I’m working my way through it now. They’re not really much different from the main game. The problem is the bosses in the main game were also pretty frustrating. A lot of absurdly long attack chains where it’s hard to read when you have an opening. Delayed attacks you have to memorize the timing for. Attacks where the enemy either dashes or stretches their model an absurd distance to hit you so it’s hard to get away from them or gauge distances. Damage values that will kill you in a few hits even with high health and armor. Attacks that start and execute so fast that anything with a cast time gets punished.
Outside bosses we have the enemies behind half the corners, we have platforming sections in a game that doesn’t really support that, etc.
I’ve always like their games in spite of a lot of the flaws. The level design, world building, atmosphere, weird writing, etc all are still great and what draws me to the games. In what in what other games can you see: bald scam man, onion man, sunny d man, “dip head in wax”, rolling lightning goats, doot doot boat ghost, etc?
But it feels like in terms of gameplay design it’s kind of stagnated. A lot of the same design patterns for difficulty plus the pressure to keep making the game feel hard to people who have played all their games before has led to them stretching their design about as much as they can. In my first play through of Elden Ring for the first time I gave up trying to play my usual Ooga booga strength build in favor of that stupid comet azure magic combo to just anihate the bosses rather than deal with their bullshit. And in previous games I happily smashed my face against things like Nameless King or Madam Butterfly and Dancer well before I was supposed to fight then.
I think at this point I just want to see FROM do some different things. Sekiro was a nice mix-up on the basic formula and while it wasn’t really my cup of tea, Armored Core 6 felt like a breath of fresh air. The mainline souls style games feel like they’re trying to keep linking the fire over and over.
A lot of absurdly long attack chains where it’s hard to read when you have an opening. Delayed attacks you have to memorize the timing for. Attacks where the enemy either dashes or stretches their model an absurd distance to hit you so it’s hard to get away from them or gauge distances.
That’s also my main critique with Elden Ring. There’s so many spin to win enemies in the game that will just keep attacking for 10 seconds straight, it gets old so quickly.
I miss the slow and methodical attacks from DS1 and to some extent DS3. DS3 was already a lot quicker than DS1 but most attacks were really well choreographed so I didn’t really mind. When an enemy pulled their sword back in DS3 you knew they were about to attack. In Elden Ring they will hold that sword back and hold and hold and hold and then after you rolled 3 times they hit you. It’s almost impossible to read an attack on the first try, which feels really unsatisfying.
Not to say I don’t like Elden Ring, I do. But out of all From games it’s one of the weaker entries.
I mean, to some extent yes. The hostile, uncaring world complemented by challenging gameplay that doesn’t hold your hand is an important part of the design. I just think they went too far in Elden Ring to the point where it stops being a challenge I can feel good about overcoming. But that’s not really what I meant as far as the flaws with the games.
Setting aside difficulty, their games are filled with flaws, both minor and major. Some they’ve learned from over the years, some they haven’t, and some which they’ve gone backwards. I could get into a whole discussion about them, but it’s a testament to the rest of the design that I can acknowledge all of these and look past them to enjoy what was done right. Just a few off the top of my head:
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The stats are obtuse and frequently either broken or useless. Resistance from DS 1, Poise from DS 3, armor in basically any game, etc. This makes engaging with the RPG elements feel kind of pointless and why in a lot of the games I played basically naked.
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The stat requirements and the need for upgrade materials makes it so that most items you find will be useless to you. They alone don’t really contribute to the desire to explore. I do end up exploring around in these games, but it’s in spite of the rewards rather than because of them.
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Demon Souls made you go back to a hub through a load screen to level. Dark Souls 1 fixed this. Then every game after that until Sekiro has gone back to forcing you to go through a load screen to level.
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The games are really inconsistent with their use of bonfires and shortcuts. I think to this day Dark Souls 1 has the best level design of the series. The lack of fast travel for the first half really makes you engage with the levels and makes you appreciate the shortcuts you find and eventually the fast travel once you have it. Since then all of the games have gone bananas with the bonfires/sites/etc with fast travel right from the start. There were some absolutely absurd places in DS3 where there was another bonfire within sight of the first. Then you have areas with absolutely no bonfires and shortcuts all the way through, or none at all. In Elden Ring sometimes you get sites of grace or stakes of Marika right outside the boss door and sometimes there just isn’t one anywhere close.
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Consumables feel pretty useless since they’re non-renewable. If you use them and still can’t kill the boss before they run out, you’re now just gonna have to beat the boss without them, so you might as well not have bothered. Elden Ring kind of helped this with crafting, but honestly I haven’t used it much because I just am trained not to think about consumables in these games at this point.
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Some weapons/spells end up being completely useless. Some feel like they were designed for a different game. I don’t know how they imagined people would make use of them. And iirc bows and spells have been a joke until like DS3, and even then from what I’ve heard people say bows are still pretty crap.
I think what’s interesting about these games is that they’re unpolished. That’s not to say I wouldn’t want these problems fixed with better design, but I think I prefer what we have to the usual AAA design where everything rough gets sanded down until the whole game is bland and appeals to nobody equally.
When I beat the first and second major bosses in the DLC I was elated, because it was very challenging, but doable if I played extremely well, and learned what each telegraph meant they were about to do.
Let’s not forget how blatantly the bosses read your inputs. FROM bosses have always done this, but it’s never been so obvious; it kinda breaks the “tough but fair” illusion.
My take is that since players have gotten so powerful, bosses had to adapt…but the only ways to make them stronger have upset the balance between “tough” and “fair”. Hit boxes for attacks have gotten larger, which hurts readability; attacks that you used to be able to dodge now land, even though it didn’t look like it. Bosses hit harder, combo their attacks, and they can even cancel into different combos now.
All of this happened because bosses are balanced around Spirit Ashes and the new insane weapon arts. It’s harder than ever to SL1 the game, because if you don’t have a good Ash summon or a crazy weapon art or didn’t grind for upgrade materials, main quest bosses are stupidly hard. If you did do all of those things, they’re almost trivial.
It’s weird. The bosses used to be the highlight of Soulsborne games, and now they’re the worst part because they’re just not fun anymore. Dragonlord Placidusax is my favorite fight, and it’s not even close. I either trivialize my way through the rest, or just wanted them to be over. The satisfaction of fighting a worthy opponent is gone, because it’s almost always just unfair for the player, or unfair for the boss.
Yeah that’s basically how I felt. It was binary. The game was unfairly and frustratingly hard when I was trying to play fair and take the game on its terms. And then when I went to cheese everything it was so trivial that it felt empty. Sometimes I think about going back to the game to try to get the “real” experience, but then I remember the frustration and just can’t bring myself to do it.
Although part of my reluctance to replay the game has less to do with boss difficulty and more to do with the repetitiveness of the open world. Without the sense of exploration and discovery you get on the first playthrough, the world becomes a checklist of places you need to go to grab stuff for your build with little desire to go replay the other content because so much of it is copy pasted filler. Even going through the DLC now, with it being smaller in scope than the full game, but still pretty huge, I’m already seeing a lot of repeat content.
As much as I appreciate the attempt at putting a twist on the formula, I think the open world was a net negative for the game. The flaws in the reward systems of the previous games were exacerbated by the structure which led you to explore all the boring repetitive stuff on a first play-through because you don’t know if the thing you need might be in catacomb #20 and then on subsequent playthroughs you just skip vast parts of the game which aren’t relevant to you.
It also just doesn’t seem like they have the content output necessary to fill an open world with content that is of a comparable level of novelty and quality to what we’d come to expect from their level design. There’s a good dark souls game in Elden Ring, it’s just that it’s spaced out and everything in between is padding.
The funny thing is, despite all of that, Elden Ring is still one of the top 3 open world games alongside the 2 Zelda titles. But I think that says as much about the state of the industry and genre as much as it does about the skill of FROM’s and Nintendo’s designers.
