls having a lot of modelled building in the distance and environmental flourishes really made it feel like a living breathing world you just occupied a small part off. One main thing though and this is because your videos got me into Dark Souls, the PvP community was far more enjoyable. It felt like a fun sense of community and coupled with the well designed levels and your ability to interact with the geography, coupled with a lot of great content creators made PvP feel fun, especially Random invasions which every game since has done it's best to completely strip down and neuter. Before, going human had the penalty of being invaded and nicely balanced itself but now? Invaders are at such a disadvantage with them buffing the hosts so much you're fighting a losing battle most of the time, coupled with the awful way they've tried to balance invasions and level scaling. It feels like the days of funny builds and interesting invasions are gone. I understand them wanting to balancing somewhat, but killing red phantoms and random invasions because of a vocal minority of players was just stupid. You have very little if any incentive to invade, least of all in certain areas. The pacing of Elden Ring is also pretty horrendous, once you get to Lyndell I felt like the game should've been over. I never understood why you needed to go to another shameless repeated Dragon arie area after burning the Tree to apparently 'unbind the rune of death'? I thought burning the tree would give you entry to it? Why do I need to beat some random person when the tree is already burning? If this was Dark Souls 1 it would've been explained with some expository dialogue but this is problem where lore and plot seemed to exist together as an excuse to not actually inform the player. I always had sense of understanding what I was doing in Dark Souls 1. 2 had this problem where they barely addressed any of the questions raised from Dark Souls 1 and I get that impression from Elden Ring it will be more vague stuff that will never actually get a reliable answer even if they did a sequel. I'd say popularity had a hand in killing the series but the reality is that there is only so many time you can make a game with the same structure and tropes before it becomes tiring. Open world game design is antithetical to what made Demon Souls, Dark Souls 1 and Bloodborne good. It doesn't help that high fantasy is the most overdone of the fantasy genre's. Popularity definitely killed PVP though, the amount of people who moaned about invasions so they skewed it 100 percent in the opposite direction is indicative of that much.
The only thing I wish they do for the next game is zooming out, or even better, let's us zoom out when locking on an enemy so we can adjust the camera ourselves; I enjoyed all bosses you could actually see it's movements, for me it's fun to learn all the combos, but the nauseating camera movement, and the almost unreadable moves at dagger range lot's of big bosses have put me off from an otherwise cool fight.
So I thought about it and I think I understand why Elden ring doesn’t hit the same with me like darksouls did; beyond the anime-fication of the combat and boss design and writing not really changing in any significant way, past your first blind play through the open world just makes me feel like I’m doing chores. In ds1 if I wanted my build to use, say, the giants halberd I would need to ring both bells, get through sens and then trek through anor londo to buy it. In Elden ring if I want to use the great stars I need to go to one end of the map for key #1, go to the other end for key #2 or fight my way through the cliff face, then don’t forget to grab the physic and clear the mines for smithing stones to upgrade it, then I ether grab it from the cart or snag it from invading magnus which then results in you needing to do varres quest (aka MORE chores). The former, I’m playing the game and making progress through an intended experience. The latter, I’m doing chores to get a build even started.
@user-kb1su7mg1g Shit sorry I wrote that when I was sleepy and slightly intoxicated. What I think I was trying to say was that he puts what I think into words.
I am in the same place after this DLC; I am left feeling somewhat bereaved of the souls franchise. It truly does feel like the whole thing has come crashing down, like some sort of finale has taken place. But not thanks to some incredible, spectacular boss being beaten or some story being concluded. Those things would bring me satisfaction. Instead, what I feel I have seen is the logical endpoint of the souls gameplay formula. The things that made DeS (and eventually DaS) special have been deprived of significance thanks to a gradual shift in level design. *The following things are no longer remarkable:* -the stamina bar that forced players to be thoughtful and conservative with actions in combat -the currency / xp meter that presented a dilemma to players: cash in or risk it all -familiarity with and solving a boss gauntlet -improvising with whatever equipment you had available at that point in a playthrough. You can often beeline to whatever you need in the open world. you can also respec many times. -bosses that rewarded experimentation and variation in gameplay (this is a tricky one, but, e.g. the very same character playing the same way could have an easy time on some bosses and a hard time on others) -the mischievousness of invasions has been largely lost because there is no host gauntlet to game, and also the repetitiveness of 3v1 co-op posses. -the quest design succeeded in souls games. it now completely fails elden ring. someone pointed this fact out to me: the casual player might go *days* between stages in quests that consist of one or two sentences often vaguely indicating where to get the next one or two sentences. -the low fantasy player meets high fantasy enemy dynamic. With more special attacks and fantastical gear, we have lost some of the sense of adventure. finally... -the ludonarrative (forgive me for using that word, zanzibart...) dissonance that was absent from much of souls is present here. FROM's fails to garnish the basic gameplay loop with narrative significance. I, the player character, am basically an immortal murder hobo who wants to rule a terribly antagonistic world. Unless I spend my time reflecting on the descriptions of the trash I pick up, or tracing the obscenely disjointed questlines, I just do not understand why I must kill, and why they want to kill me. I do not understand why I respawn. I do not understand why I get stronger. I do not understand why I shoot magic, or invade other worlds, or have a ghost horse, or why there is a giant tree with a slug in it. There is also the risk that having come to understand the lore, the player finds that the humble roll-stab/shoot gameplay undermines the lore's grandeur. Elden Ring has put my mind at ease in a way. The prediction that Matthewmatosis made years ago has been fulfilled many times over, and even more than he predicted has gone awry. I've had my fun with the series, but I can pull the plug now. The magic has been lost. thank you for reading my blogpost and thank you for the video that prompted this reflection.
I have replayed Dark Souls 1 more times than I can even count, but replaying Elden Ring? I made that mistake already by going into NG+ once I had beaten the entirety of the DLC for both the NPC quests (which I had neglected by beating the DLC ASAP) and trying to get the rest of the Scadu fragments (I didn't realize while playing that I needed to write a goddamn list of the ones I had already gotten) after forgetting how long it takes to do everything. It's been a slog just from the sheer distance I have to horse around. Regarding the bosses, learning Malenia (mind you, my favorite fight in the series and what I hoped more "spastic" bosses would be like with her staggerability making it an even match) has put me in this headspace where if a boss is annoying to fight, I tend to think I must be doing something wrong. It makes it hard for me to judge a lot of boss fights now, but no matter the subjective opinions, I feel the final boss really is just a caricature of what someone who has never touched the series but has heard Bandai's marketing BS would think a Souls boss is. They've really pushed far away from the grounded roots of the older games, and I'm not a fan of this direction. However, I feel like a lot of people who started with Dark Souls 3 and like how the series has been shedding its grounded roots to become more action-oriented love it. I always think if I wanted an actiony Souls experience, I'd go play Ninja Gaiden or Nioh yet again. Finally, the main gimmick of the open world has put less focus on the stages, and the stages are what make Dark Souls 1 the best Souls game, yet somehow they've been paying less attention to level design with every subsequent title. The dungeons have kind of kept the feeling, but it's nowhere even close to how levels were designed before. I like Elden Ring, but a lot of the changes have been moving away from the original titles and it's not really been to its benefit. It's like how I feel with 3, the foundation is good enough I'll put up with it.
I dropped out about 80 hours into the base game and have no interest to go back to any Souls game for a long time. I found the world design less interesting in ER than previous games, and this combat wore out its welcome long ago for me. It didn't help that they kept throwing in giant bosses, despite the combat mechanics being purely suited to fighting small stuff. I've played a lot of Monster Hunter and Dragon's Dogma, which have raised the bar for what fighting a dragon can be. I do not need 20 dragon fights in which you hack at their ankles on a horse and run away from AOE barf. You're right about the potential for roleplay, but unfortunately I had next to zero enjoyment of the story, world lore, or characters of this game.
Just because you fight dragons like that doesn't mean you have too lol. I literally kill on the dragons on feet using a Huge kitana chopping at their head (which is their weak spot). So you can play just like monster hunter minus MH Mechanics.
@@gamebwoy8259 it's ironic that he played monster hunter which emphasizes on hitting certain weakspot and choose to slay a dragon in ER in the most boring way possible. I only ever use Torrent to get away or close gap.
@@gamebwoy8259 No, you can't play just like MH, because unlike MH, Miyazaki refuses to acknowledge that his camera design is horrible. Play MH again, realize the camera is about a million times better suited for fighting large monsters, and then play a Souls game and stop attacking the boss so you can fight the camera to be able to see their attack patterns. I feel like heaven and earth were moved when the camera actually fucking PANNED OUT to fight Radahn. Wow, what a concept. I played every Souls game + Bloodborne but man, that was always a huge pain point. No idea why it was never addressed. These games were frankly always better RPGs than they were action games.
@@CrizzyEyes i don't have to fight the camera i got used to how souls games are designed and in fact i rarely have camera issues and thats never been a complaint of mine or any others that I've actually seen. I said u can play just like mh in reference to using big swords and other large weapons to hit dragons and beasts anywhere you want and not being limited to ankles. Mh literally has different mechanics and is a whole different game lol of course its gonna have a camera suited for its mechanics and gameplay. Elden rings camera is fine imo but to each his own
@@CrizzyEyes another good point is the gargantuan size of the weapons in MH and their animations and hitboxes being well suited to hitting very tall targets. yet another good point is how the monsters in MH are often much smaller than those in elden ring. ER is also a game in which you can expect half the weapons to be less than a metre long.
Good video. Even though I have 500+ hours in Elden Ring, it's by far not my favorite Souls game. I'm at the point where I WANT to start a new playthrough but can't because I know I'll get bored by the unsurmountable mountain that is collecting all the stuff before the fun begins. At some point before ER came out I observed that Fromsoft is upping the difficulty ante with every new Souls game. Dark Souls 1, Manus was one of the first if not the only boss with delayed attacks. Dark Souls 2 had damage reduction on phase changes, among other things. Dark Souls 3 had Pontiff require you to dodge multiple attacks in a row in order to punish - a behavior that started with Bloodborne, but 3 also cemented multi-healthbar boss fights (with especially Friede as a standout). I theorized that if this continues, at some point in the future there will be a phase where the players realize the bosses have become TOO mechanically challenging to be fun anymore. They'll still be well-designed boss fights within a game that would probably offer you alternate, easier routes to killing them, but the old days of tanking and spanking a 1v1 boss fight would be over. At that point, the devs will realize they've gone too far. Looks like we're in that phase with the elden ring dlc. It took a while, but here we are: boss fights are so difficult and overwhelming they're no longer fun to fight solo in classic melee combat unless you're dedicated to learning all of the mechanics, squeezing out every single milisecond of an opening, and theorizing the perfect dodge that will leave you in perfect position for a counterattack and you just don't do that on a first playthrough. Speedrunners and hardcore Souls challenge nerds will thrive in this environment, but not your average Souls veteran that's looking for that old-school experience.
One positive thing that Elden Ring has done to me, is that it's made me appreciate Sekiro way more in retrospect. As a hardcore fan of the old games from way back in the day, I was massively disappointed in Sekiro, because it felt like the entire highlight of that game were its spectacle bossfights. I didn't care about the world, the story, the atmosphere, felt no constant sense of danger whilst exploring, but at the very least the boss fights themselves felt like they were designed with the moveset your player character has at its disposal. I remember when Dark Souls 3 came out, I was complaining about how the bosses (and many lategame enemies) were faster and more spastic than they were in Bloodborne, which was a far faster game than DS3, with core combat mechanics that encouraged aggression. Elden Ring has managed to do the same thing, but to Sekiro, a game where you don't even have a stamina bar. I have long given up that Fromsoft will ever recapture the dungeon-crawling, almost horroresque feeling of exploring Demon's Souls or Dark Souls 1, where the areas themselves were often more dangerous than the bosses waiting at their end. Then, at the very least, they should drop the shackles of the now 15 year old game's design philosophies, and fully lean into the action game formula. At least fighting Father Owl or Isshin felt fun, even if it's a completely different type of fun than navigating and surviving Blighttown was. Yeah, Matthewmatosis was right, but I don't think even he predicted that it would've gone both in the action-spectacle direction, whilst still retaining 80% of Demon's Souls core mechanics for absolutely no good reason. Thanks for this video.
I'm so glad you made this video, because it sums up my own thoughts perfectly and you communicate these misgivings so well. These have been my favorite games since 2015, but I really dislike the design philosophy behind Elden Ring. They are so focused on keeping the games hard that they forgot what made them fun, and the tedium of exploration ruins the replayability that has always been one of the best features. I've been very frustrated with friends that are also long time fans who refuse to criticize anything about the game, and while talking to one friend about why I didn't like the bosses, he just shrugged me off and said "Nothings changed, just learn the pattern". I can learn the pattern--did my first sl1 no-hit run on Gael a few months ago for example--but Gael was fun and these bosses simply haven't been. You've been one of my favorite creators for these gams since I was 15, and I'm glad to hear you have been feeling the same way. At least we can always go back and play Demon Souls...
I've had this sentiment for a long time and have a hard time explaining it to current fans of the genre. Also started on ps3 Demon's souls. I remember vividly watching E3 on G4 and demon's souls came up and begging my dad to get it for me on launch. Thankfully someone sold it to a pawn shop on a launch week near my house. I love elden ring don't get me wrong but it seems like a misinterpretation of what original fans enjoyed about souls 1. The strongest part of ds1 wasn't gameplay or builds it was the story and world building. Unconventional characters felt more real than AAA games at the time. Not only that, but the stories and lore of DS1 were easier to understand just hard to find. I understood why gwyn kept the age of fire going because he, and other characters were scared of the alternative that they didn't understand. This tracks with most characters but in ER I have no idea why the characters are doing what they are doing and why anything they do matters. ER will use words and concepts that only exist in its game and when a character does something you are almost expected to be like "oh yeah that makes sens" Radagon is marika; ok? what does that mean? are they the same person, the same consciousness, do they share memories, can they exist at the same time, etc.. Godwyn was attacked with "destined death" but it only killed his spirit his body is "alive" still. Then there's the Golden order, the weird naming (margit morgott renna ranni).I didn't need to watch lore videos in DS1 to understand motivations behind things but when I watch lore videos for ER I'm still confused. Then there's gameplay, I loved how in bloodborne and to an extent sekiro. A lot of your basic tools worked on most if not all bosses. Gun allowed you to "parry" monsters that weren't just humans with swords, red symbols in sekiro would signify mikiri attacks, sweeping jump over attacks, and unblockable attacks, also all lightning attacks could be caught and thrown back. In ER, it frustrates me that most fights devolve to "roll r1 roll r1", I have all of these skills, all of these spells, incantations, ashes of war with cool effects but the animations are so long that if I do use them I'll die. Not only that, but some ashes are so strong there is no reason to use the other attacks on a weapon. Hitting a boss for thousands of dmg when pressing L2 is great until you see how pitiful your normal attacks are. In some cases, the windows for these attacks are the same time, I have just enough time for one R1 or for one L2. I've been playing a lot of Monster hunter and its hard to give ER praise for combat when half of the mechanics you can't use while in Monster hunter everything has a place. I have to use every button for my weapon to learn how to be efficient. Yes, there are cheese builds in MH and exploits but they're exceptions and not the norm. And in most cases the cheese doesn't deal as much dmg as just being good at your weapon and prepared for the hunt. I still like elden ring, I like it a lot but I can't keep this out of my head and I'm glad someone else shares these thoughts/
i havent really watched any of your vids since the ds1 sl1 run and there a whole bunch of youtubers who ive watched for a long time who at some point decided to start talking in their vids yet somehow every time it happens i go "no way he sounds like that" maybe its the dawn pfp its probably that
I personally didn't like Elden Ring right off the bat. I could list a ton of reasons, but I'll only say my biggest dislike was the lack of diversity in movesets between weapons. It felt like a slog to get through, and I only did to get my money's worth. It's a shame I wanted this to grab me like Dsk3 and BB did.
I think it's very likely that the next souls game will have some form of a visible posture meter like Sekiro and AC6. Hell, ER clearly has something like one behind the scenes with how boss staggers work, but the opacity makes it significantly more frustrating because of how difficult it becomes to tell when you can hard commit. This combines with how much the DLC bosses put you on the defensive to a degree that it can be actively stressful, whereas in Sekiro being on the defensive is just a different form of offense. Regarding the replayability, there's an extent to which you've always been able to just run straight through in these games, but yeah agreed that the ER open world incentivizes it more than before. SotE is definitely *better* about it than base game because the space is denser, but until we see ER2 it'll be impossible to say whether it's a fixable problem
I agree with alot of your points but i still really love elden ring. I have 500 hours and 6 characters. Personally i dont mind the check list nature(but unserstand why most dont). I think the game has some insane build variety and i find it deeply satisfying to come up with different characters, dressing them up and giving them a theme. It has froms best level design, exploration, weapons, fantastic magic system, and is hands down my favorite athstetically when it comes to art direction. My biggest problem like you is the bosses. I just hate the fake out bullshit and long combos. Which is why i love the spirit summon feature. This game i think is at its funnest when your either playing with people or summoning cool creatures. Which is why it pains me that from softwares multiplayer systems are atrocious. Honestly elden ring should have had more sekiro bloodborne style of combat to match better with the bosses. Im also disappointed in some of the kore direction
Great video. Elden Ring was such a disappointment after the masterpiece Sekiro was. The bosses in ER literally feel like they could be from Sekiro, but yet they don't give you the proper tools to deal with them, so it all comes down to just dodge rolling on muscle memory rather than on reaction, because who is actually reacting to these insane moves? Real shame. I just hope they give the player more to work with in their future IPs if they're gonna keep making crazier and crazier bosses. The souls formula needs a serious overhaul at this point. It's the main reason I've since jumped to Nioh, and don't plan on coming back to ER anytime soon, if ever.
Refreshing to see such an honest and balanced opinion. My main gripe with these games has got to be the fact that members of the community (or at the very least its vocal minority) are simply not ready for any kind of critical assessment of these titles: you either have to love these games unconditionally or it's a "skill issue" and you should "go play something else, we won't miss you here". And ever since the release of ER this problem was exacerbated and turned up pretty much to 11. I've jumped on board during the release of the first Dark Souls and played all of these games, finished them several times over. I like them as much as the next guy, but are they immune to criticism? Of course not. And neither it's a "skill issue". You are allowed to like the thing and be critical of it at the same time. As for Shadow of the Erdtree, I liked it in terms of design and exploration. Very much so. I'd go as far as to call it an actual improvement: smaller map paired with its verticality played really well into a more condensed experience compared to the original game, which I found to be bloated. A more coherent narrative focus was a welcome addition as well. And while I don't necessarily agree with "it's too hard" sentiment when taking DLC as a whole (I had a great time exploring the map and fighting field bosses), dungeon boss fights surely feel a bit...ah...overtuned. You described the root cause of this problem really well. To me it long seems that FromSoft are more interested in chasing the "hardest boss ever" label more than anything else. Sure, these bosses are hard as hell, but at what cost?.. I can't even remember the last time I had the sense of accomplishment, much less satisfaction of prevailing over the boss: these days it's more "phew, glad that's over with" more than anything else. If I'm going to come back to this DLC (surprisingly, I'd rather replay SotE than ER itself), I'm not sure I'll bother with Radahn ever again. And that brings us to the new power-up system, which is a whole other can of worms. FromSoft were so obsessed with the "intended difficulty curve" that it pretty much broke half the sense of enjoyment I might've had. It may be an unpopular opinion, but I think that if I took the time to "get huge", I have every right to enjoy the fruits of my labor, i.e. being a one-man wrecking ball. And here I was, stuck on Messmer, because I came to him with just 4 Scadutree Blessings. "You should go do something else", they say. Man, I don't need more motivation to explore the world -- it's fascinating to me as it is. But when I can't finish a dungeon -- which was a relative breeze -- because I challenged a boss "too early", I dunno. Seems a bit counterintuitive to this game's whole open-ended philosophy: all routes are valid, but some are more valid than others, I guess. This new system was so alien to people that Bamco had to post reminders across all of their social media to actually use these fragments. To me that pretty much spells failure at intelligent design. Anyway, I ramble too much. Great video, man. Good to know I'm not alone. Cheers!
Agree on that obsession of chasing "hardest boss ever". These games have a reputation of being hard and with every subsequent release From seems to ramp things further and further. It's a shame because it's caused them to move away from the weird bosses (I enjoyed the Lamenter because it was different, unique, and fun) since most discourse around them are just "lol too easy boss sucks". Like damn, are the only acceptable boss types the ones that play like Rellana?
@@justkallmekai Despite being a gimmick boss, Lamenter was at least fun and broke up the monotony a bit, I agree. It was a pleasant surprise. Sure, we've seen similar stuff in From's earlier games, but it just begs the question whey are these so few & far between? I'd rather go through a bunch of these gimmicky encounters then another set-piece boss with insane delayed attack combo strings, broken hit-boxes and effects that burn away my retinas. But that's what looks good on a stream, huh. It's just spectacle.
@@Browhiskas There's a lot I like about ER but I agree the spectacle was a bit much. (Bayle's Radahn-esque kamikazi made me roll my eyes) though I agree that ER isn't DS and has a different tone to it. I would love if From's new IPs make me enjoy the 'over the topness' of ER retroactively. But I sense they'll be continuing this trend if Sekiro, AC6, and SotE are any indication. Hopefully with the company expansion we'll see them experiment with a more grounded style
I'm seeing this clear divide between a fanbase be reminiscent of RE or Zelda. When the series got a massive hit and part of the fanbase starts to feel alienated. Some would argue it's been happening since DS2 or BB but regardless it's a shame. You don't have to go far to see people that shit on others for liking certain aspects of Souls games that got diminished. It doesn't help that games in general have a very childish discourse so you can't get anywhere in these discussions
I'm a little mixed on this, myself. Not about your opinions-they're your opinions, obviously-but I know that I was running past everything as early as DS1 by my second playthrough. Once I had more or less appeased my completionist urges, knew where everything was and how much of it was irrelevant to whatever build I was currently setting up, I'd chunk off whole regions and skip by anything that wasn't either a good souls-to-time reward to kill or protecting/carrying something I needed. So in that respect, Elden Ring doesn't really feel much different to me, there's just more ground to cover. While that does mean the first hour or two of a new character can feel like I'm checking off boxes on my standard route to be level 60 before facing a real boss, it doesn't feel much different from how I'd start a new master key character in Dark Souls and go out of order all over the place to get a +15 weapon before entering Sen's Fortress. Just a difference of playstyle, but I get it. When it comes to the DLC, particularly the bosses, I didn't find *most* of them to be unusually wild. Dealing with Waterfowl Dance is still more of a frustration point for me than basically all but one of the DLC bosses' entire kit (maybe that says more about me than them, I dunno). The *final* boss, though? Hooooly hell, what were they *smoking?* Literally the first time I've ever respecced to use a greatshield and rapier just to kill a boss because after 8 attempts at phase 2 I could tell that, while it was beatable, I'd need to dedicate a day just to learning that fight, and I wasn't that interested. So I get where you're coming from, especially if you choose not to use ashes or summons or other tools that can invalidate a lot of fight mechanics since that probably means some of the other fights I thought were about on par with vanilla Elden Ring might've seemed much less reasonable for your style. Mostly I'm just sorry the game doesn't resonate for you as much as you might've hoped it would. Disappointment's never a fun feeling.
Can't argue with financial success. Apparently people like collect-a-thons, and it's also why Ubisoft-style open world games sell so well (when Ubisoft isn't shooting themselves in the foot, or when the game isn't made by Ubisoft, anyway). But I agree. I'd take it a step further and say that Miyazaki's game design style doesn't really mesh that great with open world. Soulslike works far better when it is in a replayable, short format. Or when it's stage based, like in Nioh. Personally, I think the game could have used _less_ dungeons, namely the prefab dungeons that exist to contain... one useless bell summon you will never use. Some item that would have literally been placed in a corner somewhere as an afterthought in a previous Souls game now deserves its own dungeon. And worse, they're not that interesting.
I'd like to preface this wall of text by saying I do love Elden Ring, both base game and the DLC. Mostly for the environments, exploration, atmosphere, lore. And I enjoy crawling through "legacy dungeons", meticulously clearing every single nook and cranny. I just don't care about the challenge of ER bosses at all. I consider myself a good Souls player, I've done my fair share of challenge runs in previous titles, but I just couldn't give a shit about beating Malenia without summons for example. For combat I play Nioh 2, now that is a game with fun combat. I grew tired of i-framing through increasingly annoying and elaborate attacks by Dark Souls 3. I remember Miyazaki saying DS3 would be their last Souls game and thinking - thanks goodness, time to move on. So to me the combat loop of Elden Ring was already a letdown from the beginning. As soon as I fought Margit and saw those randomly delayed attacks, roll baits etc, I immediately knew where this is going. And I just stopped caring about ER bosses and summoned my way through almost every single boss. To me the challenge presented was just not interesting. Usually I pull a boss several times to see the moves, get to phase 2 and once I've seen everything, I just summon to finish the boss. I would also like to point out, that summons in the DLC are not as crazy powerful as in the base. Tiche or mimic tear won't solo bosses for you anymore, you still have to fight. But of course, it's much much easier. I completely agree with your main point - the current design pattern for Souls boss encounters has reached its breaking point. Something has to change.
Right, and how exactly did they improve the formula. It's just open world ds3 with more aggressive bosses and more tools to beat them without having to be good at the game.
@@colemix1852 bro you have replied to alsmost every comment here glazing elden ring. Can't you accept that your favourite game may have flaws. I love all the fromsoft games including elden, beaten the game plenty of times including level1. But starting a new game on elden compared to the others is depressing. And theres so much more problems but clearly you think it's perfect
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I was worried how the reception on this video would be but it's been reassuring to see so many people share similar sentiments.
But there been one similar line of thought within the negative comments that's perplexing me, wherin some viewers seem to be under the illusion that I want Elden Ring to bend to my tastes, when in reality I'm just observing and lamenting over what's been lost along the way. That's all this video is, really. An untangling of my feelings and experience with these games over the past decade and a half. I wouldn't have spent hundreds of hours playing a game if I didn't really like it for the good it did provide, but that doesn't mean I can't think critically about it too.
I never want to roll from 100 slashes a minute ever again
🎶Keep rolling rolling rolling🎶
🎶Keep rolling rolling rolling🎶
That fucker on the stairs before the lion boss. Fucking stupid enemy
Haha same 😂. Shit makes me nostalgic for fucking DS2 lmao. Which is crazy
Just block. Souls games being rollslop was never a great thing to begin with.
"i just sit back and laugh at some of these boss attacks"
Exactly what i did.
Me too
"wahhhhhh i can't believe i have to dodge so much!"
lmfao back to reddit, kiddos
Got to the finals bosses second phase and had a good laugh before turning the game off and going to sleep.
@@Political_Brainrot_Auditor nah more like "lul this boss is so cringe" then beat it in 2 hrs
@@naota909 2 hours? yeh ur garb lmao
Probably a minority but I miss Dark Souls 1's style the most. It was a simple game, very quaint in hindsight, but it clicked with me the most. Not just the gameplay but also the environments and general artstyle. Every game after that just becomes more and more grandiose and anime, and my old tired ass can't keep up with it.
I absolutely agree with each game that comes out. I miss the slower clunky game play of Dark Souls 1. And have generally stopped enjoying the newer souls games. I haven't even played elden ring in months and have almost zero interest in it now.
As a demon's souls fan, dark souls 1 was kind of a dry fart of a renaissance faire!! I play fromsoft games because they're Cool, not because they're a serious grimgrey romp or a tightly balanced experience. When 2 was like a weird fever dream again, I was very pleased.
...this, of course, means I know I'm not exactly in the critical consensus! just my two cents. elden ring gets away with a lot in my books because ultimately it's a game where half the weapons make me go :O is that a fuckin magic model of the solar system i swing around like a mace??
I duck ds1 because of the mechanics and gimmicks, but the world was easy to get lost in.
I remember watching feeble kings section on his ds1 lvl 1 run, that lil clip in blight town was exactly how I felt.
I'm lost, it's dark, I'm alone, and weak... is this how my ds1 1st playthrough ends?
Genuine questions and fears caused by a game lol... good times. I actually felt bad for soldier to, i could finally understand all the love he gets.
Bro came thru when you could just randomly chill with him in some of the hardest spots.
I don’t think you’re as alone as you feel. Even most of us who love all the games that have come since hold Dark Souls 1 in a very high place.
There’s something special and unique about it that still holds up separately from the rest. I’m an OG Armored Core fan, fan from Demon’s Souls to Elden Ring I’ve beaten them all and each one is special and appreciated for its own specific reason.
And the best part about that is it gives me a reason to go back and play the previous games too, not just stick to the newest one.
@@AmnesiacDoe DS1 was a game that did not age well to be honest. Somewhere between a third to a quarter of the game is blatantly unfinished, backstab cheesing makes a lot of the enemies kind of a joke once you figure it out, interface is utterly shit, etc. I beat it at least 3 times, but man, it feels like they are decades behind in some game design aspects, especially the interface. I have no real desire to play it again.
I never understood why DS2 got so much hate. Sure, you take an elevator from a poison swamp mine into a Mario 64 style lava castle, but the game also doesn't play like a tech demo and there is, gasp, a 2D grid inventory. Something that Baldur's Gate had in the mid 90's. Not to mention way more build variety and viability.
Elden Ring not having a quest log when you can easily be on half a dozen quests at the same time, spread out over a massive world, is yet another head-scratching moment where I have to imagine this game was designed by ascetic monks who have never heard of any video game outside of their monastery before. It was fine in Dark Souls where quests were usually "talk to this NPC whenever you find him on one of the 3 or so paths you can possibly take" with only one or two very obscure quests like saving Solaire's life in DS1 for example. JP developers tend to do this kind of thing a lot; reinvent the wheel as if it wasn't invented 30 years prior, and then forget to add spokes. I gave up and had to look up quest guides simply because I forgot what progress point I was on, and sometimes I forgot which quests I was even on.
I feel like there's a lot of crossover between Fromsoft fans who feel exhausted by the new adopted open world formula and Zelda fans who feel exhausted by the new adopted open world formula. I am personally sick to death of open worlds. Give me a tightly designed, more limited linear world that opens up as I explore, please, with well tuned challenges that can more easily take into account my current character progress.
Right, not like from soft designed the most intuitive and deliberate open world we've ever seen in an action game. One where you don't need countless map markers, pop ups, characters mumbling inane nonsense to themselves, and hud markers to actually make it worth exploring. Not like they baked so much story into the open world design and all the enemies from bosses to mobs. Not like they added new mechanics, features, weapon and build options and more ways for you to interact with that world. But no. Open world = bad. If you are burnt out on open world games why would you buy the open world souls game??? It was literally the main gimmick and sales pitch. If you were exhausted of open world why did you pay 40 dollars when you were explicitly told the dlc was ANOTHER OPEN WORLD TO EXPLORE? make it make sense.
@@colemix1852 Um, but I didn't purchase the Elden Ring DLC, it looks like more of the same... And from everything I've seen, I think I was right.
@@suburbansamurai3560It is more of the same but with the worst aspects of the base game turned to 11. I really regret buying it.
That's funny, because basically all of Fromsoftware's previous games before elden ring were tightly designed linear games. If you don't like open worlds, that's completely fine, but maybe pick from literally any of their other games that isn't an open world instead, nobody's forcing you to play Elden Ring just because fromsoft made it.
After making more or less linear games for so long, open world is just the direction they wanted to go in and they did really well at it, but there's no reason for you to put yourself through something you know you won't like. Rather than be frustrated that they didn't choose to make one type of game, why not just celebrate their successes with the type of game they did choose to make, because whilst not everyone likes open world games, a lot of people still do, me included. I think it's unfair to want them to only make one type of game forever when there's so much variety out there
I didn't really fuck with botw but totk is probably one of the only good open world games I've ever played. That being said I've been of the mind that dark souls has never really recovered from how they started designing the games with 3. FROM's more experimental recent games like bloodborne, sekiro and AC6 definitely did more for me than DS2/3 and ER, that's for sure.
I feel like one of the GIGANTIC things holding Elden Ring back for me as a player is the fact that the controls just feel... unresponsive? Or, rather, they just feel antithetical to what Elden Ring wants to be. Like, I could deal with the bosses that have more complex patterns and strange delays to their attacks, and regular overworld enemies that are more complex than early-game ER bosses but give fewer rewards...
I could deal with all that and try to struggle through it if, when I press roll and fail, I wasn't punished TWICE - once with damage, and twice with a roll I input 3 IRL seconds ago... usually followed up my more damage. I could deal with it if they had decided to make Roll a dedicated button for once instead of continuing to share it with sprinting, meaning that Rolling happens on button RELEASE instead of PRESS despite the games MUCH more twitch-responsive nature.
The game's controls want you to sit back and observe bosses' 37-hit-chain movesets, but the game's design wants you to react and do shit on-the-fly because the bosses' attacks are twice as fast as their startups as well as dragging them halfway across the arena in an instant (meaning there is no way to hang back and learn). Add that on top of the fact that 40 levels in vigor is practically REQUIRED if you want to get any real learning done (since most enemies past Limgrave - let alone bosses - will 2-shot you without it), so going and changing around your build isn't really super flexible, either...
I dunno. It feels like Elden Ring wants to be a more slow, considerate game like DS1 and DS2 sometimes, and other times it wants to be the Ritalin-fueled crack-nightmare adrenaline-fest that Bloodborne and DS3 were, and it really grates against itself for it. Do I dislike the game? No, not really. I actually quite like the game as a whole experience. The world feels bleak, but still somewhat lived-in (which was an experience that none of the DS games prior really game me) and the visual and aural experiences are just beautiful. But MAN, there are things that keep it from being my favorite of From's games.
Oh man, the egregious input buffer being carried on in these games despite them being faster is a sticking point for me too, as well as sprint and roll still sharing a button. The latter gets rather aggravating when you die to something you know you managed to read because it's not "I know I pressed the button", it's "I didn't release it fast enough".
@@Emarrel It's such a bittersweet feeling, because when I play it with my friend we have a *WHALE* of a time! We spent like 10 or 15 minutes on Blackgaol Knight just stunlocking him with the greathammer's scoop weapon art and dying if we ever "dropped the combo" so we could try and perfect him!
The disparity in build effectiveness didn't matter as much when we could focus on juggling the boss's aggro between us so we could get some breathing room in. But trying to play through alone to get to the points where we COULD play together again meaningfully (i.e. dungeon-like areas with a boss at the end) felt like a slog if I tried to "play it fair" by actually engaging with the enemies or felt like I was just rushing through stuff to get to those areas.
@@Emarrel a lot of attacks you can jump over and that happens on press, not release (just don't try to roll immediately after jumping)
There is an input queue but it’s definitely not 3 seconds. It’s like 1 second. You let spamming right before getting hit
@@Emarrel input buffer is king. Lies of p? I think felt like trash because there was no input buffer. Roll, deflect and hit to heal and then after the deflect, he just stood still despite me pressing heal
It does seem like most discourse is skewed toward the mechanical aspect of teh game rather than the roleplaying and replayability parts which are equally important. you're spot on about a bunch of the cool stuff being gatekept by open world busywork. I beat the game with a sorcerer build on release and it took a dlc coming out to convince me to start a second character (paladin theme, pretty baller so far)
Literally clapped and pumped my fists at the Matthewmatosis line. He was right then, he's still right, and I agree with basically everything you said in the video. Elden Ring is the first Fromsoft game I didn't complete immediately. I actually took a long break from the game about 2/3 the way through because it just wasn't gripping me anymore. Compared to all the Souls games which I've completed at least twice for each. What's funny is that, Elden Ring has cemented what I really want out of From games now. I want them to go full tilt into action rather than RPG if they want to keep this design philosophy going forward. I want more stuff like Sekiro, which had way more replay value for me because, like you said, every time I beat a boss or cleared an area I would go "I want to do that again!" I even beat and replayed the boss-rushes, something I NEVER do in games that offer them, because of the wonderfully varied boss design and fun multi-purpose prosthetic weapons and combat arts you can unlock and upgrade.
I remember watching your Demon's Souls and Dark Souls 1 NG+7 a decade ago and man those videos and the PVP adventure of yours were good fucking times, with how you feel with Elden Ring yeah I agree especially with NG+. I never bothered with those because everything is a chore to collect again.
Peculiar Parish is still one of my favorite Souls videos of all time.
I feel very similar! Liked Elden Ring enough to put 200 hours into my first character through several ng+s. Tried to start a new one for the DLC and couldn't will myself to keep going. Playing through the DLC on my OG character in ng+something. The open world is very cool and fun to explore but I also struggle to force myself to turn the game on and play for a long time because there's so much to do.
Me on the other hand can't force myself to turn the game off because there's so much to do.
What a validating listen, been more or less giving this same rant ever since the game released. I feel as though Dark Souls' reputation as "the hardest game ever!!1!" was something of a death sentence for From's design philosophy from that point onward, as they felt the need and tried harder and harder to one-up themselves with each subsequent title. I don't think Dark or Demon's Souls were ever particularly difficult to play from a purely mechanical perspective, it was more that they had a unique combination of being mechanically complex while being very demanding as far as understanding and engaging with those mechanics went. Dark Souls is "the hardest game ever" if you don't know how equip load works, if you don't pay attention to your stamina bar, or if you don't allocate your stats somewhat efficiently. But at the end of the day, it isn't particularly difficult to parse and avoid Ornstein or Smough's attacks, and with a little patience most players can get through that fight, and by extension the entire game, within a reasonable amount of time.
The draw of those games, for me anyway, wasn't necessarily tied to any mechanical difficulty, but the concept of an adventure through what were some of the most captivating and well-sculpted worlds I had ever seen in a game, that was inherently dangerous and required me to deeply consider every decision I made, both in and out of combat. The "difficulty" (I think "challenge" is a better word), was in learning what to do, not struggling to do it. "What's down those stairs? A scary new enemy, what does it do? How do I avoid its attacks? Should I try to fight it, or come back later? They're too strong, but they're guarding an item. I want that item! I'll bash my head against this until I win, not because I have to, but because I want to. The item is a shitty ring, aw. But they dropped a cool sword, awesome! What's through this door?"
I still get this sense of wonder with their more recent titles, but I haven't felt a desire to replay any of these games (unmodded) since Bloodborne. While the exploration is still there, and the worlds are still captivating (if not as well-sculpted sometimes), the process of actually dealing with the obstacles they put in front of you feels much more tedious than it's ever been before. I consider myself to be relatively good at these games, and I also enjoy mechanically challenging games, even to an extreme degree. But I simply do not enjoy the flavor of challenge that From has leaned into in recent years, for all the reasons described in the video. Dark Souls was challenging because you are exploring a dangerous world, Elden Ring is challenging because the devs are trying to "getcha".
At the end of the day I'll continue playing their games, I'll continue enjoying them, and I'll continue bitching every time I see an unnatural, arbitrary delay on swings 3 and 5 of a 7 hit combo. I'm always going to miss the more restrained approach they had with their earlier titles, but it is what it is.
this is real shit. Remember when Miyazaki said difficulty wasn't the point, it was just a tool? wtf happened to that?
@@manbearpigsereal What happened is the community that formed around souls, unfortunately, loudly celebrated how hard the game was first and foremost, and trash-talked every interesting boss that wasn't particularly challenging, like fools idol, micolash, etc. for years, and wanted to meta the games into the ground. What was FS to take away from that except that that's what people want? I feel bad for them.
Gosh, the start-of-run scavenger hunt is so miserable. I hope the open world stays in elden ring and not in future projects
As a singular experience, ER and the dlc are simply some of the best possible out there. However the focus on exploration of the open world lends itself very poorly for replayability. And the scadutree fragments only compund to that. Great the first go around, a nuisance afterwards.
Personally still love ER to death and the dlc overall is incredible, but itll take many years for me to forget enough of the game to make replaying it enjoyable.
....honestly, yeah, I kinda feel what you're getting at here. Fromsoft's games are such a unique and captivating experience, but...I kinda feel like the direction they've been going in has literally been outpacing my reaction times and ability to just, comprehend what's going on. It's the first time playing these games where I've just thrown my hands up and decided I'm just going to summon other players. That will at least be interesting, y'know? The co-op element is still so compelling. But...I dunno if I'd pick up another Soulsborne game if this is the trend.
But it's such a rich world you can roleplay so hard in, if you want to. Those characters all look really unique and cool. :D
This is an unironically brave video for you to make and I'm glad you did.
Isn't wild Matthewmatosis called this 7 years ago with Dark souls 3
I know it will never happen, but I would love if From Software brought back the World Tendency mechanic from Demon's Souls. I think that mechanic has excellent potential for replayability and rewarding skilled play.
After watching The Electric Underground youtube channel (which I highly recommend, best game related channel since Matthewmatosis imo) and getting into bullet hell shmups, I think World Tendency could work really well as an adaptive difficulty system, similar to Rank in shmups. I you played well during a stage and didn't die, the World Tendency shifts towards White after beating the boss. When the WT shifts towards White, the enemies and bosses become faster and more dangerous, and the level design could also change. You could only change WT in Human Form, and dying in Human Form shifts the WT towards Black. At the start of each stage, you could offer a Stone of Ephemeral Eyes to turn to Human Form if you're in Soul Form currently. Breaking a SoEE would also shift the world towards Black WT.
The goal would be to get all worlds to either Pure White or Pure Black WT, and there are only a finite amount of SoEE's to try to do it on a playthrough. If you got all worlds to a Pure WT, a hidden sixth world would be unlocked, and a true final boss at the end of it. If you didn't play well enough and died too many times in Human Form, then you could still get the normal ending, but would have to start the game again if you want to reach the final boss. The nice thing about this is that new players could play in Soul Form for for most of the game and don't have to worry about WT, but experienced player would have to think about WT at all times. It would be very cool if you played well and didn't die in for example 5-1 and 5-2, and suddenly 5-3 is completely different and much more difficult. I think this would all suit the mysterious and unknowable nature of Souls games.
For even more risk, you could do what was at the early development of Demon's Souls, and have an item that makes it so that if the player dies in Soul Form, the game deletes your save file. You could have this be a starting item that when chosen cannot be unequipped, kind of like forgoing Kuro's Charm in Sekiro to make the game even harder for yourself.
ER was the only souls game I beat and didn't immediately want to do another playthrough. I beat it at launch, and then didn't replay it again until the DLC came out. You made a good point about the combat being fundamentally the same for the player, all we got for extra mobility in ER is a jump. It seems like sekiro bosses, except we don't have the awesome blocking of sekiro that if done correctly hurts enemy poise. The bosses especially later in the game feel like you just need to roll/jump and wait for an opening, where you can hit them once or twice and then wait again. I replayed 1 again and while that loop is fundamentally the same, the bosses don't have gigantic health pools, usually don't have attacks that kill you in one hit, and most importantly usually have some gimmick to the fight to keep them interesting. Capra is just as much a battle with the areana and the dogs as it is the demon, the uneven footing on gargoyles is fun. I can't really remember an ER boss being gimmicky it's usually just big guy or monster. The open world is also really bad, I hate finding useless crafting materials everywhere. What was the problem with just giving me a green blossom or a purple moss, it's creating a problem out of something that was already fixed.
Ironically enough, I think that Armored Core 6 showed the world what from software could achieve in a game like elden ring if they were able to unshackle themselves of the limited combat system and redundant progression systems. A fantastic, rock solid action game with difficult, but fine tuned encounters. No arbitrary limitation on what equipment you can use, no grinding for levels, no boring item hunting in the open world, just action, and it was great.
I actually feel like ac6 and elden ring share a lot of the same problems, especially the issue of FROM focusing more on boss spectacle expressed in the video.
@@KujouCh I don't think any of the bosses in 6 come close to the level of insufferable bullshit that elden ring dlc throws at the player
@@KujouCh hope they learn something from these releases and make Tenchu as replayable as it was on 360
@Kyfow it's less that the ac6 bosses are insane (especially when you factor in the inherent imbalance of the game's combat mechanics) and more that the series never really had or even needed full on boss fights. The greatest threat you ever had was another AC because they have the exact same strengths and weaknesses as you, except there's an AI behind the wheel and they may just have better performing weapons or even just a health advantage depending on the mission. Games before V had like 2 or 3 genuine bosses, and they didn't generally need any special approaches beyond assessing what they do and altering your play- not playstyle- accordingly. Even the most infamous bosses like zinaida in last raven are just cranked up AC, so you just end up doing what you've been doing but harder.
You understand that Elden ring is an RPG right? None of the systems are arbitrary just because you don't like engaging with them. There is a reason Sekiro isn't considered an rpg after they removed those elements. If you want a straight action game, go play an action game. You don't want an rpg, and this game is so up front about being exactly that. If you couldn't tell what you were getting into, then that's on you, homie.
I really resonated with the points you made in this video. It feels good to see another veteran Souls player also share many of these critiques of the DLC, as I also started with Demon's Souls back on PS3. It really did feel like a huge juxtaposed experience for me. It was both a masterclass in environmental storytelling and open world design, but also with several huge, empty, and confusing to navigate areas. The bosses were often spectacular, complex and interesting, yet somehow felt hollow and a lot less fun and fair to fight, which made me want to cheese bosses far more than ever before, and therefore making many of my victories feel frustrated as a result.
My main I bring first into all new content is always an Int character, often with some faith/arcane as well for lots of spellcasting shenanigans. I went in as an intelligence build, excited for new and fresh takes on sorcery and finished the DLC as a reluctantly primarily faith incantation user, as I felt my favourite build was unfun to play and develop in the DLC. Half the number of sorceries as there was new incantations, no new fun variety of exciting sorcery gear or aesthetics, I felt like the game was conditioning me to feel like I was playing the "wrong" type of caster if I wanted to have fun.
This DLC both met and missed a lot of expectations. Whether they were fair expectations or not, its hard to tell. All in all, it just felt very... bittersweet, but not in that classic Fromsoft sort of way it employs in its storytelling and worlds, but disappointingly so.
Honestly, the 'checklist' feel is what damns the replayable nature of the game, why I keep feeling like going back to Dark Souls 2, easier to get what I want for a character I have in mind for a run.
100% what kills elden ring replays
Gotta spend first hour or 2 gathering all the stuff I know is free and sitting out in open before fighting first boss or else I feel I’m just not optimal.
I could just copy/paste my save after doing this to save on time but.. seems dumb to have to do that just for replayability that’s not exhausting. It’s not the games fault I feel this way but.. just the way I look at it. : /
@@claytontucker8088agreed its the one aspect i dislike. Even though i got a bunch of characters A lot of them i make have become more simple and straightforward, they dont require many things to collect anymore.
@@claytontucker8088 It is the games' fault, really. I'd venture to say that Margit exists as a casual filter specifically to condition you into this kind of behavior -- "breadth-first gameplay" I call it, borrowing a term from computer science. Because you're skimming the game world and exploring in a very "wide, but shallow" manner.
When I first played this game, I was convinced that a veteran player shouldn't have trouble beating Margit at the beginning based on the pacing of prior games. I did do a little side content first, but he was still unbeatable for me until I came back later after having explored a lot (no, I never used the shackle). I found myself chronically underleveled at each boss. I know because I had to check just to see how other players seemed to be getting through the game. I think I ended up fighting Mohg at something like 40 rune levels below what everyone else seemed to be fighting him at. The game seemed to continually slap me on the wrist for wanting to fight bosses when I first encountered them. No no no, it would say, you have to grind and scavenger hunt for at least a few more hours first. I found myself missing every prior Souls game where I could pick a path and fight a boss, knowing that the designers were intelligent enough to pace progression such that I should be able to beat it when I get there.
The progression of the game just felt very weird to me. I've beaten Bloodborne so it is not like I am a stranger to fast and difficult bosses. I've always worried that Miyazaki's games would eventually suffer because of the meme that every single one of his games needs to be harder than the last. No idea why he seems to think that's necessary, but here we are. Monster Hunter suffered from a very similar problem, actually, especially with bosses that have absurdly long and punishing attack patterns, but they have course corrected.
@@CrizzyEyes maybe the “open world” part of elden ring is what killed that dark souls 1 progression feel you’re referring to. Maybe we can’t have both
@@claytontucker8088 I agree with you. I suppose I implied that without stating it out right. Perhaps it is possible, but it would require a lot of effort and careful design.
fatrolling in darkmoon knightess cosplay and pvping in fight clubs (GFWL hatemail) was peak. i never cared about my build and despite the tiny and linear map by comparison, it was more immersive as a character, like cat covenant.
i feel as though the bosses in elden ring deserved to be in sekiro instead. their attack cadence is so much different than any souls game. mashing roll and running away is typical of souls, but it's so exacerbated in elden ring and its DLC. with so few options, cheese tends to be the main strat and is therefore encouraged, reducing the impactfulness of the fights.
Im enjoying this DLC a lot more than the others, BUT the points being made here are hard to argue against, the bosses except for a few ones, dont feel like Ludwig, Nameless King, King Allant, Artorias, Manus, Fume Knight or Sir Alonne (yes even the despised DkS2 did that aspect generally better). In Elden Ring almost every boss fight induces an anxious state trying to deal with the frantic movements and attacks. Still the dlc is awesome in a lot of aspects
"You're just too bad at vidyagames" and "Learn to cheese, bro" were used to shield Dark Souls 2 from all critique back then and it's about as reasonable or absurd still. I feel like Miyazaki has forgotten his own statement that the point of Demon's or Dark Souls was never to just seek some misguided notion of 'hard', but rather provide a challenging encounter through tough but fair mechanics. Now he's saying something like they designed the content trying to test how much his players could endure. The decision to introduce the Scadutree Blessings is a baffling decision to me. You balance the game for players having these fragments, but now you can't balance bosses after a specific blessing-level in mind for what the player reasonably should have when they fight that boss.
I just feel this unbridled "Meh" after almost every DLC boss, like a "Well, that happened, I guess". It's like they're just a chore I have to complete before I can go back to playing the game again. The only boss I remember liking even slightly was Putrescend Knight, but the fight ended too quickly due to him having too little health, unfortunately.
Hard to put into words but I agree
When I first played Elden Ring I really loved my time with it only for it to grow exhausting by the end. I wouldn't call myself a good player but Malenia was the first time I went out of my way to look up strategies on how to deal with them in any of the Souls' games. It felt like a problem I was too stupid to find the solution to. I think you hit the nail on the head when it came to a change in design philosophy. Nothing in the DLC felt nearly as egregious but there were a times I felt I needed to "cheat" because outside of luck avoiding certain moves I did not see a path forward. I still loved the game overall, and I think SOTE has some of the peaks of Fromsoft's entire game catalog. I just don't see myself coming back to it like I would previous entries.
I'd love it if the fragments/revered ashes carried over into fresh ng+ cycles (doubt they do though..)
From what I've heard, they do. Not that I've actually checked myself.
They do. Don't know why you'd doubt it considering both the tears, and the recent update of the bell bearing, stay between cycles.
@Emarrel ahh that's good to know, thanks for confirming! Overall that makes me feel alot better about the new upgrades in the dlc, as I don't mind going out of my way once per character (though gotta agree that it would get repetitive across a dozen characters)
I actually like the more slow methodically approach dark souls 1 has it feels more relaxing and it feels fun to learn
There not hyper fast
They don’t have an unexpected
Unreactable combos extenders
You know when the boss is done with a combo
The problem with Elden ring is when they try to use a combat system meant for slower more methodical and simpler bosses when the game is filled with fast paced hyper aggressive bosses with complex combos
I also feel like they should have made the base game of Elden ring more compact and vertical like the DLC There’s way too many sections in the base game where there’s a huge empty space you do almost nothing in
Been following your stuff for a long time, got me into Shibayan and all. After hearing everything here, seeing people stream it over discord, and seeing the ungodly toxic discourse of people who just want you to suffer as much as they did to tick boxes to allow attempting a bossfight which sucks ass, I really don't know if I want to play Shadow of the Erdtree. The endgame of Elden Ring in general rubbed me the wrong way, and it seems like more of the same but worse.
i don't have the DLC yet but most of this reflects pretty strongly how i felt about base elden ring as a whole. after my first win, i never actually managed to get a new character past altus plateau because the game's just too goddamn big and i would inevitably burn out before getting to anything exciting (especially since i've got the brainworm that wants me to clear out Every side area i can, plus the size of the game makes it incredibly hard to remember where to get any of the specific items you might want without looking them all up). i genuinely think it would be a better game if it had 50% of the land area and Stuff in it. riding your horse across limgrave for 10 minutes loses its splendor by the dozenth time you've had to do it
and i agree strongly on the boss design philosophy too. to me the shift started becoming noticeable in dark souls 3, and only got moreso in elden ring. enemies that have some moves that come out so fast you can barely react to them, and others timed to perfectly roll catch you if you do roll on reflex. hard-to-distinguish animations with indeterminate capacity for combo extension. it's like they saw how people had so thoroughly mastered dark souls and its systems and timings, and went "no we can't be having that. the point of this series is suffering and pain so we're just going to make bosses more and more unnatural and awkward to fight." and so as trying to learn bosses becomes more and more frustrating and less rewarding, it does incentivize finding the less satisfying ways out - the pre-nerf bug swarm bleed incantation pretty much carried me through the back half of my playthrough. in the entire game there were exactly two bosses that i actually really thoroughly enjoyed rather than being a "thank god it's over," and those were maliketh and hoarah loux, two of the last bosses in the critical path who i thus have only gotten to fight once each
it feels like elden ring was a game designed to be played Once. and i mean, considering the majority of people who buy any game are unlikely to beat it once let alone multiple times, maybe from a business position that makes sense as a decision. it is very engaging and pretty and exciting to uncover the world on your first playthrough. but it really comes at a cost to how enjoyable it is to replay and try new builds. i've been playing a lot of bloodborne and some DS2 and sekiro recently, and even knowing there's a big new dlc world in elden ring to go buy, i'd much rather just revisit any of the other games first
A bit of a mixed bag.
My hope is that when the honeymoon period of SotE is over, we can look at the issues raised objectively and not have them completely written off as a lack of player skill or not enough Scadutree Blessings. I love Elden Ring and SotE but it's insane to not hold the game or devs accountable for the genuine shortcomings.
Over-tuned and over-engineered enemies and bosses that barely give you time to attack and deal any meaningful damage, but in turn completely drain your HP with one or two hits makes the repetitious nature of the Souls games a massive slog, resulting in myself (and many other I've seen in threads) simply running away from them. Bosses like the Divine Beast Dancing Lion and the final boss are hitbox blenders I find difficult how anyone can find genuinely fun and intuitive.
I completely understand that Fromsoft DLC's are typically where the harder and hardest boss fights are, but it feels like SotE took the "Hard but fair" nomenclature and just removed the "fair."
i have to disagree with you, i have fought most of the remembrance bosses so far and they all feel good and live up to the best of the base game(better than previous souls games), not once did i think something was stupid.
I see arguments like this a lot but I actually have no idea what people are talking about when they say this. I'll admit the final boss is very strong, and has at least one pretty bad move. But that aside, I really don't know what you mean. I personally loved the divine beast fight, and I never found myself getting destroyed by any regular enemy, and that's not me trying to say I'm amazing at the game (I'm absolutely not), just being honest.
Maybe it comes down to me having explored a lot and getting a good amount of scadutree fragments, but as much as I hate to say it, I feel like this is kind of skill issue territory. Or at least, not knowing how to approach these bosses. I think people forget that this is supposed to be a difficult game, but you're also supposed to adapt your playstyle. Getting destroyed by an attack? Try to look out for a telegraph, maybe try dodging in a different direction/jumping over it instead. Getting hit by the boss whilst you heal? Don't chug every time you get hit, wait for an opening after the attack string is done. Doing zero damage? Explore some more, use some of the items that the game gives you to your advantage.
Despite my great appreciation for Elden Ring, after the DLC, I *really* hope FromSoft takes more leaps like they did with AC6 in the future. A new and reimagined King's Field or Shadow Tower (spiritual successor or sequel) would be phenomenal with everything that they have learned.
The Soulsian formula has been exhausted at this point, I think.
i’ve been ranting with a friend about everything you talked about in this video! i’m not crazy!! thank god!
it was literally yesterday that i realized that i’m just not looking forward to engaging with any bosses! i love the exploration in the game, but when they’re as you said- goofy bosses with 5-7 long string strikes with minimized retaliation windows- they really do all like. blend together in my mind
i too also don’t look forward to fighting anyone on repeats, and bosses then just feel more like vehicles to experience more exploration than a challenge to see if i can overcome in a different context of fighting style
is it novel and fun when every boss, back to back, gets a second phase with whirlwind AOEs and an even higher damage ceiling to punish you with so you can’t learn their pattern? i don’t think it is!
i just find it really unfortunate that like, instead of feeling like i’m being treated to a new souls-like experience for a series veteran, i’m being winked and nudged at at every opportunity, as though to say “isn’t this so *Dark Souls*? heh. i bet you feel line you really got Elden Ringed” with the intentional delayed hits, the additional tacked-on strikes there exclusively to, as you said, trip the player up. i feel like we lost the plot with this game
anyway thank you for this
Your Dark Souls PVP videos are hilarious and classic.
I'm not going to write an essay: For me, the honeymoon phase wore off a long time ago (got Demon's Souls in November of 2009).
God you are right people do not roleplay in this action roleplaying game. Your points are pretty close to mine save for i feel like a almost don't like the game. I think about buying the DLC to play it thinking i will probably enjoy it but there is more frustration than accomplishment and I know some of it is brought on by me making themed builds but damn man I felt like being an archetype was fine in 1 and 2 and a bit less in 3 with some annoyances but I did it but here I dunno I just end up thinking about the areas that'll flatten me. Which is a shame since I remember having at least a spellsword and death knight to play around with I even back traded gear cause most of what I like is extreeeeeemely far into the game and felt pointless to play 50 hours to finally get what i wanted to use.
Didn't help my first and only completed run of this game was on a Holy based Str Faith character woh is heavy and fatrolls with a greatshield (I always like doing this did it in every game so far) when the normal endgame just shits on the holy damage type in general that might have left a bad taste in my mouth. Oh and Melania just made me stop playing the game for a while after I beat her and I've no plans to do that again.
I still might get the DLC or maybe on discount cause I want to love this game it's so close to what I would think is really great but a lot of bosses and encounters are just things that make me go ugh when i think about them instead of how cool they might have been. This was a good video though even if you think what you have to say won't change the discourse of "Elden Ring is a masterpiece 100/10" it is good sometimes to just voice your opinion to just settle the matter in your head and this was a good listen.
Elden Ring is the first fromsoft game that I didnt ever feel the need to replay, I started the series with ds1 and ds2 is my favorite souls game by far. I've always gone back to the other souls games and replay them atleast once a year if not more but after i finished elden ring and got all the achievements I didnt feel like replaying it, I just finished the DLC and I dont think it changes the way I feel about the game. It's an incredible game but it's removed from the original souls games. I am in love with the world and the lore of elden ring but doing another playthrough? I'd rather pick any other souls game.
I feel ER is more the kinda game you play once every 3 years and really get lost in the fantasy again, I do prefer the more linear from games though overall.
Something about my OCD makes how messy an ER play through devolves into quite off putting. It is way more satisfying to have a simpler idea of your build and work thru the game from start to finish
All the little tiny caves and evergaols and catacombs are repetitive and get stale pretty quick, and yet they have build critical equipment in them so you have to go hit at least some of them up with every new character.
Thanks for this, you did a good job of putting what I've been feeling into words. I do like Elden Ring, I like it a lot, but it is so overtuned that I'm just not able to enjoy it like I did the previous From entries.
couldn't agree more, good takes from one of the ogs
I have spent the last year trying to convince myself to start a new character for the DLC and I just can't do it. I liked exploring Elden Ring but it's something I realized I only wanted to do once.
I replayed elden ring endlessly, and then I played the dlc once,
I don't think I'm going to do that ever again. It's just too much to do twice
Yes, indeed. Elden Ring was a game I beat once and didn't touch again. Like you say, it has a replayability problem: the fact that running past minor creatures ends up being what I did too, and the bosses are the checkpoints that mattered; The fact that a lot of bosses are massive and the camera doesn't quite keep up to, along with their movesets -- In my opinion, I think FromSoft really wanted this one to be played by as many players as possible given the tie to LOTR stuff back when they announced it -- so they added some things to make it easier, and give an open world for people to explore: if they failed at West, it is no problem, because they have other 7 cardinals to explore and get stronger or get more used to the game, and then come back. It's a tone shift from FromSoft, and I hope they keep exploring different things and ideas. Hopefully their identity lives up through and we'll get something like we never seen before next.
I always knew this game would resonate more or less with certain people. But Elden Ring is the first ""Souls"" game I just didn't bother finishing. I realized after 30 hours of doing what felt like mindless busy work going through chalice dungeon caves fighting The Most Annoying Bosses that I just wasn't having fun. There is some good in this game but I would rather do something else than slog through the open world junk to get there.
I think the exploration was terrible and unrewarding in the DLC. You would think the DLC (being an experience designed around the assumption that 99% of first-timers will enter it with post-game and fully-geared-up characters) would give players more appropriate loot than just things like Smithing Stone [1], Smithing Stone [2], Crab Eggs and Bone Darts, all of which are some of the pitiful "rewards" you get for checking out shinies in the Shadow Keep in the DLC. Then again, this isn't really a DLC-exclusive issue. The base game has a lot of unrewarding exploration as well. You get as far as Castle Sol and Miquella's Haligtree (two late-game areas) and you're still being "rewarded" with shinies that give you Golden Rune (10) items that provide you a grand total of 5,000 runes. Totally something that is useful for a late-game character. This is despite the fact that roughly a third of all armors and weapons in the game can only be acquired by farming enemies with horrendously low, gacha-tier RNG drop rates. You would think that From Software would have the sense to put these armors and weapons in these shinies as opposed to useless crap like Golden Rune (10) or Smithing Stone (5). But no. You have to suffer through RNG for actual unique loot like the Partizan.
You made a great point about Golden Seeds in the base game being associated with landmarks that are easy to identify even from afar. If Scadutree Blessings were the same and weren't so poorly telegraphed in their locations, people wouldn't be complaining about them as much (even if they still would be busy work). I suspect that once the rabid, drooling fanboys get past the current honeymoon period and get past dismissing every DLC criticism as being a "skill issue", we'll be seeing a lot more sober discussion about the DLC.
Considering that you are someone who has extensively played Monster Hunter games, I think you would agree with me that those games do a far better job of creating that sensation of "man, I can't wait to fight this boss again!" than Elden Ring's bosses. For example, Primordial Malzeno in Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak is just as combo-heavy as DLC bosses like Messmer and Radahn, but because he is better designed, he feels more fun to fight than these Shadow of the Erdtree bosses. Team Ninja's games also do a far better balance of making the player equally as nimble and as capable as the boss, instead of NuFrom Software's idea of having the bosses be Devil May Cry characters and you being stuck with more restrictive Souls combat.
Furthermore, the lack of intuitively-designed enemy movesets (as you put it) that allow the player to sightread bosses in Elden Ring and its DLC just makes playing through it feel so demoralizing and exhausting. Animations are deliberately designed to deceive the player, mislead them and trip them up. So many delayed swings, feints, mad flurries and sucker punches coming from the minds of combat designers far too eager to mess with the player. I felt like the combat designer was always trying his damn best to outsmart me and subvert my expectations.
14:32: "I dread to think of how much my playtime is just riding towards a point of interest while staring at vistas."
15:29: "All the open world has managed to accomplish is encourage me to find ways to engage with the game less."
Open world is a mistake. It will always be a mistake. That said, I'm really loving Rise of the Ronin by Team Ninja. Though I love it for its deep, stylish combat, and would not miss its open world at all if this open world went away and was replaced by Team Ninja's more traditional linear level design.
I really tried to avoid bringing up Monster Hunter as part of the discussion myself because I felt it would be pretty cliche at this point despite it being a perfectly apt comparison but yes, you're right. The bosses generally have that "I can't wait to fight this again" sensation because the games are fundamentally designed around repeating boss fights over and over and the games don't set you up for failure. Not only that, the weapons themselves do a better job of giving you a fresh way to engage with them.
And yeah, even though I found the act of navigating the DLC a lot of fun (I just like the feeling of mapping stuff out), I'd still agree the item distribution often made reaching somewhere wholly unrewarding. There were a number of times where I'd see the setup for something that seemed potentially interesting, like a reasonably long path leading up to a graveyard with an item guarded by half a dozen enemies only to pick up a... Ghost Glovewort [5] or something equally worthless. And then later I'd find equipment in the most inconspicuous locations possible.
If I had a nickle for everytime I saw a "didn't expect dung" or "why is it always dung?" message at the end of a trail, followed by a mediocre item...well, I'd have more than two nickles, honestly.
I've been fatigued by the Souls series for a long time after playing Demon's and Dark Souls 1 back in the day so it's been interesting to see the discourse around ER as an outsider.
I do love elden ring, but I also resonate really hard with most of your feelings here. I used to like restricting myself from summoning most of the time in From's previous games, but the obnoxious direction their combat design has taken reached a breaking point for me in sekiro, and I decided to not restrict myself anymore. Thank God spirit summons exist, they really make the game more bearable for me.
I also feel similar about the open world aspect: it makes your first playthrough magical, but just the thought of replaying the game stresses me out, so I never even got to try many different builds. Now that I'm switching platform to PC for the dlc, I'm kind of dreading the prospect of all the running around I'm going to have to do just to get there...
Replaying the first Dark Souls recently to hype myself up has really nailed home how much I prefer those first two games, and it's not for nostalgic reasons. DS3, Bloodborne and Elden ring are all great, but nothing will beat Demons and DS1
Thought I was the only one… was so bad that I prefer if they release more Armored Core
Base game Elden Ring started leaning into the unfun bosses in the last third of the game, yet still receiving flawless reviews. It felt like they hadn't reached them, or they just assumed that "brutally hard = fun" which it doesn't.
As a result, the DLC appears to have leaned into it more. Difficulty was never the reason people loved the prior games. They were just good games that *happened* to be challenging.
I almost wholeheartedly disagree with this opinion.
Look at almost anyone’s favorite boss fight, and they all come from the last third of the game.
Elden ring bosses challenge players in a different way than dark souls, but it isn’t so insanely difficult that it becomes unfun for most people.
Where dark souls almost never punishes rolling without a thought, Elden ring attacks tend to require more thought from the player on where to dodge.
Maliketh for example, has his big aoe which will hit you if you roll anywhere but away on the attack before he uses it, and he has plenty of flips where clever positioning instead of rolling can lead to charged heavy opportunities for an easy stagger.
Bosses like Margit teach you from the beginning that enemies can and should be attacked while they are attacking.
The DLC doesn’t really provide any new forms of challenge the player must overcome, just a further emphasis on all of the lessons the base game has already taught.
And yes, while dark souls has formed an entire community around its extensive world and lore, how many people do you know actually read item descriptions and piece everything together on their own? Compared to the amount of people playing the games on a consistent basis, the lore hunters, much like the pvp community, are a minority. Most people play souls games specifically because they are a challenging experience.
It’s fine not to enjoy elden rings approach to difficulty, but given their “flawless reviews”, it’s safe to say that many people do actually find elden ring fun.
@@pixelmaster9964 Let's look at the Shadow of the Erdtree reviews then
wrong souls like was always the biggest fun the harder it was, someone that says a souls like should be easy is a idiot and shouldt play souls like .
@@GlivGluv yeah let’s look the opinion of review bombers that similarly attacked the base game on release.
I do wonder how Elden ring could have possibly recovered from literally the exact same attack if the game was actually too difficult.
This comment is literally wrong, as Miyazaki himself said and cemented the primary objective of the souls games are to be hard and rewarding.
Like the video creator, how about you just accept the fact, that you are not the audience for souls games? Move on.
The starting character ritual in ER: get the physick, get the sacred tears and regen physick tear from weeping peninsula, buy all the stones you can from merchants along the way, hope your chosen weapon isnt locked behind 30 minutes of running to the other side of the map or even worse... grinding.
And then you still have to collect every gold seed and sacred tear along the way, get the bell bearings for upgrades, grab your spells from different corners of the map.
Now you gotta do the same for the DLC on every new character with scadutree.
Good video and having a similar feeling as someone else who started back with DeS all those years ago. These games have just become excessive and tiresome and gone in a direction I don't really care about - compared to DeS and the original Dark Souls which I still return to over and over/must have hundreds of hours in each. When the DLC first dropped Artorias was an insanely hard boss that was cool, high intensity and stood out, but it seems the lesson they took from it was that their games should be more like Ninja Gaiden Black when the first two games are more RPG than action game. And then all the increasing size and scope - I already found Dark Souls 2 with the DLCs unbearably long, I couldn't even finish base Elden Ring because it just overstayed its welcome - I got bored by the time I got to the capital. Compare that to Demon's Souls or Dark Souls which you can comfortably beat in a weekend or less as a nice, short revisit. Both of these points I feel can be seen in the boss fights as you mentioned when there are now so many high intensity bosses (or even regular enemies) that its impossible to keep them all in your head. Your point about the people who run through these games naked SL1 with donkey kong bongos which the fanbase then use as a measuring stick felt really interesting to come from you considering how legendary I remember it feeling to watch your SL1 runs back in the day/like watching a 1CC for a shmup whereas now that is considered like.. a baseline level of play in the eyes of the dickriders. Not covered in the video but I also miss when the online in these games was actually fun too considering how much invasion has been nerfed and how you cant use/learn these huge areas like you could in DaS/DeS, but maybe that's also just rose tinted glasses from the GFWL days lol. Glad to see your perspective on this.
I quickly got a bit of a distaste for invasions because the proximity between checkpoints became too narrow or there's just one right next to a fog gate, so it rarely ever feels like you can catch people "in medias res" and get to enjoy that feeling of a battle of attrition or setting up a surprise using the environment.
been watching your videos for the past 11 years and it feels so great to see such a veteran of the series sharing these thoughts. Totally agree with you.
Great video, I resonate with basically everything wmyou said. We as player charcters are still playing Demons Souls, but the bosses are playing Devil May Cry or Kingdom Hearts. And just because Ongbal can no hit everything naked doesn't mean something is good well designed. Its not fun to dodge 6 or more attacks in a row and then only be given .5 seconds to counterttack for minimal damage before having to dodge perfectly again. And god forbid if you get hit because thats a massive chunk of health and probably a knockdown so you lose multiple tyrns for just one very minor mistake in an endurance run of a fight. And the cult of Fromsoft will defend basically anything, saying the game is oerfect the player just needs to adapt or get better.
fair opinion but its false that you get very little time to counterattack, besides maybe the final dlc boss. if you jump, strafe or even crouch instead of roll, the boss openings get tripled on your end
I've had many the same feelings since my first playthrough; there came a point where powercreep dramatically outpaced mechanics and the solutions provided feel like a bandaid to a larger problem. You aren't overcoming these encounters, your tools are, and every victory feels undeserved as a consequence.
Oh my god THANK YOU. I don't completely agree on your points with the attack patterns, but the absolute slog of having to find a Golden Seed clone just to make the DLC manageable was just a terrible design decision.
I hate the argument that "its not dark souls, its elden ring. You can't play it like dark souls" ok, then why does it play exactly like dark souls 3? Spirit summons aren't gameplay, and using op spells and weapon arts just isn't fun. The entirety of a soulslike should ne built on truly learning enemies and places in and out but elden ring just makes that unfun
I honestly think that Elden Ring's DLC has the bosses, that I feel will age the best in the entire franchise. Other than the final boss, which is genuinely modded there's no way, bosses like Metyr, Messmer, Putrescent Knight, Midra, Romina, and the Scadutree Avatar are all bosses that come close to achieving Demon Princes level of perfection, that being said, near the best boss in the franchise.
The only issues each of them have, are one or two garbage moves that can easily be patched, and camera issues which is a thing of its own. The only bosses in main game I was excited to fight again, was Loretta and Mogh. They were the only bosses that felt like the high quality Ds3 bosses, that didn't involve me locking my world state (Godfrey and beyond.) Thinking of Metyr, despite the terrible laser attack and AoE blast, everything else is perfection. The music, design, and balance outside the two moves are all amazing. And that's not to mention Midra, probably, no easily, the best boss in the game entirely, and probably top 10 in the series.
And then honestly, I think my favourite part about the DLC are the future potential for the NPCs. This DLC has easily the best set of NPCs in the series, bar none. Ansbach, Thiollier, Leda, and Freyja are all easily some of the best NPCs they've made. And to be frank, I enjoyed the final battle with all of them more than I did the final battle itself, outside of the first phase which is genuinely fantastic. I think it's a solid 8/10, which still lines up with the rest of their DLCs.
the trick with Metyr's spinning lasers is to run to the side of the AOE(not right in front) but stay as close as you can to it so the lasers will pass over and behind you.
whats wrong with putrescent knight?
The whole idea of scadutree fragments is cool. Since the dlc is end game content there is no more real progression to be had for your character so they add a way to get more powerful. The thing that bothers me is WHY DOESN’T FROM JUST MAKE MID GAME DLC? Or early game for that matter?? For some reason it seems like they are allergic to it. Dlc always has to beend game or beyond end game scalimg. If it was just a totally seperate path that you could also start going down during the early or mid game that would be sooo much more fun and it would fix the problem of people having nowhere to take their character’s power level during the dlc.
I agree with most of what you've said here. I don't mind the open world of Elden Ring as much as you, apparently, though. I think the real problem with Souls games is the evolution of enemies, especially bosses. They have gotten harder, but less fair and less interesting and fun. I hate that "soulslike" is just synonomous with diffculty, when it originally was so much more than that.
Elden Ring is probably my favourite in the series alongside dark souls 1. The Elden Ring open world is far from perfect, but From Software made a very good attempt at it. 950+ hours and counting.
Really great video essay! Honestly agree with the majority of your points. Any chance you might just be experiencing fatigue from so much time in the Lands Between versus some fault in FromS’s open world game design/replayability? Not being snide, just genuinely curious.
I appreciate you sharing your thoughts, I’ve been a fan since the ptde invasion/pvp videos. So I share in some experience, I played this dlc on a melee build without summons. I’m really sad to hear you didn’t like the bosses. I agree overcoming them is tedious and sometimes downright frustrating, but I don’t dislike these bosses. I actually love them all so far, they can be one and done spectacles but for me I put my summon sign down only in the dlc to get to fight them over and over. They’re the best in the whole game, some in the whole series imo. And I always ended up using a different weapon setup for each one, I have a pure caster ready to go through the dlc, maybe I’ll get some of your grievances, but as of now I cannot disagree more about the bosses
It's hard to properly articulate exactly how I felt about the bosses. It's less that I disliked overcoming them or think they're objectively bad (bar a couple) but that often they feel like they're made to be obtuse for the sake of it and the learning process itself just feels exasperating at times. For what it's worth, I really enjoyed Bayle, Messmer and Midra in particular and they're probably the only bosses I'd genuinely look forward to fighting again in the DLC. In fact, it's kinda funny how the frenzy boss ended up feeling like one of the most straight forward of the lot.
But even Bayle has really awful camera issues exacerbated by a lack of lock-on points like other dragons and a relatively small arena considering its size. Half the time I feel like I'm trying to goad it away from a wall that it charged into. I wonder how many issues could be alleviated if From would just zoom the damn camera out more.
The camera issue has been my main confusion of the dlc. Like the dragon below Baylor lets you target the body and the head while Baylor only a lets you target the head. Feels like such a simple solution to baylor and other bosses like the lion exist already
I actually really enjoyed the Bayle fight but the arena is way too small for the size of the boss and it amplifies a lot of camera issues. It really is bizarre how you can't target different body parts and it stuck out immediately to me too.
I feel you man,
i've played the DLC. and Eldenring and the DLC dont feel like the souls games i know from past times.
I begun playing Dark Souls back when i found it around 2013-2014 continued with every souls game, where i got sucked into another awesome story and world but Elden Ring, i dont know.
It feels, different and the DLC a bit disappointing.
Usually, when faced with difficult bosses, I tend to overreact when I defeat them, sticking middle fingers into the monitor. The thing is, I usually grin with joy while doing so.
Radahn... well, after my numerous attempts at bashing my head against him, I just gave up, respeced for 2 seppuku bloodfiend forks, and got lucky to defeat him when my mimic actually came to stab him for once. I did defeat Radahn and Miquella, but my expression was of scoff. There was no joy, no relief, no catharsis. And, what’s even worse, there were no mentions about what happened in Shadowlands in the Lands Between. As if this entire sequence was just a semi-canonic uninspired spin-off with no impact on the main story... Oh, wait!
You’ve said everything Ive had in my mind these past two years. Great video.
About your first point; the prospect of re-doing scadutree fragments on future plathroughs being dull or busywork, is short-sighted. To me just knowing where to get them is half the battle, and on a second play through that half of the battle is already won. It’s really not so dull revisiting the various corners of the map for necessary items, because you get to see the sights and fight the fights, all for a good enough reason. I’ll concede that torrent running is dull but with that it goes by quickly with that knowledge of where to go.
They should have added more adventure elements to the series instead of making the combat more bombastic
I don’t understand what people expect from Elden ring.
Dark souls have a linear progression, forcing you to engage with almost all of the content. There are a few optional side areas with essential character upgrades, encouraging you to engage with all of the content in the game, which is good.
Elden ring has an open world, with tons of content off to the side. In order to encourage players to engage with even half of the content in the game, they place essential upgrades that encourage you to explore, which is bad apparently.
And the boss design point is, well…
Why would you even decide to play the game if you’re unwilling to learn their move set? You had ample opportunity from the base game to decide Elden rings design approach wasn’t for you.
Don’t want to interact with the jump mechanic at all? Literally nothing is preventing you from this. All jumpable attacks can similarly be dodged, you are simply rewarded less for doing so.
It’s almost as if, after 5 games of the exact same boss design, Elden ring wanted to change things up a bit.
You need to avoid attacks in specific ways in order to optimally punish bosses, and sometimes to avoid damage at all.
If this is such an insane concept to grasp, that maybe after 5 games, Fromsoft wants players to find new ways to avoid attacks, then Elden Ring isn’t the game for you unfortunately.
And the idea that there has never been a “meta” aspect to these games is novel.
Never played demons souls enough, but it doesn’t take a genius to absolutely dumpster any of the dark souls games with knowledge reasonably acquired after a first run.
I mean, one shot setups exists in every game, and you can deal significantly less damage than a one shot and still dumpster a boss.
Elden ring provides you with more buffs sure, but it doesn’t take a genius to know buff do more damage.
Obviously everyone is entitled to their own opinion, and your experience with the game is valid, but that doesn’t invalidate the experience of the vast majority of players who hold elden ring in much higher regards.
The unfortunate truth is that Fromsoft isn’t going to stagnate. They’re not going to make the same linear world, in the same setting, with bosses across an entire series that can all be mindlessly dodged so long as you press button at the right time and nothing else.
The issue with Elden Ring is that the overwhelming amounts of d1ckriding the game gets overshadows some actual valid complaints people have with it.
There's always some sort of retaliation or excuse people have, no matter what the complaint is. As if Miyazaki communed with God Himself to create the most absolute perfect game in existence that has no flaws at all and to find issues with it or have a criticism about it means the person in question is objectively wrong and needs to just "git gud." Reusing bosses and putting kaizo-tier traps in dungeons is completely valid because, well "You can just ignore that content." Replays of the game suck because you have a checklist of shit to get just to get your build started, but "You don't HAVE to collect those items." Holding forward while mashing sprint on Torrent is mind-numbingly boring but "Oh, well uhhh the unmatched sense of exploration is there. It's never tedious to find new areas!" I would love to have a job at Fromsoft working on ER because I could just stick a Tree Sentinel in the fight with Elden Beast or something and have legions of parrots just scream that my design choices are some of the best they've ever seen in gaming and make 2 hour video essays about how the lore of the Tree Sentinel being in the Elden Beast fight is that he was the first to scratch his ass with an Elden branch or something.
With games like Sekiro and Bloodborne, Fromsoft already proved they can make a game in a similar style but still make it fun and engaging, with actual challenge that isn't artificial. Elden Ring just has you with a Dark Souls moveset + a jump that you can sometimes be aggressive with but is still incredibly wonky to use but in return the developers up the amount of aggression bosses have and lowers the downtime on almost all of their combos, whilst also trying to overcompensate for Spirits and Summons by giving almost every single boss an insane amount of AOE attacks and damage. Most endgame and DLC bosses just defy physics and all logic, jumping into the air and hanging there like a magical reindeer or cartoon character and the only tell you have is muscle memory on when to dodge because there's no discernible way to avoid the attack other than just abusing i-frames. I'm just pulling some excuse out of my ass but I'm sure people's perfectly valid reason for this is some shit like "well these bosses are eldritch and inhuman of course they have stupid unreadable bullshit for a lot of their attacks." I understand it's still all doable. But it's just not fun. Wily Capsule from Mega Man 7 is hard. Doesn't make that fight fun. The Ancient Dragon in Dark Souls 2 is hard, due to it pretty much killing you in one hit no matter what, doesn't make that fight fun. Slave Knight Gael is hard but the fight is fun. Perfecting a Devil May Cry game is hard but that is fun to do. Fun and hard aren't an equal destination. You have to actually make the hard content fun to do.
Elden Ring is massively popular, being played by millions of people who are finally eager to jump in to these "LE HARD!!!!!" games for the first time and being wowed with the experience because they heard TH-camrs sucking these Souls games off for so long. A good majority of them don't know the standard these games use to set, they just think the game being hard and getting your ass kicked means the game is good.
" Y'know, it's hard but at least I'm not like those heckin' journos getting stuck on tutorials! Ha! Go back to Call of Duty!! I'm playing a real game, ELDEN RING!"
Shit like that.
Elden Ring is incredibly solid, there are some objectively well designed parts of the game. The peaks this game can get to are really great, especially if you consider the first playthrough. But the lows are some of the worst in the entire franchise. It's okay to like the game, it's okay to have problems with the game as well. It is not a perfect game though. People acting like this game has no flaws and a group of Japanese game developers just somehow magically found the formula for making the perfect video game and 2022 was the year the best video game ever came out and will never be topped are incredibly corny. They're the reason Fromsoft doubled down on the worst aspects of the game for the DLC. Because the loud majority pretty much silenced any and all problems people had with the game. The fact that people actually having issues and criticisms was treated as "review bombing" tells you all you need to know about this game and its following.
You're absolutely right, they shouldn't do the same thing forever, and they've proved they can do it in the past. It's just that with Elden Ring, they missed. That's pretty much it. Fromsoft missed. Not hard to come to terms with. At least most Dark Souls 2 fans who love the game and have thousands of hours in it know it's just a piece of dogshit. But whatever.
I wish I was able to say all of this this well. They told everyone up front and in the marketing exactly what this game was. They also specifically said not to expect another dark souls But everyone was so ready to get back to slower fantasy combat from sekiros frenetic parry based gameplay, (Which also had it's fair share of old heads calling it too hard). That they are mad they can't play this like a DS game. Adapt. Explore. Overcome. Thats a FromSoftware game.
I didn't read your comment but I disagree with it because you have an omori pfp. Go kick rocks
This. I can't believe how many people broke their minds over this game.
A kind of mixed up comment: you say it is fortunate* that from isn't going to stagnate. But then you only talk about one of many problems in the game, and bizarrely, the *most* stagnant part of the game. The chief virtue you highlight is how 'Fromsoft wants players to find new ways to avoid attacks'. But it is clear that nothing has changed in terms of player defence from demon souls. You can still block, parry, and roll (and even get special rolls like catring/bone/bloodhound.) They added jump but as you say, it is redundant since it performs (almost) the exact same defensive role as dodge does.
So one *minor* (emphasis on minor) problem with the game is that these defensive tools are the same as they've ever been, they are literally stagnant. They innovated with sekiro, but went back to the old formula. Let's collectively stop thinking about rolling boss attacks, please.
ngl, its extremely refreshing to see someone who isnt infected with the whole "elden ring is a masterpiece" mind virus
you can like a game and still see the myriad things it does badly
ever since ER released i felt like im being gaslit by the entire community trying to pretend that the cutscene length attack chains with 20 different extenders is an okay design decision
or that were basically fighting final fantasy spectacle level bosses with just some dork ass human slapping people with a sharp stick
meanwhile the enemy summons yuri lowell to unleash havenly bladewing upon us
i just dont understand why they have to go harder better faster stronger with every entry, its okay to have the final boss just be a dude with a sick mustache and a big ass sword
i just wanna play the game and not watch the enemy do a ff14 limit break while i sit there waiting until the game decides its finally my turn to throw a singular fireball
Not a mind virus, just a really solid game. You can be critical of the game all you want but there’s no denying how much it resonated with people 🤷
@@Izanagi-FLOW apparently, having a different opinion than the op is a virus LMFAO
It's okay to not like ER, but those of us who consider it their Top 1-3 of all time are not infected with a "mind virus" lmao
If I was a fish and you threw this at me, I'd actually be offended that you thought I'd fall for bait this obvious 😂
@@Izanagi-FLOW A lot of its fans actually don't accept the idea that you can be critical of it though, that's what the comment is talking about. It resonated a little *too* much with those people. You can see some of them at the bottom of this comment section. The perpetual "Elden Ring is a flawless masterpiece" discourse is everywhere on TH-cam and Twitter, in my experience.
The biggest DS1 fans are often pretty open about the parts of the game that suck ass, and no one pretends it's cool that Asylum Demon was used three times in that game. But when Elden Ring reuses dozens of bosses anywhere between 3 to 9 times, then the line is "It doesn't even reuse that many bosses" or "There's so much content though, so it's fine." Yeah, normal people who just enjoy the game exist too, but it obviously has a huge defense force that has to cope over any criticism they encounter because they're so subsumed by a fantasy of perfection for the game.
And it's not even that these things have to be a bother to them. It's the fact that they act like other players are wrong, ungrateful, or nitpicky for thinking these things suck. Criticize the open world for being a chore to go through on replays, and the defense is "Just skip 90% of the content and only do what's essential for your character" like that's a justification and not merely a player-driven band-aid. People will say things like this and treat it like every non-fun situation is on the player and never the game, because to them Elden Ring is just too perfect to be at fault. It's wack.
Thanks for making the video, I’ve had similar thoughts and I think it’s a shame that a lot of the dialogue revolves around “getting gud” rather than what’s fun. Truthfully, Elden Ring is not a hard game. With enough prep time and game knowledge a player can reduce the mechanical skill required to defeat a boss to nil. Foresight and game knowledge are their own skills and I’m fine with that existing in these games, it always has, and I think it’s a more elegant way of tuning difficulty than selecting “baby mode” or “I have something to prove” mode. But the design of bosses has been tuned to deal with the absurd ways players can prep their way out of these problems and it feels like its left players like me that don’t like using meta weapons and quad buffing before every boss a bit behind.
I was challenged but not driven to cheese Bayle. He's a tough, mildly unfair boss whose greatest attack is influencing your camera. Either his arena is too small for the big boy or his lunge attack has too much forward momentum. Spastic amputee combos don't help the camera either.
Gaius on the other hand, can go straight to bad game design hell. He was the only boss of my playthrough that I didn't engage with. The charge attack is unreliable in both your ability to dodge it and how many of its five hitboxes connect with you. I've gotten kissed by one hitbox, slaughtered by 2 or 3 or dodged unscathed despite doing the same action on the same attack. The combos aren't any worse than other ER bosses but Gaius can unleash his nonsense charge at any point. Also did I mention he's a poise monster? Because he's a poise monster, so guard breaks are of little use. There's also a phase 2 that introduces AoE and flashy anime divebomb attacks into the mix.
After trying to learn that nonsense for a few hours, I kited him into a wall, summoned Greatshield Soldiers, and hit L2 to win with Moghwyn's Sacred Spear. Oddly, I feel more accomplished breaking this boss with cheese than I ever would have had I engaged with him more "fairly". I can tolerate a lot of junk from FromSoft, DS1 was my introduction to the series, but that boss was the end of my patience.
I feel this way about every game past Dark Souls 1 with Bloodborne and Sekiro being an exception.
Combat was never the main strongsuit of Dark Souls games, it was a combination of the tight level design, and layered geography that gave the impression the world was bigger than what it was alongside the Dark Fantasy design/aesthetic. Some bosses we're less conventionally difficult and more like a puzzle you had to solve, now everyboss has a 50 hit attack pattern with slight delayed timing, all the bosses are big people with swords who have anime style attack patterns who all fight the same,. The lore and plot have become synonymous with each other to the point it's indistinguishable so there is less of an 'Go from A to B' simple plot the continues throughout the game with a new 'A to B' plot line to move forward and now it's a small bit of exposition at the beginning with a goal but never any understanding why.
Dark Souls 1 at least had enough of a rudimentary basis that logically it made sense why you would have some agency in the world where there was a reason for your existence in the world in the following games its shaky and best and unexplained at worst. Open world doesn't give that same grandiose impression of DS1 because there is nothing that sparks the imagination where you realize an open world is just flat expanses of dull traversable plains with some copy past legacy dungeons thrown in. Dark Souls 1/Demon Souls having a lot of modelled building in the distance and environmental flourishes really made it feel like a living breathing world you just occupied a small part off.
One main thing though and this is because your videos got me into Dark Souls, the PvP community was far more enjoyable. It felt like a fun sense of community and coupled with the well designed levels and your ability to interact with the geography, coupled with a lot of great content creators made PvP feel fun, especially Random invasions which every game since has done it's best to completely strip down and neuter. Before, going human had the penalty of being invaded and nicely balanced itself but now? Invaders are at such a disadvantage with them buffing the hosts so much you're fighting a losing battle most of the time, coupled with the awful way they've tried to balance invasions and level scaling. It feels like the days of funny builds and interesting invasions are gone. I understand them wanting to balancing somewhat, but killing red phantoms and random invasions because of a vocal minority of players was just stupid. You have very little if any incentive to invade, least of all in certain areas.
The pacing of Elden Ring is also pretty horrendous, once you get to Lyndell I felt like the game should've been over. I never understood why you needed to go to another shameless repeated Dragon arie area after burning the Tree to apparently 'unbind the rune of death'? I thought burning the tree would give you entry to it? Why do I need to beat some random person when the tree is already burning? If this was Dark Souls 1 it would've been explained with some expository dialogue but this is problem where lore and plot seemed to exist together as an excuse to not actually inform the player. I always had sense of understanding what I was doing in Dark Souls 1. 2 had this problem where they barely addressed any of the questions raised from Dark Souls 1 and I get that impression from Elden Ring it will be more vague stuff that will never actually get a reliable answer even if they did a sequel.
I'd say popularity had a hand in killing the series but the reality is that there is only so many time you can make a game with the same structure and tropes before it becomes tiring. Open world game design is antithetical to what made Demon Souls, Dark Souls 1 and Bloodborne good. It doesn't help that high fantasy is the most overdone of the fantasy genre's. Popularity definitely killed PVP though, the amount of people who moaned about invasions so they skewed it 100 percent in the opposite direction is indicative of that much.
The only thing I wish they do for the next game is zooming out, or even better, let's us zoom out when locking on an enemy so we can adjust the camera ourselves; I enjoyed all bosses you could actually see it's movements, for me it's fun to learn all the combos, but the nauseating camera movement, and the almost unreadable moves at dagger range lot's of big bosses have put me off from an otherwise cool fight.
So I thought about it and I think I understand why Elden ring doesn’t hit the same with me like darksouls did; beyond the anime-fication of the combat and boss design and writing not really changing in any significant way, past your first blind play through the open world just makes me feel like I’m doing chores. In ds1 if I wanted my build to use, say, the giants halberd I would need to ring both bells, get through sens and then trek through anor londo to buy it. In Elden ring if I want to use the great stars I need to go to one end of the map for key #1, go to the other end for key #2 or fight my way through the cliff face, then don’t forget to grab the physic and clear the mines for smithing stones to upgrade it, then I ether grab it from the cart or snag it from invading magnus which then results in you needing to do varres quest (aka MORE chores). The former, I’m playing the game and making progress through an intended experience. The latter, I’m doing chores to get a build even started.
Listening to you feels like talking to someone who knows what you think better than you do.
i don't think i understand
@user-kb1su7mg1g Shit sorry I wrote that when I was sleepy and slightly intoxicated. What I think I was trying to say was that he puts what I think into words.
The biggest issue with the dlc bosses isnt damage, it's visibility. It was an issue in the base game but the dlc turned it up to 11.
I am in the same place after this DLC; I am left feeling somewhat bereaved of the souls franchise. It truly does feel like the whole thing has come crashing down, like some sort of finale has taken place. But not thanks to some incredible, spectacular boss being beaten or some story being concluded. Those things would bring me satisfaction. Instead, what I feel I have seen is the logical endpoint of the souls gameplay formula. The things that made DeS (and eventually DaS) special have been deprived of significance thanks to a gradual shift in level design.
*The following things are no longer remarkable:*
-the stamina bar that forced players to be thoughtful and conservative with actions in combat
-the currency / xp meter that presented a dilemma to players: cash in or risk it all
-familiarity with and solving a boss gauntlet
-improvising with whatever equipment you had available at that point in a playthrough. You can often beeline to whatever you need in the open world. you can also respec many times.
-bosses that rewarded experimentation and variation in gameplay (this is a tricky one, but, e.g. the very same character playing the same way could have an easy time on some bosses and a hard time on others)
-the mischievousness of invasions has been largely lost because there is no host gauntlet to game, and also the repetitiveness of 3v1 co-op posses.
-the quest design succeeded in souls games. it now completely fails elden ring. someone pointed this fact out to me: the casual player might go *days* between stages in quests that consist of one or two sentences often vaguely indicating where to get the next one or two sentences.
-the low fantasy player meets high fantasy enemy dynamic. With more special attacks and fantastical gear, we have lost some of the sense of adventure.
finally...
-the ludonarrative (forgive me for using that word, zanzibart...) dissonance that was absent from much of souls is present here. FROM's fails to garnish the basic gameplay loop with narrative significance. I, the player character, am basically an immortal murder hobo who wants to rule a terribly antagonistic world. Unless I spend my time reflecting on the descriptions of the trash I pick up, or tracing the obscenely disjointed questlines, I just do not understand why I must kill, and why they want to kill me. I do not understand why I respawn. I do not understand why I get stronger. I do not understand why I shoot magic, or invade other worlds, or have a ghost horse, or why there is a giant tree with a slug in it.
There is also the risk that having come to understand the lore, the player finds that the humble roll-stab/shoot gameplay undermines the lore's grandeur.
Elden Ring has put my mind at ease in a way. The prediction that Matthewmatosis made years ago has been fulfilled many times over, and even more than he predicted has gone awry. I've had my fun with the series, but I can pull the plug now. The magic has been lost.
thank you for reading my blogpost and thank you for the video that prompted this reflection.
I have replayed Dark Souls 1 more times than I can even count, but replaying Elden Ring? I made that mistake already by going into NG+ once I had beaten the entirety of the DLC for both the NPC quests (which I had neglected by beating the DLC ASAP) and trying to get the rest of the Scadu fragments (I didn't realize while playing that I needed to write a goddamn list of the ones I had already gotten) after forgetting how long it takes to do everything. It's been a slog just from the sheer distance I have to horse around.
Regarding the bosses, learning Malenia (mind you, my favorite fight in the series and what I hoped more "spastic" bosses would be like with her staggerability making it an even match) has put me in this headspace where if a boss is annoying to fight, I tend to think I must be doing something wrong. It makes it hard for me to judge a lot of boss fights now, but no matter the subjective opinions, I feel the final boss really is just a caricature of what someone who has never touched the series but has heard Bandai's marketing BS would think a Souls boss is.
They've really pushed far away from the grounded roots of the older games, and I'm not a fan of this direction. However, I feel like a lot of people who started with Dark Souls 3 and like how the series has been shedding its grounded roots to become more action-oriented love it. I always think if I wanted an actiony Souls experience, I'd go play Ninja Gaiden or Nioh yet again. Finally, the main gimmick of the open world has put less focus on the stages, and the stages are what make Dark Souls 1 the best Souls game, yet somehow they've been paying less attention to level design with every subsequent title. The dungeons have kind of kept the feeling, but it's nowhere even close to how levels were designed before.
I like Elden Ring, but a lot of the changes have been moving away from the original titles and it's not really been to its benefit. It's like how I feel with 3, the foundation is good enough I'll put up with it.
I dropped out about 80 hours into the base game and have no interest to go back to any Souls game for a long time. I found the world design less interesting in ER than previous games, and this combat wore out its welcome long ago for me. It didn't help that they kept throwing in giant bosses, despite the combat mechanics being purely suited to fighting small stuff. I've played a lot of Monster Hunter and Dragon's Dogma, which have raised the bar for what fighting a dragon can be. I do not need 20 dragon fights in which you hack at their ankles on a horse and run away from AOE barf. You're right about the potential for roleplay, but unfortunately I had next to zero enjoyment of the story, world lore, or characters of this game.
Just because you fight dragons like that doesn't mean you have too lol. I literally kill on the dragons on feet using a Huge kitana chopping at their head (which is their weak spot). So you can play just like monster hunter minus MH Mechanics.
@@gamebwoy8259 it's ironic that he played monster hunter which emphasizes on hitting certain weakspot and choose to slay a dragon in ER in the most boring way possible. I only ever use Torrent to get away or close gap.
@@gamebwoy8259 No, you can't play just like MH, because unlike MH, Miyazaki refuses to acknowledge that his camera design is horrible. Play MH again, realize the camera is about a million times better suited for fighting large monsters, and then play a Souls game and stop attacking the boss so you can fight the camera to be able to see their attack patterns. I feel like heaven and earth were moved when the camera actually fucking PANNED OUT to fight Radahn. Wow, what a concept.
I played every Souls game + Bloodborne but man, that was always a huge pain point. No idea why it was never addressed. These games were frankly always better RPGs than they were action games.
@@CrizzyEyes i don't have to fight the camera i got used to how souls games are designed and in fact i rarely have camera issues and thats never been a complaint of mine or any others that I've actually seen. I said u can play just like mh in reference to using big swords and other large weapons to hit dragons and beasts anywhere you want and not being limited to ankles. Mh literally has different mechanics and is a whole different game lol of course its gonna have a camera suited for its mechanics and gameplay. Elden rings camera is fine imo but to each his own
@@CrizzyEyes another good point is the gargantuan size of the weapons in MH and their animations and hitboxes being well suited to hitting very tall targets. yet another good point is how the monsters in MH are often much smaller than those in elden ring. ER is also a game in which you can expect half the weapons to be less than a metre long.
Good video. Even though I have 500+ hours in Elden Ring, it's by far not my favorite Souls game. I'm at the point where I WANT to start a new playthrough but can't because I know I'll get bored by the unsurmountable mountain that is collecting all the stuff before the fun begins.
At some point before ER came out I observed that Fromsoft is upping the difficulty ante with every new Souls game. Dark Souls 1, Manus was one of the first if not the only boss with delayed attacks. Dark Souls 2 had damage reduction on phase changes, among other things. Dark Souls 3 had Pontiff require you to dodge multiple attacks in a row in order to punish - a behavior that started with Bloodborne, but 3 also cemented multi-healthbar boss fights (with especially Friede as a standout).
I theorized that if this continues, at some point in the future there will be a phase where the players realize the bosses have become TOO mechanically challenging to be fun anymore. They'll still be well-designed boss fights within a game that would probably offer you alternate, easier routes to killing them, but the old days of tanking and spanking a 1v1 boss fight would be over. At that point, the devs will realize they've gone too far.
Looks like we're in that phase with the elden ring dlc. It took a while, but here we are: boss fights are so difficult and overwhelming they're no longer fun to fight solo in classic melee combat unless you're dedicated to learning all of the mechanics, squeezing out every single milisecond of an opening, and theorizing the perfect dodge that will leave you in perfect position for a counterattack and you just don't do that on a first playthrough. Speedrunners and hardcore Souls challenge nerds will thrive in this environment, but not your average Souls veteran that's looking for that old-school experience.
One positive thing that Elden Ring has done to me, is that it's made me appreciate Sekiro way more in retrospect. As a hardcore fan of the old games from way back in the day, I was massively disappointed in Sekiro, because it felt like the entire highlight of that game were its spectacle bossfights. I didn't care about the world, the story, the atmosphere, felt no constant sense of danger whilst exploring, but at the very least the boss fights themselves felt like they were designed with the moveset your player character has at its disposal.
I remember when Dark Souls 3 came out, I was complaining about how the bosses (and many lategame enemies) were faster and more spastic than they were in Bloodborne, which was a far faster game than DS3, with core combat mechanics that encouraged aggression.
Elden Ring has managed to do the same thing, but to Sekiro, a game where you don't even have a stamina bar.
I have long given up that Fromsoft will ever recapture the dungeon-crawling, almost horroresque feeling of exploring Demon's Souls or Dark Souls 1, where the areas themselves were often more dangerous than the bosses waiting at their end. Then, at the very least, they should drop the shackles of the now 15 year old game's design philosophies, and fully lean into the action game formula. At least fighting Father Owl or Isshin felt fun, even if it's a completely different type of fun than navigating and surviving Blighttown was.
Yeah, Matthewmatosis was right, but I don't think even he predicted that it would've gone both in the action-spectacle direction, whilst still retaining 80% of Demon's Souls core mechanics for absolutely no good reason. Thanks for this video.
I'm so glad you made this video, because it sums up my own thoughts perfectly and you communicate these misgivings so well. These have been my favorite games since 2015, but I really dislike the design philosophy behind Elden Ring. They are so focused on keeping the games hard that they forgot what made them fun, and the tedium of exploration ruins the replayability that has always been one of the best features.
I've been very frustrated with friends that are also long time fans who refuse to criticize anything about the game, and while talking to one friend about why I didn't like the bosses, he just shrugged me off and said "Nothings changed, just learn the pattern". I can learn the pattern--did my first sl1 no-hit run on Gael a few months ago for example--but Gael was fun and these bosses simply haven't been.
You've been one of my favorite creators for these gams since I was 15, and I'm glad to hear you have been feeling the same way. At least we can always go back and play Demon Souls...
I've had this sentiment for a long time and have a hard time explaining it to current fans of the genre. Also started on ps3 Demon's souls. I remember vividly watching E3 on G4 and demon's souls came up and begging my dad to get it for me on launch. Thankfully someone sold it to a pawn shop on a launch week near my house.
I love elden ring don't get me wrong but it seems like a misinterpretation of what original fans enjoyed about souls 1. The strongest part of ds1 wasn't gameplay or builds it was the story and world building. Unconventional characters felt more real than AAA games at the time. Not only that, but the stories and lore of DS1 were easier to understand just hard to find. I understood why gwyn kept the age of fire going because he, and other characters were scared of the alternative that they didn't understand. This tracks with most characters but in ER I have no idea why the characters are doing what they are doing and why anything they do matters. ER will use words and concepts that only exist in its game and when a character does something you are almost expected to be like "oh yeah that makes sens" Radagon is marika; ok? what does that mean? are they the same person, the same consciousness, do they share memories, can they exist at the same time, etc.. Godwyn was attacked with "destined death" but it only killed his spirit his body is "alive" still. Then there's the Golden order, the weird naming (margit morgott renna ranni).I didn't need to watch lore videos in DS1 to understand motivations behind things but when I watch lore videos for ER I'm still confused.
Then there's gameplay, I loved how in bloodborne and to an extent sekiro. A lot of your basic tools worked on most if not all bosses. Gun allowed you to "parry" monsters that weren't just humans with swords, red symbols in sekiro would signify mikiri attacks, sweeping jump over attacks, and unblockable attacks, also all lightning attacks could be caught and thrown back. In ER, it frustrates me that most fights devolve to "roll r1 roll r1", I have all of these skills, all of these spells, incantations, ashes of war with cool effects but the animations are so long that if I do use them I'll die. Not only that, but some ashes are so strong there is no reason to use the other attacks on a weapon. Hitting a boss for thousands of dmg when pressing L2 is great until you see how pitiful your normal attacks are. In some cases, the windows for these attacks are the same time, I have just enough time for one R1 or for one L2. I've been playing a lot of Monster hunter and its hard to give ER praise for combat when half of the mechanics you can't use while in Monster hunter everything has a place. I have to use every button for my weapon to learn how to be efficient. Yes, there are cheese builds in MH and exploits but they're exceptions and not the norm. And in most cases the cheese doesn't deal as much dmg as just being good at your weapon and prepared for the hunt.
I still like elden ring, I like it a lot but I can't keep this out of my head and I'm glad someone else shares these thoughts/
i havent really watched any of your vids since the ds1 sl1 run
and there a whole bunch of youtubers who ive watched for a long time who at some point decided to start talking in their vids
yet somehow every time it happens i go
"no way he sounds like that"
maybe its the dawn pfp
its probably that
I personally didn't like Elden Ring right off the bat. I could list a ton of reasons, but I'll only say my biggest dislike was the lack of diversity in movesets between weapons.
It felt like a slog to get through, and I only did to get my money's worth. It's a shame I wanted this to grab me like Dsk3 and BB did.
I think it's very likely that the next souls game will have some form of a visible posture meter like Sekiro and AC6. Hell, ER clearly has something like one behind the scenes with how boss staggers work, but the opacity makes it significantly more frustrating because of how difficult it becomes to tell when you can hard commit. This combines with how much the DLC bosses put you on the defensive to a degree that it can be actively stressful, whereas in Sekiro being on the defensive is just a different form of offense.
Regarding the replayability, there's an extent to which you've always been able to just run straight through in these games, but yeah agreed that the ER open world incentivizes it more than before. SotE is definitely *better* about it than base game because the space is denser, but until we see ER2 it'll be impossible to say whether it's a fixable problem
I agree with alot of your points but i still really love elden ring. I have 500 hours and 6 characters. Personally i dont mind the check list nature(but unserstand why most dont). I think the game has some insane build variety and i find it deeply satisfying to come up with different characters, dressing them up and giving them a theme. It has froms best level design, exploration, weapons, fantastic magic system, and is hands down my favorite athstetically when it comes to art direction.
My biggest problem like you is the bosses. I just hate the fake out bullshit and long combos. Which is why i love the spirit summon feature. This game i think is at its funnest when your either playing with people or summoning cool creatures. Which is why it pains me that from softwares multiplayer systems are atrocious.
Honestly elden ring should have had more sekiro bloodborne style of combat to match better with the bosses. Im also disappointed in some of the kore direction
Great video. Elden Ring was such a disappointment after the masterpiece Sekiro was. The bosses in ER literally feel like they could be from Sekiro, but yet they don't give you the proper tools to deal with them, so it all comes down to just dodge rolling on muscle memory rather than on reaction, because who is actually reacting to these insane moves? Real shame. I just hope they give the player more to work with in their future IPs if they're gonna keep making crazier and crazier bosses. The souls formula needs a serious overhaul at this point. It's the main reason I've since jumped to Nioh, and don't plan on coming back to ER anytime soon, if ever.
Refreshing to see such an honest and balanced opinion. My main gripe with these games has got to be the fact that members of the community (or at the very least its vocal minority) are simply not ready for any kind of critical assessment of these titles: you either have to love these games unconditionally or it's a "skill issue" and you should "go play something else, we won't miss you here". And ever since the release of ER this problem was exacerbated and turned up pretty much to 11. I've jumped on board during the release of the first Dark Souls and played all of these games, finished them several times over. I like them as much as the next guy, but are they immune to criticism? Of course not. And neither it's a "skill issue". You are allowed to like the thing and be critical of it at the same time.
As for Shadow of the Erdtree, I liked it in terms of design and exploration. Very much so. I'd go as far as to call it an actual improvement: smaller map paired with its verticality played really well into a more condensed experience compared to the original game, which I found to be bloated. A more coherent narrative focus was a welcome addition as well. And while I don't necessarily agree with "it's too hard" sentiment when taking DLC as a whole (I had a great time exploring the map and fighting field bosses), dungeon boss fights surely feel a bit...ah...overtuned. You described the root cause of this problem really well. To me it long seems that FromSoft are more interested in chasing the "hardest boss ever" label more than anything else. Sure, these bosses are hard as hell, but at what cost?.. I can't even remember the last time I had the sense of accomplishment, much less satisfaction of prevailing over the boss: these days it's more "phew, glad that's over with" more than anything else. If I'm going to come back to this DLC (surprisingly, I'd rather replay SotE than ER itself), I'm not sure I'll bother with Radahn ever again.
And that brings us to the new power-up system, which is a whole other can of worms. FromSoft were so obsessed with the "intended difficulty curve" that it pretty much broke half the sense of enjoyment I might've had. It may be an unpopular opinion, but I think that if I took the time to "get huge", I have every right to enjoy the fruits of my labor, i.e. being a one-man wrecking ball. And here I was, stuck on Messmer, because I came to him with just 4 Scadutree Blessings. "You should go do something else", they say. Man, I don't need more motivation to explore the world -- it's fascinating to me as it is. But when I can't finish a dungeon -- which was a relative breeze -- because I challenged a boss "too early", I dunno. Seems a bit counterintuitive to this game's whole open-ended philosophy: all routes are valid, but some are more valid than others, I guess. This new system was so alien to people that Bamco had to post reminders across all of their social media to actually use these fragments. To me that pretty much spells failure at intelligent design.
Anyway, I ramble too much. Great video, man. Good to know I'm not alone. Cheers!
Agree on that obsession of chasing "hardest boss ever". These games have a reputation of being hard and with every subsequent release From seems to ramp things further and further. It's a shame because it's caused them to move away from the weird bosses (I enjoyed the Lamenter because it was different, unique, and fun) since most discourse around them are just "lol too easy boss sucks". Like damn, are the only acceptable boss types the ones that play like Rellana?
@@justkallmekai Despite being a gimmick boss, Lamenter was at least fun and broke up the monotony a bit, I agree. It was a pleasant surprise. Sure, we've seen similar stuff in From's earlier games, but it just begs the question whey are these so few & far between? I'd rather go through a bunch of these gimmicky encounters then another set-piece boss with insane delayed attack combo strings, broken hit-boxes and effects that burn away my retinas. But that's what looks good on a stream, huh. It's just spectacle.
@@Browhiskas There's a lot I like about ER but I agree the spectacle was a bit much. (Bayle's Radahn-esque kamikazi made me roll my eyes) though I agree that ER isn't DS and has a different tone to it. I would love if From's new IPs make me enjoy the 'over the topness' of ER retroactively. But I sense they'll be continuing this trend if Sekiro, AC6, and SotE are any indication. Hopefully with the company expansion we'll see them experiment with a more grounded style
What are your thoughts on lies of p if you love bloodborne and sekrio i think you'll love lies of p 😊
Thank god anyone has talked about how replaying ER is a snore.
It would have been nice if they had a normal difficulty setting so people who aren't good at combat can still bumble their way through.
Mathew mattose did a video on elden ring?
I'm talking about the "The Lost Soul Arts of Demon's Souls" video specifically.
@@Emarrel got it! Thank you. Love his videos.
I'm seeing this clear divide between a fanbase be reminiscent of RE or Zelda. When the series got a massive hit and part of the fanbase starts to feel alienated. Some would argue it's been happening since DS2 or BB but regardless it's a shame. You don't have to go far to see people that shit on others for liking certain aspects of Souls games that got diminished. It doesn't help that games in general have a very childish discourse so you can't get anywhere in these discussions
Monster Hunter comes to mind too.
except elden ring isn't actually apart of the souls series, people forget this and complain that they can't just roll r1 spam anymore.
Elden Ring never satisfied the high Dark Souls has left me chasing.
I'm a little mixed on this, myself. Not about your opinions-they're your opinions, obviously-but I know that I was running past everything as early as DS1 by my second playthrough. Once I had more or less appeased my completionist urges, knew where everything was and how much of it was irrelevant to whatever build I was currently setting up, I'd chunk off whole regions and skip by anything that wasn't either a good souls-to-time reward to kill or protecting/carrying something I needed. So in that respect, Elden Ring doesn't really feel much different to me, there's just more ground to cover. While that does mean the first hour or two of a new character can feel like I'm checking off boxes on my standard route to be level 60 before facing a real boss, it doesn't feel much different from how I'd start a new master key character in Dark Souls and go out of order all over the place to get a +15 weapon before entering Sen's Fortress. Just a difference of playstyle, but I get it.
When it comes to the DLC, particularly the bosses, I didn't find *most* of them to be unusually wild. Dealing with Waterfowl Dance is still more of a frustration point for me than basically all but one of the DLC bosses' entire kit (maybe that says more about me than them, I dunno). The *final* boss, though? Hooooly hell, what were they *smoking?* Literally the first time I've ever respecced to use a greatshield and rapier just to kill a boss because after 8 attempts at phase 2 I could tell that, while it was beatable, I'd need to dedicate a day just to learning that fight, and I wasn't that interested. So I get where you're coming from, especially if you choose not to use ashes or summons or other tools that can invalidate a lot of fight mechanics since that probably means some of the other fights I thought were about on par with vanilla Elden Ring might've seemed much less reasonable for your style.
Mostly I'm just sorry the game doesn't resonate for you as much as you might've hoped it would. Disappointment's never a fun feeling.
Can't argue with financial success. Apparently people like collect-a-thons, and it's also why Ubisoft-style open world games sell so well (when Ubisoft isn't shooting themselves in the foot, or when the game isn't made by Ubisoft, anyway). But I agree. I'd take it a step further and say that Miyazaki's game design style doesn't really mesh that great with open world. Soulslike works far better when it is in a replayable, short format. Or when it's stage based, like in Nioh. Personally, I think the game could have used _less_ dungeons, namely the prefab dungeons that exist to contain... one useless bell summon you will never use. Some item that would have literally been placed in a corner somewhere as an afterthought in a previous Souls game now deserves its own dungeon. And worse, they're not that interesting.
I'd like to preface this wall of text by saying I do love Elden Ring, both base game and the DLC. Mostly for the environments, exploration, atmosphere, lore. And I enjoy crawling through "legacy dungeons", meticulously clearing every single nook and cranny.
I just don't care about the challenge of ER bosses at all. I consider myself a good Souls player, I've done my fair share of challenge runs in previous titles, but I just couldn't give a shit about beating Malenia without summons for example.
For combat I play Nioh 2, now that is a game with fun combat.
I grew tired of i-framing through increasingly annoying and elaborate attacks by Dark Souls 3. I remember Miyazaki saying DS3 would be their last Souls game and thinking - thanks goodness, time to move on.
So to me the combat loop of Elden Ring was already a letdown from the beginning. As soon as I fought Margit and saw those randomly delayed attacks, roll baits etc, I immediately knew where this is going. And I just stopped caring about ER bosses and summoned my way through almost every single boss. To me the challenge presented was just not interesting.
Usually I pull a boss several times to see the moves, get to phase 2 and once I've seen everything, I just summon to finish the boss. I would also like to point out, that summons in the DLC are not as crazy powerful as in the base. Tiche or mimic tear won't solo bosses for you anymore, you still have to fight. But of course, it's much much easier.
I completely agree with your main point - the current design pattern for Souls boss encounters has reached its breaking point. Something has to change.
Enjoyed my time with ER overall but the thought of traversal keeps me from wanting to revisit it. Open world game design is a meme
I'm afraid that future games will be going in this direction
It's a sad thought.
Good
Hopefully they do. They have done nothing but improve upon their formula. If you get left behind, Miyazaki wouldn't lose a wink of sleep at night.
Right, and how exactly did they improve the formula. It's just open world ds3 with more aggressive bosses and more tools to beat them without having to be good at the game.
@@colemix1852 bro you have replied to alsmost every comment here glazing elden ring. Can't you accept that your favourite game may have flaws. I love all the fromsoft games including elden, beaten the game plenty of times including level1. But starting a new game on elden compared to the others is depressing. And theres so much more problems but clearly you think it's perfect