From Software Elden Ring - From Software's new game with writing by GRRM

[Hell Swarm]

Hardest game will be decided by personal preference. If you gel specifically with a designer's style you will find their games way easier than one you clash with.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Nioh 1 feels way easier than Sekiro to me which i just played a couple of months ago.

Of course, i've been through pretty much every FromSoft game that's avilable on PC so i got a shit ton of practice at this point.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Out of curiosity how much of NG is left? Like i said i just killed the frog boss, the one in the ninja house with the illusions.

 

[HeatEXTEND]

Dunno but that's towards the latter part of the game if remember correctly, I got mindwiped by

discovering magic is OP

the dual bossfights

i think

 

[Silverfish]

If you don't enjoy summoning an army and using weapon arts you're in for a seriously rough time from basically the capital on wards.

Pretty stupid on From's part to tailor the difficulty around the game's mechanics.

 

[Damned Registrations]

If you don't enjoy summoning an army and using weapon arts you're in for a seriously rough time from basically the capital on wards.

Pretty stupid on From's part to tailor the difficulty around the game's mechanics.

Maybe From should have tailored the game's mechanics around the game's mechanics instead, so summoning shit doesn't make bosses into retarded pincushions that pose less of a threat than a single trash mob.

 

[Nathir]

BTW, out of curiosity, which game do you think did combat right under your criteria?

Monster Hunter series is probably the best if we're talking about a 3D action game imo. Aside from some janky stuff like the space warping Plesioth, you can generally predict where a monster is going to be at least half a second from now at any given moment, even on your first encounter. When a monster leaps at you, it follows a parabolic arc. When it rears back and lunges forward, it finishes the lunge instead of pausing halfway through for a quarter second to ruin your dodge timing. You can judge the range of a monster by the length of it's limbs and the way it moves in general, whether it's a lumbering beast or an agile predator. When I lose a fight in a MH game, pretty much without exception I feel like it was my fault for not reading the situation or managing my own resources properly. Monsters have a fatigue and rage system as well playing into their behaviour, and the fights are meant to last a long time and give you many chances to learn and adjust, instead of being over in 60 seconds, win or lose.

In an even broader sense, fighting games are what set the bar for action combat. Assuming players of equal skill, the match is about mindgames and reading behaviour, rather than timing or memorization. You're never totally in control, but jump kicking someone in the face when they go for their 3rd sweep kick in a row feels satisfying in a way poking at a golem's ankles after it does attack variant 2B does not.

This is why modern fighters suck. Everything that requires skill is dumbed down or removed, just so you can have players spam the same safe moves over and over and it feels much more like guessing than skill.

 

[smaug]

Sheesh. I’m 26 hours in and only have completed maybe 40% of the game, but hell even though I overleveled early on with a strong weapon but it still takes forever to explore everything. Been stuck running around with 500k souls because I don’t want to level up too much because I still play co-op with random people.

Apparently they removed instant black gargoyle kill which means you can’t get 200k souls in the first 20 mins of the game, how gay of them.

I also forgot just how terrible the loot system is. 80% of loot you find is worthless and not worth exploring for, whereas in previous games this is solved by everything for the most part being on the path forward through levels which makes using an online map even more reasonable. Like crafting might as well be removed and ingredients items you can pick up should just be normal consumables.

 

[Lyric Suite]

If you don't enjoy summoning an army and using weapon arts you're in for a seriously rough time from basically the capital on wards.

Pretty stupid on From's part to tailor the difficulty around the game's mechanics.

Maybe From should have tailored the game's mechanics around the game's mechanics instead, so summoning shit doesn't make bosses into retarded pincushions that pose less of a threat than a single trash mob.

This is a fair criticism but i think summoning was always intended to be the way out for people. FromSoft never wanted for people to get stuck at a boss and be unable to progress. Like i said regarding the story or the secrets etc, their games are designed with multiple playthroughs in mind. You are not meant to just complete all content in one go. This applies to bosses as well. If you are hopelessly stuck at a boss, you can always ask for help, and it's not a big deal since you'll face that boss again in a different playthrough and you can try your luck then.

That said, since they gave us the spirit ash mechanic they should have tried to improve the AI in this game to compensate for it, but not only they didn't do that but they even made it worse by nerfing the AI becasue of the try hards that just HAD to do the duo or trio bosses solo.

 

[Odoryuk]

No one forces you to summon the most overpowered ashes like Mimic Tear or upgraded Banished Knights or Tiche. You can summon a duo of flying puppets and watch them flailing like crazy after a boss damages them enough. It's fun and doesn't remove all challenge from most of non–trivial bosses. Can even use them for minor bosses in early tombs and have fun.
In fact, seeing how different ashes act in combat can be a source of its own exploration.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Since i like to maximaze the challenge i never used them on most bosses but this game is so large with so much redudant content that even for a try hard like myself there was no reason not to use them if it helped ease some of the tedium. In fact in the open world i never refrained from using any of the overpowered shit you get. Like, even if you wanted to prove to yourself you can beat all the challenges on your own once you mastered an enemy it's not like you necessarely have to square off with them the other 50 times they appear in the game.

 

[H. P. Lovecraft's Cat]

Out of curiosity how much of NG is left? Like i said i just killed the frog boss, the one in the ninja house with the illusions.

Hm? There's NG+ exclusive bosses?

 

[Hell Swarm]

FromSoft never wanted for people to get stuck at a boss and be unable to progress.

Which is a problem. Part of the souls charm was it expected you to 'git gud' and learn as you went so you could over come later challenges. The enjoyment of the game was conquering difficult but fair bosses. Not summoning 2 strangers to kill the boss for you.

If you are hopelessly stuck at a boss, you can always ask for help, and it's not a big deal since you'll face that boss again in a different playthrough and you can try your luck then.

It is a big deal and I don't like it.

becasue of the try hards that just HAD to do the duo or trio bosses solo.

How is it try harding to want to beat every boss by yourself? I don't think I've ever summoned a player in Elden Ring.

 

[Odoryuk]

Which is a problem. Part of the souls charm was it expected you to 'git gud' and learn as you went so you could over come later challenges.

...or to kill bunch of mobs and level up enough so you can faceroll any boss.
Giving player multiple ways to deal with the challenge been a staple since Demon's Souls (though in DeS levelling mostly helps with level traversal and only with three or four bosses in the whole game), the whole git gud thing was invented by players and Bando Namcai marketing team. I mean, there is a sense of accomplishment when you defeat a strong enemy or survive a dangerous situation in these games, but the developers never forced you to improve untill Sekiro (and never after since).

 

[H. P. Lovecraft's Cat]

but the developers never forced you to improve untill Sekiro (and never after since).

I hear AC6 is pretty tough.

 

[Skinwalker]

P. S. Clearly, this is the work of GRRM. He has a few borrowings of Tolkien's names/terms in Game of Thrones. E.g. "valar morghulis" - both words are from the Silm/LotR, and Tyrion (the midget) is named after the elven city of Tirion upon Tuna.

Anor Londo and Irithyll came from Tolkien as well.

Oh yeah... Anor was obvious, but Irithyll = Ithilien is something I just realized. Thanks, Odor!

Oh, and Gelmir's brother (who is a fairly major character in the sad tale of Turin Turambar) is called Gwindor.

Gwindor... Gwyndor... Gwyn... Gwyndolin?

 

[Lyric Suite]

FromSoft never wanted for people to get stuck at a boss and be unable to progress.

Which is a problem. Part of the souls charm was it expected you to 'git gud' and learn as you went so you could over come later challenges. The enjoyment of the game was conquering difficult but fair bosses. Not summoning 2 strangers to kill the boss for you.

Nobody is forcing you to use summons so this complaint is nonsensical.

Just because the game has a safety net for novices doesn't mean your enjoyment of the challenge is in any way affected, unless you really care about how other people play their game.

How is it try harding to want to beat every boss by yourself? I don't think I've ever summoned a player in Elden Ring.

Those double or triple boss fights were designed specifically because of the spirit ash mechanic. Massive number of people complained those boss fights were too unfair which is why the AI got nerfed. None of those people however had any business trying to do those boss fights solo. Instead of just playing the game as intended, you forced FromSoft to backtrack from their original intention. The result is that now those of us who DID like the challenge of doing those boss fights solo have had their game made worse since in most cases those fights are now too easy.

 

[Hell Swarm]

Just because the game has a safety net for novices doesn't mean your enjoyment of the challenge is in any way affected, unless you really care about how other people play their game.

I care about game balance being fair and interesting. Giving a newbie a way to effectively skip a boss sets them up for failure and it snowballs from there. If you don't learn now to beat the godskins solo what chance do you have of beating them together when it's mandatory later?

Those double or triple boss fights were designed specifically because of the spirit ash mechanic. Massive number of people complained those boss fights were too unfair which is why the AI got nerfed. None of those people however had any business trying to do those boss fights solo. Instead of just playing the game as intended, you forced FromSoft to backtrack from their original intention. The result is that now those of us who DID like the challenge of doing those boss fights solo have had their game made worse since in most cases those fights are now too easy.

Could you take From's dick out of your mouth already? It's getting tedious with you fanboying them no matter what. The souls community was built on a foundation of doing it yourself and finding your own solutions and this is clearly part of the game design with multiplayer originally designed as a last resort with a major risk in using it.

"Original intentions" lol. Double fights were a problem because they created situations where a player couldn't avoid damage. If two enemies did the right attacks together you had no way to dodge both of them and Elden rings damage is so high it was unfair. This was even worse when enemies would attack from off camera and blast you with a huge attack. The reason for the change was the angelic knights doing their swooping attack at you while another enemy pressured you. And it's a lesson games like DMC learned back on the PS2 and From are so retarded they only just figured out it might be unfair to have unavoidable damage. It doesn't matter if you use summons or coop because the multiplayer AI is so bad with it's target selection you could randomly get both enemies aggroing you and setting up unavoidable damage any way. So if From "designed the fights for multiplayer" why the fuck is multiplayer AI utterly broken and not actually fit for multiple players?

Which is a problem. Part of the souls charm was it expected you to 'git gud' and learn as you went so you could over come later challenges.

...or to kill bunch of mobs and level up enough so you can faceroll any boss.
Giving player multiple ways to deal with the challenge been a staple since Demon's Souls (though in DeS levelling mostly helps with level traversal and only with three or four bosses in the whole game), the whole git gud thing was invented by players and Bando Namcai marketing team. I mean, there is a sense of accomplishment when you defeat a strong enemy or survive a dangerous situation in these games, but the developers never forced you to improve untill Sekiro (and never after since).

Leveling up rarely helps. It's usually upgrade material that makes the biggest difference. Plenty of bosses force you to improve or they will kill you with their combos. There's not a way to out level any of the mid to late game bosses. Their combos are so long they will kill you easily if you don't learn to dodge at least part of them.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Just because the game has a safety net for novices doesn't mean your enjoyment of the challenge is in any way affected, unless you really care about how other people play their game.

I care about game balance being fair and interesting. Giving a newbie a way to effectively skip a boss sets them up for failure and it snowballs from there.

No it fucking doesn't and it never snowballed anywhere. If anything their games have gotten harder over time, which in fact is what spurred our original argument (bosses in Elden Ring being more "obscure" and hard to understand than previous Souls games. Also, there were no summons in Sekiro where is this snowballing exactly?).

Also, summons exist precisely because FromSoft didn't want to bother trying to balance different difficulty settings or compromise anything in their game. Instead of designing "easier" versions of the same boss, they basically gave you a way to get past them if you are stuck, with the idea you can always try again next time. If anything, this system encourages people to get better beause i'm sure getting past a boss with summons would bother most players even if they don't want to admit it and i very much doubt summons is something most people rely on most of the time. It's just there to avoid people getting stuck and quit the game out of frustration. There's also the fact it's not guaranteed you can get past a boss even with a summon. It's very much intended that you would try the boss on your own first before being forced to rely on a summon because even with a summon you still need to have a basic understanding of what the boss does (and so does the guy who came to help. Don't forget it's not guaranteed you gonna get a pro every time. Sometimes your summon is just a scrub too).

There's also one last point about this that is worth mentioning, and that is that summons are basically co-op and some people actually enjoy playing with others as a matter of principle. I am one of those people (as long as the co-op is instanced at any rate). While i NEVER compromised with a boss in my own game, i'm an avid Sunbro. In fact, i probably put more hours helping others in co-op than i ever did in PvP in all the FromSoft games. I'm just wired that way. I never enjoyed ruining people's game. All my PvP is mostly duels or playing cop.

If you don't learn now to beat the godskins solo what chance do you have of beating them together when it's mandatory later?

It's their game people can do whatever they want. If someone is using summons on every boss that would beg the question of why they even bothered paying money for this but in either case it's entirely their choice. Not sure how that affects you. Like i said, it's not like FromSoft had to sacrifice anything in the game to allow for this. The game is untouched by the existence of summons. It's an option that is there for people who want to take it. Not a big deal.

Could you take From's dick out of your mouth already? It's getting tedious with you fanboying them no matter what.

Maybe it's you who needs to stop making shit arguments.

The souls community was built on a foundation of doing it yourself and finding your own solutions and this is clearly part of the game design with multiplayer originally designed as a last resort with a major risk in using it.

Not sure what changed here. Elden Ring still works that way.

"Original intentions" lol. Double fights were a problem because they created situations where a player couldn't avoid damage. If two enemies did the right attacks together you had no way to dodge both of them and Elden rings damage is so high it was unfair. This was even worse when enemies would attack from off camera and blast you with a huge attack. The reason for the change was the angelic knights doing their swooping attack at you while another enemy pressured you. And it's a lesson games like DMC learned back on the PS2 and From are so retarded they only just figured out it might be unfair to have unavoidable damage. It doesn't matter if you use summons or coop because the multiplayer AI is so bad with it's target selection you could randomly get both enemies aggroing you and setting up unavoidable damage any way. So if From "designed the fights for multiplayer" why the fuck is multiplayer AI utterly broken and not actually fit for multiple players?

The AI being broken is not the issue. It would have been great if they had come up with better AI. They didn't, which is unfortunate, but that has nothing to do with the issue, not the least because given that those multi-boss fights were intended to be challenging EVEN with summons in mind, it's clear the AI was actually working as intended.

The fact remains that once they introduced the spirit summon mechanic, they had to design the game to account for it. That's why there's no many multiple boss fights. And in most cases, those fights went like this if you tried to do them solo:



This was before the AI nerf. Keep in mind i was too retarded then to understand all i had to do was parry the spear guy to make this fight go down much easier, but this video is a good rapresentation of how most people dealt with those multiple boss fights. Just run around like an idiot for 10 minues while occationally trying to squeeze in an attack.

Doing the above was anything but fun, but of course you weren't meant to do them solo. They were designed with spirit ashes in mind (and like a said to be challening WITH summons, which is why the AI was so aggressive and relentless). People didn't get that, they all tried to fight them solo, complaining those fights were just boring and long winded, and FromSoft caved and "adjusted" the AI.

FromSoft did have multi-boss fights before but those were designed for solo play and they were actually better balanced. Ornstein and Smough is a good example, but also the Gargoyles. Most of the duo or trio fights in Elden Ring don't compare to that because most of them were designed with spirit ashes in mind or at the very least the "unfairness" factor was upped because they factored in that option (most of the time the reason the AI can't work toghether is because those monsters were designed to be dealt solo on their own, and were just put in a room toghether like that because they expected people to just use spirit ashes as a defence).

Personally, i could have easily done without spirit ashes altoghether but it's obvious that once they were put in the game you were going to find situations where you were compelled to use them.

 

[Hell Swarm]

No it fucking doesn't and it never snowballed anywhere.

Not going to bother replying to the rest of your From defense force post because it's the same loop with you.

I knew a guy who started Elden ring and used a summon to get past Margott. The game lead him right to this boss with poor sign posting and he ended up summoning someone to beat it for him. This lead him to areas he was underleveled for and he didn't understand how to properly deal with Elden ring's levels of bullshit. He lacked flasks to heal so when he got to another decent boss he summoned again and again. Eventually he realized he didn't understand how to play Elden ring and restarted and had almost the exact same experience. His ability to have someone else beat bosses for him snowballed his difficulty because he didn't know any better and never learned because the player summons beat the game for him until that point. Nintendo specifically force a player to overcome an obstacle that it's safe to fail on so next time they can represent the same problem and have failure mean death. From says no, you can just skip the tutorial fail safe and carry on to the failure means death part. Until eventually you get out of sync with summoning levels or over level a summon spot and get soft locked because the game specifically let you skip tutorials. And that's without dipping into "From logic", where the best course of action is iframing everything which experienced players expect but newbies will never think of.

This is a problem with any player summoning. As a game designer telling someone they can skip Margott sets them up to be completely destroyed by Margitt. But Elden Ring is so poorly designed a new player has no reason to think this is anything but the intended path. And "Souls games are hard bro" just eggs them on to hitting their head against the wall. And when a player only has an hour a night to play games they're not reasonably going to take the hard path and the hard path gets ridiclous at end game.

"I never enjoyed ruining people's game." said the player ruining multiple people's games by cheating bosses for them. But that might hurt your ego to admit.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Not sure why it is supposed to be FromSoft's problem if people act like retards. I'm also not sure how his stupidity affects you in any way.

 

[Skinwalker]

Nobody is forcing you to use summons so this complaint is nonsensical.

And older soulsgames also had summons (not the spirit ashes, but summonable NPCs outside the boss door), and hardcore players like me would just ignore them and solo every boss for the sake of the challenge.

If you can't keep yourself from using spirit ashes during boss fights, blame only yourself. I use them on repeated bosses like the Asylum Demons Erdtree Avatars, and that's mostly it.

 

[Ravielsk]

"I never enjoyed ruining people's game." said the player ruining multiple people's games by cheating bosses for them. But that might hurt your ego to admit.

This is a pointless argument you are having here. Souls cheerleaders cannot and will not understand that having kept with the series since DS1 or even Demon's Souls(15-13 years btw) gives them a painfully warped perspective on how well designed a new game is or is not. Having familiarized themselves so much with the base formula and all its variations means that a lot of problems that are obvious to new or even not so thorough players(aka skipped some games, have not played in a very long time etc.) go completely under the radar for them.

Spastic bosses who require i-frame abuse to deal with? Obvious to anyone new, completely invisible to a guy who was i-framing the fuck out of Alant since 2009.
Enemy spam? "Bruh, just equip the Electic Moon Dildo from the Fushrum Cave and wipe them in one swing, git gud."
"Electic Moon Dildo" snaps the game balance in half? "Rofl, nobody said you have to use it all the time just for big groups, git gud."

And my favorite: "Its not a problem for me, so its not a problem period." There is not argument you can make that will make them even consider they have a faulty reference point for this sort of stuff. They did not get it in 10+ years, they will not get it now. Only once From drives the formula so much into the ground that the series caves in on itself will they maybe consider that some things were not exactly as peachy as they thought but not a second sooner.

 

[Skinwalker]

This is a pointless argument you are having here. Souls cheerleaders cannot and will not understand that having kept with the series since DS1 or even Demon's Souls(15-13 years btw) gives them a painfully warped perspective on how well designed a new game is or is not. Having familiarized themselves so much with the base formula and all its variations means that a lot of problems that are obvious to new or even not so thorough players(aka skipped some games, have not played in a very long time etc.) go completely under the radar for them.

You would think that it would be exactly the opposite of what you just said. Here, watch:

This is a pointless argument you are having here. Souls newbies cannot and will not understand that not having kept with the series since DS1 or even Demon's Souls(15-13 years btw) gives them a painfully warped perspective on how well designed a new game is or is not. Being unfamiliarized so much with the base formula and all its variations means that a lot of problems that are obvious to seasoned or even somewhat experienced players go completely under the radar for them.

 

[Silverfish]

So Elden Ring offers new or less skilled players numerous ways to overcome its difficulty while never forcing these mechanics so that series vets or skilled newbies can take on a greater challenge if they so wish. Somehow, this is bad.